Which drawing apps are ready for Mountain Lion?

Comments ⁵

1. Jim Lavery

   How would Photoshop 5.0 for Mac work?

   That’s a serious question–how would old, pre OS X versions of Photoshop or Illustrator, work on todays Macs?

2. Rick Kirkman

   Thanks for the list.

   @ Jim: Something as old as Photoshop 5 would have been coded for PowerPC processors, which Macs no longer use. Apps written in code for PowerPC computers were previously run through Rosetta (an interpreter) on Intel-based Macs so they could remain backward compatible. Rosetta was eliminated from the Mac OS starting with 10.7 Lion. So none of those older apps coded to run on Power PC machines will run at all on today’s Macs.

3. Dave Stephens

   Photoshop 5 is not remotely “old” – it works on any modern Mac, however, it certainly does NOT work on older PowerPC Macs.
   So Photoshop 5 *should* work fine on Mountain Lion, imho.

4. Kelly McNutt

   Dave: unless I’m misunderstanding you, Photoshop CS 5 is Version 12.0 from 2010-ish. Photoshop 5 (Version 5.0) is from 1998-ish, which is not only old but downright ancient. Jim mentioned he’s referring to pre-OS X, which puts it squarely in the Precambrian era. 😉

5. John Lotshaw

   Kelly: I was going to say “antediluvian”, but “Precambrian” works as well.

   Anything pre-OS X–that is, classic MacOS–hasn’t been supported since the arrival of the Intel Macs. The Classic environment, which let MacOS 9 run under OS X, depended on the PowerPC and was never updated for Intel. And, PowerPC apps will no longer run in emulation since Snow Leopard.

   In short, you’re not wringing any more value out of those old apps. Time to update… 😀