`  == OS 9 version bump== From the section on OS 9 In fact the only reason that the version was increased from 8 to 9 was to pave the way for the upcoming Mac OS X, rather than leave a gap in the version numbers which might have discouraged some to make the eventual transition from classic Mac OS to Mac OS X  I thought it was widely understood that the version bump from OS 8 to 9 was a way to get out of the cloning market. It was thought that all the cloners had rights to ``MacOS 8``, so Apple bumped the version to 9, so they wouldn't have to distribute it to the third party computer manufacturers. Nonetheless, the stated reason doesn't even make sense to me. All sorts of apps skip versions with impunity - and I can't think of why anyone wouldn't transition to OSX because there wasn't an OS 9`