Semi-OT: Classic Mac support gone from Leopard (OS X 10.5)

[Zane H. Healy]

> > OK, that <bad word> STINKS!  Just the night before last I had to fire
> > up ClarisDraw as even though I own copies of more modern drawing
> > app's, nothing works as well.  First in 10.4 they dropped support for
> > classic AppleTalk breaking things for me, now this.  Well, we may
> > just stay on 10.4.x for the next few years.  As a result of the
> > Appletalk issue I didn't upgrade to 10.4 till earlier this year, even
> > though I bought it the day it came out.
> 
> Yep. Although to be fair, I have few Macs so old they can't run MacOS
> 8.1 and it networks happily with Tiger boxes over TCP/IP.
> 
> But yes, I entirely agree.

In my case I was normally using classic Appletalk to speak to my OpenVMS
server.  As that was keeping me at Mac OS X 10.3.9 *AND* OpenVMS 7.3-2, I
finally broke down and copied all the Mac files off of VMS, and upgraded
both systems.  Now the best way to get files between the two is FTP, which
is far less convenient! :^(

In all fairness I've already started looking into running ClarisDraw under
emulation since I can't find a replacement I like, in the long run it is
likely to run better under emulation.  There is a glitch or two with running
it under Classic on my G5.  Besides I want to be able to upgrade to a Mac
Pro one of these days.

Or, I might just setup my G4/450 running Mac OS 8.6 (I have the special G4
version), and use it as an X-Terminal running my old copy of eXodus.  At
which point I'll be able to run ClarisDraw on there.  Though at 8 years old,
I'm not sure I want to depend on it for an app I *need*.

> I happily run Linux, but if money were no object, I'd be on OS X on a
> Mac Pro, with Wine for a few legacy Windows apps - or possibly
> Parallels Desktop, as it's cheap and it runs Windows seamlessly - i.e.
> Windows apps' windows merged with OS X apps on the same shared
> desktop. On a quad-core or octo-core machine with 4G of RAM, I could
> afford a copy of W2K in a VM. I'd never notice the load, I'm sure. The
> thing that saddens me is that if you do this, you suddenly have to do
> all that tired old dancing around with legions of MS updates and
> antivirus and antispyware and so on in Windows on your nice clean safe
> Mac.

One of the reasons I'm still on the G5 is RAM is more important to me that
speed.  The only new system I could use would be a nice Mac Pro, and I don't
really want to know what 4-8GB RAM would cost.  I'm currently sitting at
5.5GB in my G5, and am starting to look at bumping it up to 7GB (will
require pulling 512MB).

	   Zane