G4's will run OS8.6

From: Keith Bahjat (kbahjat@ufl.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 13 2000 - 10:21:39 EST


David,

A solution, but first a comment.

Apple released beta versions of OS9 to developers well in advance of its
commercial release. Thus, the majority of software vendors released upgrades
at the same time as Apple. That BD did not act at that time is the fault of
BD, not Apple. Apple realizes that maintaining legacy hardware and software,
as is done with other OS/hardware manufacturers, only makes the current
system weaker. Thus they have moved forward in both software and hardware,
creating the state of the art personal computer, that works well as a single
entity, but gets complicated if you need to use older software or hardware.
But I won't delve into the OS diatribe any further.......

The G4 with the Sawtooth motherboard (which is what you have) originally
shipped with OS8.6, so we know OS8.6 will run on this machine. There have
been certain G4 specific issues that have been addressed with OS9, so the
system hardware will not be fully utilized running OS8.6, but it will run.
You just need to get a copy of the OS8.6 CD and install the OS. I have seen
messages from people that claim to have received the OS8.6 CD from Apple
upon request after similar situations.

In the meantime, I would drop a line to BD, reminding them that OS X is
coming in August, at which point their software will not be compatible with
the previous two generations of the MacOS (much less being AltiVec capable).
The cytometry companies feel no pressure to provide us with cutting edge
software, evidenced by the hundreds of labs running their XL software under
DOS (yuk!). Maybe Verity or TreeStar will make some inroads if we demand
state of the art software.

Good luck.

kb

-- 
Keith Bahjat
Graduate Assistant
University of Florida
College of medicine
kbahjat@ufl.edu



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 10 2001 - 19:31:03 EST