I finally filled the gap between OS 8 and OS X in my OS collection by picking up a few retail boxes of OS 9.



I always thought picking up an OS 9 box would have been a relatively simple conquest. I figured it's old enough that it's of no use to non-collectors, but not old enough to be extremely hard to find. I mean, you can buy Windows 98 for $20 bucks on eBay. OS 9 is of the same vintage. You'd think it would be pretty cheap.

Apparently, that's not the case at all.

OS 9 in the box regularly goes for a good $50 or so. Some auctions I've seen have been as high as $100 for a sealed box. I don’t know if they ever actually sold at that price, but that's crazy money for an obsolete OS!

I was very pleased to finally score a near-perfect open box for only $26.55. It still has the shrink wrap on it.





This box is dated 1999.



It also still has the original $89.99 price tag on it.



All the original documentation is included.



I was also pretty excited to see that this is the original 9.0 release. The seller didn't specify the exact version number in the auction. All I had to go on was that it was 9-something. So this was indeed a nice treat for such a low price.



Usually there's only 1 or 2 auctions to pick from at any given time, but this time around there were several auctions running. After wining the first box, I noticed there was one with a totally different cover. I guess I hadn't paid it much attention in the past, but I never noticed there were packaging differences between dot revisions.

This one was a Buy-It-Now for $40 with free shipping. I couldn’t resist. I’d never pay any more than $40 for an old OS, but seeing as I won the first one for only $26, it averaged out to about $30 each. I can live with that.

Instead of "Featuring Sherlock 2", this box has "Featuring iTools" on the front. I never used iTools. The first service I used from Apple was .mac. iTools is the predecessor to .mac.



The back of the box is the same.



This box is dated 2000.



Unlike the 9.0 release, this box has a fold out panel on the front highlighting some of the features of iTools.



All the original documentation is also included.



This disc is labelled "Version 9.0.4”.



Although these fill in a few gaps in my collection, it looks like I'll still have to keep an eye out for 9.1 and 9.2.



The collection is never complete!