Funny! I used MACs at a graphic arts night school, in ‘98, to learn PhotoShop, Illustrator and Quark Express, and they crashed every 45mins, like clockwork. We spent more time reloading software than we did learning.
Sucks to own a MAC, IMO.
Having managed a network of Macs in a professional environment (newspaper, magazine publisher) circa 1995-2001, I can tell you that properly managed Macs of that vintage did not crash for just no reason.
The vast majority of crashes I had to fix were related to font issues: fonts from amateur fontographers, fonts with modified, mixed or borrowed metrics, fonts that had been built by someone who did not know what they were doing who left characters with unclosed paths or that would cause a divide by zero error when the font was reduced in size. Once I implemented a strict font policy, the crashes stopped. Believe me, a professional will not put up with a computer that "crashed every 45 mins, like clockwork." Macs under my care crashed maybe once a week, if that.
The other issue you probably ran into is that all three of those applications you listed are memory hogs, that want a heck of a lot of RAM each. My experience in school environments is that most computers, not just Macs, were running with bare minimum RAM set-ups... and that would cause all kinds of issues that could cause crashes. Getting a school administrator to sign-off on buying expensive RAM that could not be seen was very hard. Trying to run any two of them in multifinder as multitasking with insufficient RAM would really cause problems on a minimal system.
It is obvious to me that Macs in a student environment are going to have a lot of bad fonts to contend with. I am not surprised you had such issues. Clean out the font directories and use only professionally constructed fonts and install sufficient RAM and 98% of the problems would have gone away.
That being said, your experience with the 1990-2000 vintage Macs at a night school, is valueless when speaking about OSX Macs. OSX has no relationship with the operating system you were learning on. The Apple Macintosh operating system was rebuilt from scratch.
I have been running OSX since it was released in 2001... and in that time I have had three system crashes... two of which were in the first two months of OSX.0 in 2001... and that is with using upwards of TEN Macs! The Macs that I have now, a 2003 PowerMac G5 Tower (my main Mac), a 2000 PowerMac Dual G4 Tower, and a 2007 Pro Core 2 Duo Intel PowerBook, are on 24/7/365 and not one of them has crashed since I put them in service.
By-the-way, the publisher also ran some Windows PCs in the same era... and they crashed far more often than did the Macs... but from different reasons. They would handle the bad fonts pretty good... but the output was not as professional because that handling was sloppy.
You were using MacOS 9 back then, a totally different operating system. You have no idea, no idea whatsoever, how much better things are with the latest versions of OS X.
-ccm
I used MACs at a graphic arts night school, in ‘98, to learn PhotoShop, Illustrator and Quark Express, and they crashed every 45mins, like clockwork. We spent more time reloading software than we did learning
. . . but of course, Macs now are an entirely different breed of cat than they were a decade ago. Then, the hardware was incompatible with Wintel and the OS was, what - 7.0 or 8.0?Now the hardware supports Windows apps (if you need them) and the OS is industrial strength (Leopard gets UNIX 03 certification) with a Steve Jobs shell.
OSX runs for weeks and months between crashes. Applications may die, but they rarely bring down the system if they do. Command/Option/Escape gets you a menu listing your open apps which tells which apps aren't responding, and allows you to force them to quit. Just restart them and carry on - sometimes from where you were when the crash occurred.
That was true back then, but ever since the MacOS went to the BSD Unix-based Mach kernel with MacOS X things have gotten way better, thanks to the Mach kernel's vastly superior memory management! The latest Macs are actually very full-featured machines with very high-level hardware that would take a huge sum of money for a Windows machine to match in terms of hardware. All I need is to use my Logitech MX500 mouse pointer (which is supported by MacOS X 1.30.9 or later natively) and the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (both with USB connections) and I'm all set to go!