#MAC OS 7.6 VS 8.1 G3 MAC OS#
#MAC OS 7.6 VS 8.1 G3 WINDOWS#

#MAC OS 7.6 VS 8.1 G3 MAC OS#

Keep in mind as well that the Mac OS 8.1 installer isn’t all that “smart” about it. Having a Mac OS Standard boot partition on a 68K Mac is simply a requirement, so keep this in mind if you ever decide to put a larger drive into a 68K Mac running Mac OS 8.1. The remaining 3.5 GB of the drive were put into the second partition, which used Mac OS Extended. 68K Macs cannot boot off of a Mac OS Extended partition, and so when I installed Mac OS 8.1 onto the new larger replacement hard drive, I had to partition the drive into two, with the first smaller partition being a boot partition (I made it 1 GB) using Mac OS Standard. Mac OS Extended is great, but a word to the wise. Mac OS Extended relaxed even the 32 character limit, but this was no longer a competitive advantage, as Microsoft had finally caught up with Apple in this regard by the time Mac OS 8 was released in 1997.

#MAC OS 7.6 VS 8.1 G3 WINDOWS#

In the Quadra 840AV’s day (1993), when DOS and Windows were still struggling with the old 8.3 file name format, Macs were light years ahead of them with their 32 character filenames, and no need for an extension as part of that. Mac OS 8.1 brought the now standard Mac OS Extended file system to Macs, delivering key enhancements like file names that were greater than 32 characters long and support for larger drives. The net result of this and a whole host of other incremental improvements is that Mac OS 8.1 is an easier to use and more pleasant environment than Mac OS 7.6 was – I can see why Mac OS 8 sold so well in its day (it sold an amazing 1.2M copies in its first two weeks!). There is a definite performance penalty for moving up to Mac OS 8.1, but it is worth it, if only for simple features like “sticky menus” (when you click a menu, it stays there without you having to continue to hold down the mouse key) and what we know today as “right click context menus”, although on Mac OS 8.1 that is “control click context menus”. It is not quite as fast however under Mac OS 8.1 as it was under Mac OS 7.6. Nonetheless, the subjective result is pretty tangible. Of course, in addition to the faster CPU, my Quadra 840AV has a different and potentially faster hard drive, and also features the hardware enhancement of interleaved RAM, both of which accelerate throughput. After working extensively with my 25 MHz Quadra 660AV, the 0 in the Quadra 840AV just races through Mac OS initialization and launches apps in what seems a fraction of the time it takes on the 660AV. I titled my last post about this topic “The Need for Speed”, and while it may seem silly to use the word “fast” in conjunction with a machine whose speed is measured in MHz not GHz, I have to say that this machine is FAST. From a hardware perspective, only the floppy drive remains to be replaced and that aspect of the work will be done.

In the aftermath of the weekend’s work, the hard drive has now been updated to the replacement 4.5 GB unit, the CD-ROM drive has been replaced with one that will actually mount AND eject CDs, and Mac OS 8.1 is now loaded and running on the machine. By the time the weekend was over, it had received a significant makeover. …with apologies to Tracy Kidder, after whose excellent book “The Soul of a New Machine” this post’s title is patterned.Īfter sputtering and wheezing a few times, the Quadra 840AV chimed back to life again this weekend, still sporting its CD munching CR-ROM drive and its incredibly FR (floppy retentive!) floppy drive, but successfully booting Mac OS 7.6 once more.

Mac os 7.6 vs 8.1 g3