Best/Most Stable of the pre-OSX OSes?

[Radium_Angel]

aka 9 and below.

I've been considering re-visiting Apple hardware (I had a bondi blue g3 eons ago) for the fun of it, but for the life of me I cannot recall which pre-OSX was bestest/mostest stable/leastest crashy.

 

Then, to make the question just that much more difficult, which hardware should I pair it with (obviously eBay will be the route I go, not like they sell these things new anymore)

[DrMacintosh]

Pre OSX is before my time unfortunately. 

[LloydLynx]

Macintoshrepository has a universal ISO for MacOS 9.2.2 which is the latest of the classic Mac OSes. I have it running on my PowerMac G4 and it flies, it idles at ~40mb. The only instability I've ever had has been when an application misbehaves and crashes the whole system, but that's just inherent to cooperative multitasking which all classic Macs use and it's never not been a problem. You can see the issue in LTT's latest classic Mac video, I think it was Photoshop at fault iirc.

[Radium_Angel]

1 minute ago, LloydLynx said:

LTT's latest classic Mac video,

I saw. I only vaguely recall the pre-OSX OSes, as I wasn't into Macs at all at the time, so I don't recall which OS I had on my iMac g3, 8.....something I think.

I kinda wanted the cube looking mac, but the prices are not what I had been hoping for.

[LloydLynx]

5 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I saw. I only vaguely recall the pre-OSX OSes, as I wasn't into Macs at all at the time, so I don't recall which OS I had on my iMac g3, 8.....something I think.

I kinda wanted the cube looking mac, but the prices are not what I had been hoping for.

If you have room, 100% get a PowerMac G4. They're like a 3rd of the price on ebay. Hell, I found mine on the side of the road for free. Maybe get the Quick Silver version if you want a god tier dual G4 CPU. Otherwise the Graphite models are fine, that's what I have. Avoid the ones with the "Yikes" motherboard because they use PCI graphics rather than AGP. Maybe you can get a cube one day, but yeah, they are quite expensive.

[BondiBlue]

17 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I saw. I only vaguely recall the pre-OSX OSes, as I wasn't into Macs at all at the time, so I don't recall which OS I had on my iMac g3, 8.....something I think.

I kinda wanted the cube looking mac, but the prices are not what I had been hoping for.

Definitely don't get a Cube if you're getting back into old Macs. They're great as collectibles and small machines, but they're not the easiest thing to get into for a number of reasons.

I second @LloydLynx's suggestion of a Power Mac G4. I've got a PMG4 MDD and it's an excellent machine. 4 PCI slots, AGP, 4 3.5" drive bays, the fastest G4 CPU options, and they look nice.