Let me put all this in perspective. When I first began to use a Mac in the 1980s, it was difficult to work a full day without having a system crash. Indeed, I remember setting up a new Mac IIcx at my home office back in 1989, and having it freeze within 15 minutes after the initial boot. That was before I launched a single application, so the computer was idle when it happened.
Now I can’t say all of my Mac experiences were that bad and, in fact, the version of System 6 I was soon replaced by a later one, which proved noticeably more stable.
In the 1990s, the Mac OS was really becoming long in the tooth fast. The move to System 7, in 1991, was supposed to herald a new era of color support and ease of use. But you’d easily hit the rough spots, although the Restart button in the crash warning prompt would sometimes work for once.
It’s fascinating, in retrospect, to see Microsoft using the “System 7? label at times to refer to Windows 7, as if the very mention of Windows was itself a negative. Strange, though, that they’d crib the name of a Mac OS version that was distinctive only in encouraging Apple that it was time to move on and develop a truly industrial-strength operating system.