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Macintosh Operating System 6 is probably the nicest operating system ever made. Nowadays it's considered ancient (development stopped somewhere in 1991) but it's far from backward and with the use of the proper vintage software you can be just as productive on a System 6 machine as you'd be on a modern Mac. System 6 runs on most older Macintosh computers with 68000, 68020 and 68030 processors. Some of these Machines are also able to run later versions of the Mac OS up to 7.55 and 7.61, but the lower-end models, most notably the so called Compact Macs, the Mac Plus, the SE and the Classic, and the lowend 68020's, the Mac II and the LC, are better off running System 6. They will be a lot faster with System 6 than with System 7. The reason behind this is the fact that System 6 is not only a lot more compact (it has less features and therefore less code to crunch), but also because System 6 was written in assembly code instead of the high level language C. Assembly code is a bit lower level and because of that a bit closer to the hardware of the machine, making it a lot more responsive.
Read some more system 6 advocacy here