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OS 10.6.8 imac model 9,1 8Gb ram Intel Core 2 Duo. I was just looking at the requirements to download OS7 and I think I qualify. My question is: can I have both OS 6 & 7 installed and if so, can I chose which will be the default OS? Also, what is to be gained apart from being able to download VOX, which interests me?
I have about 163 Gb available on my HD. jaybass

Don't you mean OS 10.7? OS 7 became extinct many moons ago.

OS 7 is several years old and will not run on an Intel processor, it won't even run on a PowerPC. iOS7 is the soon to be released operating system for iPhones and iPads but it will not run on a Mac. There is an OS7 "theme" that makes an iPhone or iPad look something like the Microsoft OS for mobile devices. Finally there is an OS X 10.9 (Maverick) beta release 7 but you have to be a certified Apple Developer to get a legal copy of that.

Only the Maverick beta release 7 will run on your Mac and it would either have to be in its own partition on the hard drive, a separate hard drive, or replace OS X 10.6.8 that you are currently running. The same would be true for OS X 10.7.x.

Sorry about that jon. Now that you know what I meant, perhaps you can enlighten me. jaybass

Bottom line:
As joemikeb noted, OS X 10.7.x (most likely the latest iteration, 10.7.5) "would either have to be in its own partition on the hard drive, a separate hard drive, or replace OS X 10.6.8 that you are currently running."
How that might relate to downloading VOX (?!) I have no idea.

You can have 10.6 and 10.7 both on your computer and switch between them, but in order to do that, you must either have two hard drives or one hard drive partitioned into two pieces.

I have, for development reasons, a need to run OS 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, and the developer preview of 10.9. I do this by having 10.8 on the hard drive built into my computer, and running the others on external USB hard drives.

OS 10.7 is a significant change from 10.6. It has both advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages: Many new programs require at least 10.7, as it introduced several under-the-hoods improvements to make programmer's lives easier. Going forward, it will be harder and harder to find apps that run in 10.6. It offers better integration with cloud storage. You have to have at least 10.7 to take advantage of Apple's iCloud and Find My Mac services. It offers many new security features. It offers a new Full Screen mode for your apps. It creates a "recovery partition" on your hard disk that makes it easy for you to recover from system errors and hard disk problems. It improves Safari.

Disadvantages: It makes several user interface changes that, I think, are on the whole good, but take some getting used to. It no longer supports or runs programs written for old PowerPC Macs.

Thank you for that detailed information. The reason I mention VOX was because according to apple, you need OS 7 minimum to download VOX. I have 2 external HDs so should I choose to try it out, that's no problem. I could partition my HD as there is plenty of room for my needs. Thanks tacit. jaybass

There never was an OS 7—Macintosh operating systems prior to OS 8 were simply called System n, where n represents an integer between 1 and 7, inclusive, plus one or two additional digits separated by decimal points.