When Apple released System 7 on May 13, 1991, it was the biggest change to the Mac since the beginning. Although it had some problems, it also gave us features that we still use today, 35 years later.
The world was a very different place in 1991. If you owned a Mac, the release of System 7 was a thrill that lasted for years. THE New York Times even summarized the release by simply saying that “for Macintosh users, a very long wait is over.”
This is partly because System 7 hasn’t had a huge impact outside of Mac users. For Windows users who even noticed, it may have been more of a catch-up release than Apple would have liked. But if you had worked intensively with System 6, you really wanted 7.
And you may have misunderstood it too. woozad the staff remembers the 15 installation floppy disks and the very well printed manuals that arrived almost as well as we remember the problems.
What was wrong with system 7
There were real bugs, and it took a few months before an update was released to fix them. But the key problem was that you needed more RAM than you perhaps had then.
Back then, this usually meant that you simply couldn’t upgrade to a system that required more than you had. Except that System 7 had a way to use hard drive space as virtual memory, so it allowed you to upgrade whether or not you had adequate real RAM. It practically encouraged you.
“There are two fundamental reasons to upgrade to System 7,” Apple marketing chief Chris Espinosa said in a video promoting the system to businesses. “The first is that you can make every Macintosh in your organization more powerful and easier to use.”
Espinosa then listed what “every” Mac should have for this to work. Additionally, he showed how the upgrade included a compatibility checker that examines your Mac before installation.
Later, macOS would thoroughly check your system and discard incompatible apps, leaving them in an “Incompatible Software” or “Moved Items” folder. In 1991, all control was done via a HyperCard stack.
In reality, this meant that it was simply a lookup table based on a list of compatible applications, as software developers reported to Apple. Today, you would certainly be certain that there would be developers who would not take the time to report on their work.
However, in 1991, everything worked. Because in 1991, there were few applications for Mac compared to today.
It was such a different world in so many ways. If your Mac had software that hadn’t been updated to run on System 7, the HyperCard stack listed it, fine, but also gave you the developer’s phone number instead of their website.
Just as developers circa 2020 had to adapt to Apple Silicon – and previously to 64-bit apps, Intel and more – they had to make some changes to run under System 7. Compared to the changes across the entire platform, the work was simple, but it still took time for all developers to get it done.
Whether people are ignoring the recommended 2MB RAM requirements – which is not a misprint – or Apple is being optimistic, some people shouldn’t have done it.
Remember, this was before SSDs, so when Apple said System 7 used your hard drive as virtual memory, it meant spinning up the drives. The result was that Macs became very slow the longer System 7 read and wrote from these hard drives.
“And, second, you’ll be able to use the great new applications that System 7 requires,” Espinosa continued. “And you don’t give up much because System 7 is compatible with the Macintosh computers, networks, applications and documents you use today.”
What was great about System 7
In our experience, it was difficult to abandon System 7 and return to System 6, and perhaps mainly because of MultiFinder. This was now built into the system and meant you could finally run multiple apps at once.
That’s right, it doesn’t sound fascinating anymore. And there’s always an argument that you’re more productive if you stick to just one app at a time. But in 1991, it was a relief and a blessing to have this option.
It was also a blessing that System 7 finally came with the feature that meant shutting down or restarting your Mac no longer automatically emptied the Trash. It was a big deal.
Maybe Find was too when it first appeared in the File menu of System 7. But the much better Spotlight has erased that from our minds/
As changes go, though, the smallest ones may have been the most surprising to Mac users of the time. System 7 introduced aliases, allowing a document to be efficiently stored in multiple locations.
What you would do then and can still do now is select a document, application or drive and create an alias. This is a very small file that when clicked will open the original.
There was a reason not to: unless you had a powerful enough Mac, System 7 would run slowly
You can copy this alias to a floppy drive and import it to another Mac. As long as it was on the same AppleTalk network, clicking on the alias was enough to open the original on that other Mac.
This was partly because System 7 also introduced personal file sharing.
And although we were all already accustomed to double-clicking documents to open them, System 7 gave us another tool. It was now possible to drag a document onto an application icon and open it.
This was only marginally convenient compared to double-clicking the document to open it, except when you wanted to use a different application. You can now drag a Word document, for example, into the now-defunct WordPerfect for Mac and cross your fingers.
Speaking of word processing, System 7 is where we got TrueType fonts on the Mac.
And although it was less visible to most users, it was also the version of the operating system that gave us Apple Events. You’ll still be familiar with Apple Events today if you ever write AppleScript to automate your Mac, although this must be less likely since Shortcuts were introduced in 2014.
What didn’t last
All of these features are still present on the Mac today, but some elements have been slowly forgotten over time. The most visible of these was Balloon Help.
Enable balloon help and when you move your cursor over a control or window, you get contextual information about it. Eventually.
There was also Publish and Subscribe. This allows you to “publish”, for example, part of your Excel spreadsheet. Then another user could “subscribe” to that and so when you edit the sheet they see the new data.
It was like Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) of the time. And while it was superior to OLE for its understandable name, the feature itself was complex and cumbersome enough to disappear from lack of use.
Today we have the ability to send documents and possibly collaborate on them. But Apple has grouped all these features under the umbrella term of the Share menu.
Unimaginable in 1991 and still surprising in 2015 when it was achieved – but this is System 7 running on an Apple Watch
The excitement of System 7
THE New York Times I may have shrugged my shoulders, but for a Mac user in 1991, System 7 was a huge deal. For the first time in a few years, you felt like you had a new Mac.
Of course, in some cases you did. Because you had to do it.
But the vibe was fresh and modern and it seemed like Apple was doing something right. It was. System 7 became the longest-lasting version of the classic versions of Mac OS, lasting until System 7.6.1 in 1997.
Even then, there’s an argument that Apple only moved to System 8 because it helped with the cloning deals that Steve Jobs wanted out of.
It’s not the best ending for an operating system, but overall, System 7 ranks among the Mac’s best. And while we can’t really miss it, more than three decades later we can still look back very fondly on the days of the Mac SE/30 and the like.
It’s quite affectionate that there have been many plans to allow today’s users to see System 7 on modern Macs. And just to illustrate how long it takes 35 years in technology, a developer made System 7 work on an Apple Watch.
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