Well, back in those years, we had Mac OS 8 and its cooperative multitasking, if a single application crashed it forced you to reboot the whole system, and its instability was so commonplace that Jobs himself humored on it when Mac OS X came.
"a friend to us… always at our beck and call, except when he forgot who he was and needed to be restarted"
Also he demoed Bomb.app on OSX launch to prove that the new OS wouldn't be so infamously unstable.
So you could say they were about equal.