Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
> It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
Rather: It took them two more releases until they offered a version that had a price tag (setting the price was a conscious decision by Microsoft) that made a Windows NT derivate also affordable to non-professional users.
I don't think it was that simple. Hardware support wasn't good on NT, and it had poor compatibility with a lot of 9x software. These were two things that MS considered obstacles at the time.
If all you did was look at it, sure. OS 8 was a mess internally with an archaic and badly designed kernel. Windows 98 was much better at multitasking, system recovery, process isolation, etc. And that's saying a lot for the BSOD-ridden mess that that was. Then you had NT, which made both look like children's toys.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
OS 8 was designed to run on 68020 without the mmu so you could run on the Mac II and LC. Likewise, MS was trying to keep backwards compatibility with windows 3.11 era software which led to 98 being a compromise, where NT was a much better os. Incidentally, you could pop in an MMU and install A/UX for a os 8 style ui running Unix underneath on those older Macs.
Your reasoning also isn’t sufficient. The classic Microsoft Kernel was able to support a much wider variety of hardware because it was modular (internally, not architecturally). The classic Macintosh Kernel had a far smaller ecosystem to support and couldn’t even add support for hardware that existed on many of their own devices that would make the kernel on-par with the 9x kernel and be transparent (except for improved usability) for users.
So to recap, OP claimed that OS 8 (not A/UX) was superior to 9x. And that’s simply false. Many consider the 98 kernel garbage, even for its time; and yet it’s objectively better to OS 8’s.
If we’re simply arguing Apple hardware OSes versus Intel options (as you seem to be conflating this to), then the latter still wins with Xenix, any number of Unices, BSD, Linux, etc; all more stable and better supported than A/UX as well as better UI-centered OSes (NT, OS/2, BeOS, XFree86, etc).
> The context is that MS had much more capable hardware to run 95 on than the 68020 based Macs.
MacOS 8's initial release was after PowerPC-based hardware was already released. The OS had a separate kernel for that hardware. MacOS 9 never ran on 68k hardware (with an MMU or not).
It was perfectly capable of having that functionality, yet didn't.
You're just retroactively applying rationale to a bad design and making bad faith arguments (or "explanations"). Even Apple knew it was bad, that's why they threw it out.
MacOS 8 was not innovative by 1997 standards. I had it running on my PowerMac 6100/60. It was crash prone and Netscape could easily crash the entire OS, cooperative multitasking, you as an end user still had to manually allocate how much memory an app could have.
