By Christopher Breen
Longtime Mac user, J.R., writes in with a question that many people
will be asking as the Macintosh transitions to the Intel processor.
As a Mac user since 1995 I have applications from way back that still
run on my iMac G4 and Tiger 10.4.3. I have thousands of documents in
MacWritePro 1.5, ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, text, etc. I also have
pictures in ColorIt and PhotoDeluxe. Will any of the “Classic”
applications run on the newly released Intel Macs? How does one
upgrade without losing years of information and data? MacLinkPlus
does not provide a method of translating everything. Will Rosetta do
so? From the info as of today, it appears not. Is there a way to buy
a new Mac and not lose all your past data?
While this may upset a few crusty old timers (and yes, I count myself
among their number), I feel it’s my duty to issue a bitter dose of
reality. Mac OS X became the default operating system for the
Macintosh on March 24, 2001. Apple has provided a link to its past,
in the form of the Classic environment, for nearly five years, which,
in computer years, is an eternity.
If you intend to embrace the brave new world of the Intel Mac, I
believe you’re better served by letting go of the past. The Classic
environment will not be part of the Intel Mac. It’s possible that
someone will develop a PowerPC emulator for Intel Macs that lets you
run these old applications—such work is already underway in a beta
of SheepShaver. But without Apple’s support, there’s no saying how
effective and speedy such an emulator might be.
The end of the Classic environment doesn’t mean that you must do
without your old documents, only that you need to save them in a form
that’s compatible with modern computers. J.R. cites a few
applications that bit the dust years ago. All of them offer options
for saving files in formats that will work with today’s
applications. For example, the current version of AppleWorks (creaky
though it may be) will open MacWritePro and ClarisWorks documents.
Once in AppleWorks you can save them as text files or Word documents
(which, in turn, can be opened with Apple’s Pages or TextEdit).
ColorIt and PhotoDeluxe can save files in common graphics formats—
pict, tiff, and jpeg, for example.
Of course there are disadvantages. You may wish to maintain the
documents in their native format so you can work on them in an
application you’re familiar with. Translating hundreds of documents
to a compatible format is a grind (though MacLinkPlus Deluxe can help
with this). And who wants to buy new applications when the ones you
have work perfectly well?
For those of you who raise these reasonable objections I suggest that
you translate those documents you really need (honestly, do you
really require a current copy of the ill-advised letter you sent to a
now-former girlfriend?), vow to do new work on a new Mac (with new
applications), and keep your old Mac around so you can work in the
Classic Environment on those documents that can’t be handled in any
other way.
Alternatively, you can stop right where you are. When the Intel Macs
hit in full force, buy the finest PowerPC Mac you can afford when it
goes on sale and continue to work in the Classic environment as you
do today. As the years go by you’ll find your Mac less and less
compatible with the tools of the day, but your work and play may not
require that you have those tools.
In the end you may decide that there’s no shame in driving a
Studebaker in a Honda world.
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