It's always a bit sad when a nice, juicy rumor dies a horrible twisted death, but with a few notable exceptions (that whole Disney-Apple buyout thing), every rumor must eventually either be proven true or sent to that Great Rumor Mill in the sky. So don the black armbands and wear a somber expression, because after only a few short days in circulation, the "Mac OS 9 Recall" rumor has officially passed on. Despite worrisome clues to the contrary, Mac OS 9 is alive and shipping, and rumors of its recall have been greatly exaggerated.

As it turns out, the whole hubbub was caused by-- wait for it-- a CompUSA "internal error." According to a MacWEEK article, CompUSA received way more copies of Mac OS 9 than they needed, and therefore issued an overstock-return order to send some copies back. But apparently somebody was still in a turkey-induced coma or something, because "some stores accidentally got the message to return all copies" of Mac OS 9 instead. When customers at those stores asked where all the Mac OS 9 boxes were, personnel said that they'd all been recalled. We in the Mac community took that info, threw in a dash of Microware OS-9 lawsuit paranoia, and, well, a feisty little rumor was born. (Awww, look, he's spreading... Isn't that cute?)

And so we pay our respects to a great rumor that burned brightly, but burned out quickly. CompUSA's working to restock those stores at which all copies were pulled and soon everything will be back to normal. Whatever's going on with Microware's lawsuit to protect its OS-9 trademark evidently hasn't resulted in an injunction yet, so Mac OS 9 is still out there and available-- and by the time anything happens in that case, it's entirely possible that Apple will have moved on to Mac OS X anyway. And for customers whose Macs won't run Mac OS X, we have a feeling that Mac OS 9 will be supplanted with a free bug-fix update that will re-brand the system "Mac OS X Lite" or something. But then again, that's just another rumor...