Snow Leopard was a high point of OS X development.
As a side note, everything up through System 7 use to be available for download from Apple buried somewhere on their website, although I couldn't find it the last time I looked. I think it was either OS 7.5.5 or OS 7.6(around the time the naming convention went from "Macintosh System X" to "Macintosh Operating System X") that weren't posted because, IIRC, there was some copyright buried in it to which Apple didn't have the rights to freely distribute.
At the same time, there was a "back door" and there was a download that contained a functional OS 9 system folder that could be teased out and made bootable. Back in my early days in PPC, I didn't have ANY disks and sites like Macintosh Garden at the time didn't have operating systems. There was a period of a few months where getting OS 9 in some form or fashion was elusive to me. I used that back door download I mentioned to get a system folder for Classic mode and it worked for that, but at the time I didn't know enough about OS 9 to understand how to make it bootable.
appleinsider.com
