Sorry if off-topic. You can try it here: https://macos9.app (or 8 if you replace the 9 with 8)

I loved it dearly. There were lots of cool customizations that were possible because the OS wasn’t locked down pre-internet. There was a system extension to have Oscar the Grouch pop up in the Trash and sing when deleting files. There were GUI customizations that radically changed the interface. iTunes Visualizer was amazing to watch while playing music on LSD.

Someone figured out how to trick the AOL client to think you were in their Support section (which wasn’t billed against your allotment of monthly hours) and released AOL4Free so you could run forever without extra billing. Eudora was a fine email client that I only remember because other people talk about how much they liked it. I was too young to work and so received very few emails at the time, but I know I hated whatever came after it; I think maybe Outlook Express? We had to troubleshoot system extensions that had incompatibilities and used a tool that aided in a binary search of disabling some systematically across reboots. You could customize apps with a tool called ResEdit (a resource fork editor for attributes like icons and buttons).

The most important part (to me) at the time: The text looked beautiful. I could never understand how anyone using the janky Windows fonts didn’t look at MacOS and immediately think to themselves, wtf my computer must be garbage. Being a publishing-first platform really made our typefaces shine by comparison.

I had an ugly old Macintosh and it sucked because nothing I wanted worked on it and none of the things that did work were of any use.

I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I’ve used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I’ve seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.

Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean “there’s no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS”?!

Hardware wise they’re still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of “they’re excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended.”

…sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don’t actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.

There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.

Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you’re interested in stories from the inside.

I used them for word processing stuff in school and it was fine. I was mostly working on Amiga at home at the time, moreso than DOS/Windows.