December 9, 2001: Last Update of the Classic OS

Ah, the Classic Mac OS. It began life as a black and white memory-throttled GUI operating system designed to move hardware, and ended life with a version designed primarily to ease the transition to OS X.

The shortcomings of Mac OS became apparent early in the game, but Apple kept revising the system while attempting to work on something new. The odd thing was that while Apple knew it needed something new, a hardcore group of people were falling deeper in love with the Classic OS.

Whatever the failings of the Classic OS, it did offer an intuitive interface and was easy to love. All good things must pass and the “Smiling Mac" OS was eventually replaced by OS X. The last update to the Classic OS came this week in 2001 when Apple released 9.2.2.