Mac OS 9

by Shank • 4 years ago

945 349 4 years ago

5amdotis• 4 years ago

Brings back memories!

yubiox• 4 years ago

I wanted access to the college mac lab so bad back then, and eventually got in. Something about those little white screens and the feel of those keyboards was so compelling.

autotune2• 4 years ago

Oh wow this actually has The Oregon Trail available to play, this is impressive!

spking• 4 years ago

Prince of Persia as well. There goes my whole day.

aareet2• 4 years ago

I tried the Prince of Persia but it just loops on the intro. Wasn't able to get to the game.

johnthuss2• 4 years ago

This is awesome! I still love the look of the Finder from this era, and I love that this has the Window Shade extension turned on too.

lostgame2• 4 years ago

WindowShade was amaaaazing. There was something that - for a while, was an OSX equivalent…I want to say ‘ShapeShifter’(?) - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4.

zero_iq• 4 years ago

You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II emulator for the Amiga.

duskwuff3• 4 years ago

There was a utility called "WindowShade X" which (messily) hacked the functionality back into early versions of Mac OS X. This developer's utilities had a nasty habit of breaking with every OS update, though, sometimes even making the machine fail to boot, so it probably comes as no surprise that it's no longer available.

The same developers also had a UI skinning utility called ShapeShifter, which is probably what you're getting WindowShade X confused with.

chongli3• 4 years ago

The WindowShade control panel disappeared after MacOS 8. The feature became part of the Appearance control panel at that point. You can customize it on this MacOS 9 machine by going to Apple -> Control Panels -> Appearance and clicking on the Options tab. There you have access to the option "Double-click title bar to collapse windows", an option that lets you use the feature the way it originally worked (before the minimize widget was added to the far right end of the title bar).

bri3d2• 4 years ago

This is really impressive and goes way above and beyond the normal "emscripten an emulator into a browser" shenanigans.

There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an AppleTalk zone together.

Extremely cool stuff.

rzzzt2• 4 years ago

If you open the developer console, it is revealed that the experience is provided by SheepShaver, a traditional desktop emulator (packaged presumably with Emscripten) running in the browser. :)

The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt.

Edit: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-emulator... reveals that it is indeed built using Emscripten.

bri3d2• 4 years ago

Oh sure, I didn't expect it to be a from-scratch emulator, but it's way beyond the usual low-effort "type make and send it" type stuff.

Not_John• 4 years ago

Reminds of this https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/

Had a lot of fun with this some time ago.

poundtown• 4 years ago

KPT Bryce!

genewitch9• 4 years ago

but who is Kai

johndoe0815• 4 years ago

Kai Krause, a German designer and software developer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause

bastardoperator• 4 years ago

Sick!

agys• 4 years ago

Makes me remind (and appreciate) of how beautiful and clean the UI was. Designed in the tiniest detail!

slowmotarget• 4 years ago

It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen.

Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.

mk_stjames5• 4 years ago

The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general...

All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee.

Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.

Cockbrand4• 4 years ago

I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal", of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x.

I do agree on all other points :)

resters• 4 years ago

I agree it was a high point for UI/UX logic. The filesystem was part of the OS experience and it generally made sense with little magic going on.

I have wondered in the years since whether the newer abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces, synchronization, etc.

ralphc3• 4 years ago

I have several Macs that run OS 9, I pull them out just to use the UI at times, I enjoy it so much. It all flows and works together so well.

klodolph9• 4 years ago

Sure, but—

The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars.

Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locations with the assumption that the window borders were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. This often meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be partially covered by another window’s border.

I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of “excess” that got cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X.

On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the apps look better. These widgets came with guidelines for how they should be sized and placed, something which is missing from a lot of modern UI toolkits.

david4222• 4 years ago

Not a fan of the new trend of zero window borders. I wish there was at least a way to make them customizable.

outworlder• 4 years ago

Yes, but also keep in mind that the pointing devices in use were very primitive compared to what we have today and that many users were not as proficient. All contemporary operating systems had thick borders and some had very prominent resizing handles.

amadeusz• 4 years ago

Compared to amount of space wasted in modern applications on margins, padding, etc, I would take Mac OS 9 window borders with rest of the interface.

Not to say it was perfect, but overall old computer interfaces were more information dense than todays one.

amelius• 4 years ago

Apple isn't so great. For example why aren't Copy and Paste separate or specifically marked keys and do we have to use Cmd+C and Cmd+V? Same for Undo/Redo, etc. This is stuff any UX student can figure out.

acdha2• 4 years ago

Separate keys have challenges: in addition to the extra cost, you need to find physical space and train people to look for and use them. The original designers wanted to make it efficient for people who were already typing and as you might have noticed those keys are all close together and convenient for one-handed use:

Why the Z X C V keys? — They were close on the keyboard. We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because it pointed down like this [he makes a ‘V’ shape with his hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured you’d UNDO a lot. And C for COPY — that was easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via http://morrick.me/archives/8432

dmix2• 4 years ago

I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple:

https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png

They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...

JonathonW2• 4 years ago

None of the alternate themes actually made it into a final release of Mac OS; just Platinum.

There was a fairly healthy third-party theming community, though, and the Apple-developed themes (Memphis, High-Tech, and a sketch-styled theme called Drawing Board) would still work if you got your hands on them.

munificent• 4 years ago

I love that color too. Fun trivia that I discovered doing pixel art way back then: That color is blue.

It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue with hue right at 240°. Something about the lack of saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast.

tambourine_man4• 4 years ago

There was Drawing Board which I found exquisite, but as a work of art, not for everyday usage.

https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/2-jpg.330369/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KOEMz_saHCE

toasteros• 4 years ago

Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux?

asveikau3• 4 years ago

It's not maintained, but a few years ago I was feeling nostalgic and playing with "mlvwm", the mac-like virtual window manager, a project from the late 90s.

At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new compiler or new libc will expose old bugs.

My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to work reasonably on modern high dpi displays.

Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient. It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over from XFree86.

retrac3• 4 years ago

You could theme some window manager, but it's not the same. It'd be a tough project! The Mac UI was holistic. Early on, it didn't even make much of a distinction between application and operating system. Just getting the menu bar right (shared between OS and application) when every program has its own idea on how to present a menu would be a major challenge. Applications really do need to be designed for the classic Mac environment. Back in the day software was almost never ported directly, but had to be substantially redesigned for the Mac.

rcarmo2• 4 years ago

Here you go: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330

You can theme XFCE to look really, really close. Won't behave identically, of course.

zydeco• 4 years ago

I made a platinum theme (and a few other mac-like ones) for xfwm some years ago: https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1016308

lproven3• 4 years ago

Not that I know of. I asked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562

I'm aware of unfinished efforts and mockups, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17505247

WirelessGigabit• 4 years ago

Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...

philistine• 4 years ago

Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. Apple has added full screen app support only recently, and any Windows convert who has switched to macOS and has problems adapting to its UI has one thing in common: they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times.

musicale2• 4 years ago

Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...

What do you mean by this?

How did screen savers and games work?

azinman25• 4 years ago

You say that but I’ve recently been programming an app in system 7, which isn’t totally dissimilar to 9 in UX, and I keep thinking “wow how did I ever use this.” Windows constantly occluding each other, no easy way to switch between them outside of the mouse, finder windows filled with grids that I have to scroll through, no easy way to just see the desktop, etc. Current macOS is miles ahead in usability.

eyesee2• 4 years ago

It’s interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders and didn’t have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because navigation was so painful.

truetraveller4• 4 years ago

Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a third party app.

To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray, integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar.

I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective.

Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or "polish". Mac is superior, will agree.

philwelch3• 4 years ago

How do you live without a simple maximize button?

Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an application to contain multiple windows that could all be visible at once.

To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame.

This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is contained in a single window, which you would typically maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar pertains to the application and not to the window.

deergomoo3• 4 years ago

How do you live without a simple maximize button?

Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my 2560px wide monitor?

matthewmacleod• 4 years ago

If they’re anything like this, almost none of your frustrations are going to be objective - they are going to be things that grate on you because of the design and interaction models you are used to.

There’s nothing wrong with that! You’re allowed to prefer particular approaches. It’s like when I use Windows or Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions work. It’s not because the Mac is objectively better, but because I’m used to it.

(Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will die on this hill.)

bodge5000• 4 years ago

I only started using MacOS a few months ago. For the first ~2 weeks, I hated it. I actually remember thinking that it felt like a poorly implemented clone of MacOS ironically. But the truth is, whilst you can jump between Windows and most Linux distros (even Fedora) without much trouble, MacOS is an entirely different beast.

For example, I learnt that, completely different than Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you open the command centre or whatever its called and switch between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra, they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of the OS.

I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow, for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main computer, just that its different and should be treated as such.

oaiey• 4 years ago

I came here to say the opposite: The folder icons ... a mess. Dynamic spacing depending how long the folder name is, free style sorting, "arranging", ... that is a lot of things but not a folder system ;) .. maybe a "desktop" folder ... but not a structural archiving system.

I was a macOS 9 user before I switched to Windows ... and I have to say: I had a fonder memory of it than what I see in this emulation. All operating systems came a long way since. But hey, it is 20 years, is not it.

mk_stjames5• 4 years ago

So, is Photoshop 3.0 considered freeware/abandonware at this point?

It runs impressively fast in this compared to what I remember in period.

hardnose2• 4 years ago

It's considered shhhware

johnthuss2• 4 years ago

Civilization 1 runs! I played this for SO many hours back then. I loved that game so much. This VM locked up after 100 turns or so, but man, this really brings me back.

smallstepforman• 4 years ago

Whatever you do, dont attack Spearmen with a battleship.

kzrdude• 4 years ago

Spearman is civ 2. Phalanx is the Civ defender of choice :)

tambourine_man4• 4 years ago

I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a certain age, I feel it’s a bit counterproductive and not a net positive.

But old Macs hit me hard and it’s something I can’t seem to build an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of the metaphors… so good.

rocketbop• 4 years ago

Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the way.

Nav_Panel• 4 years ago

Same. And, for me, it's the little happy Mac icon at startup... seeing him takes me back to such specific moments in my childhood. Playing Oregon Trail in my friend's basement... damn.

chongli3• 4 years ago

That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally) Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because they have a conflict of interest by running the ad network so many spammers use.

I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi-user security was non-existent (you were basically always running as "root").

But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors, and borderline unusable by grandma.

ace23583• 4 years ago

Can’t grandma still use the old computer while we all use our new computers with new software that’s enriching our lives? I have countless instruments at my disposal in VST form, 3D software like blender, DAW to write music in, stable diffusion to help with the creative process.

grishka2• 4 years ago

I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even trying to get anything meaningful done on classic MacOS in the modern times on an emulator is an exercise in frustration because of how poor the support for Cyrillic characters is.

But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions. The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser (not yet ruined by the existence of touchscreens) and much more thought out. They actually felt like extensions of your mind, not something you have to fight all the damn time.

Two things frustrate me immensely about modern computers: the dumbing down of everything, and the insistence on using touchscreen-inspired UI controls and patterns where they don't belong. The third thing, that kinda encompasses the second one, is the erosion of affordances. Is it a label? Is it a button? Is it a text input? You never know!

tambourine_man4• 4 years ago

It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any intrinsic merit, I'm sure.

Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac superiority fumes.

Joeri2• 4 years ago

The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser

I’m not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so apparent size was the same for the “denser” UI. A 14 inch vga monitor in the late 90’s would run 800x600, where a modern 14 inch laptop runs 1920x1080.

pram• 4 years ago

I miss window shading to this day, shame it never made it into OSX.

bitlax• 4 years ago

Wow, A10 Attack must have been by the same people who did FA-18 Hornet.

fideloper• 4 years ago

I played that game for HOURS as a kid. I literally just yelled "OMG A-10 ATTACK!" when I saw it there about 3 minutes ago.

I don't remember the key bindings very well (or if it works with a mouse), but I did make it into the air before crashing.

What a wonderful hit of nostalgia. I'll have to try to play again when I have a free second.

pmarreck• 4 years ago

Graphing Calculator doesn't work because it can't find an FPU, and it's the first thing I tried. :/ (also, because it was pretty revolutionary at the time!)

jdlyga• 4 years ago

Brings me back to being a kid playing with Mac OS making folders and colorizing them with labels. This was the first time in my life I ever heard the word "essential" and had no idea what it meant. I used to pronounce it like "assess natal".

thfuran• 4 years ago

You had a very novel approach to phonetics.

heywire• 4 years ago

I have some words like this too. I still read archive as arch-ive in my head all these years later. Native speaker too, just wasn’t a word I heard a lot when I was younger I guess.

eigenhombre• 4 years ago

Very cool to see a working HyperCard app in there (Infinite HD > Multimedia > HyperCard). Some of the animations are painfully slow, but dang this takes me back... and the old Photoshop!!! Just, wow!

Spent a lot of time in this world a few decades ago....

winrid• 4 years ago

Amazing that this boots faster in Chrome on my phone than it did on my laptop in the day.

sph• 4 years ago

Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it...

What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.

cogman102• 4 years ago

And why is everything just so slow!

That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many actions have noticeable lag.

Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?

bombcar• 4 years ago

Some of that you can tune down as it’s trying to redraw at every single step in between.

Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back up (don’t redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn off animations but not sure you can disable that one.

IncRnd3• 4 years ago

It's created with javascript in the browser, which is not efficient.

dzikimarian2• 4 years ago

Javascript/Electron - single code base for multiple desktop platforms.

yamtaddle2• 4 years ago

Well, you see, they've traded end-user performance for productivity. This is why it only takes a team five times as large to deliver the same functionality as a comparable program from the 1990s, and that team can make a buggier initial release in merely twice the time.

retrac3• 4 years ago

When you resized a window on classic Mac OS, your program had to actually like, draw the new window. Your program is spinning in a loop listening for events, you get a window-resize event. So you allocate space for the new bitmap, calculate what you need to display within the enlarged view, and then draw it. Did the user drag another window over your window, and then drag it away again? You get an event for that. Gotta draw what was there all over again.

This is all very close to the metal. On early 68K Macs, this is driven by QuickDraw, some very tightly coded assembly routines in ROM. Invoking them is only 2 bytes of code, as they're simply CPU opcodes (trap instructions). Render this string at this point size with this font at this X, Y location. Redraw the menu bar. Draw a rectangle. And so on. If you sequence these Toolbox invocations correctly, as a great master programmer of coroutines who never mistreats a handle as a pointer, you can render a complex scene with hundreds of polygons and a full screen of text in 200 milliseconds at 8 MHz.

But it takes thousands of lines of hand-holding the machine to do it.

Today, all of this is typically handled by instantiating a window object which draws into a private framebuffer which the system composites. That right there is tens of megabytes of RAM overhead. Then you use a thread to handle the UI and a thread to draw and etc. There's almost no boilerplate to just show a window. Perhaps one line of code. And it doesn't get overwritten by intrusive neighbour windows. Creating frameworks that can do all that bookkeeping in a flexible and general way (don't forget you want to be able to render vector fonts for any Unicode language) has a tremendous overhead.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

See, the whole problem is that you're running Outlook, probably on Windows. A light-weight Linux desktop is not slow. If anything it's a bit faster and snappier now than those older systems were on their historical hardware, since it can save a lot more disk I/O via caching in RAM.

throwaheyy• 4 years ago

It's not slow. It's just that modern OS's redraw at every intermediate size between the initial size and the final size. The name of the setting in Windows is "Show window content while dragging", you can disable it and all your windows will be 100x snappier than Mac OS 9.

genewitch9• 4 years ago

https://danluu.com/input-lag/ has some actual metrics with scientific rigor and accuracy.

acdha2• 4 years ago

Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?

Outlook is old, old code and still does things network I/O in the same thread as window repainting. I wouldn't treat it as a reference of anything other than how much Microsoft has struggled with the baggage from a bunch of mistakes they made in the 90s.

If you use Safari, Apple Mail, or almost any other macOS app, it is instantaneous — and unlike the older Mac apps like the Finder which did the rubber-band overlay until you released the mouse button, that means things like Safari seamlessly reflowing the entire Mac OS 9 emulator the whole time.

firecall2• 4 years ago

I 100% agree with your broader point!

However in support of Apple's M1/M2 macs, I dont have this problem so much!

Apart from Electron based apps...

Which is why I find the wide spread love of VS Code so befuddling!

It's fine.. but so laggy when redrawing windows, switching tabs and so on!

Maybe it doesn't seem slow when in isolation, but compared to a GUI editor like Sublime Text, it's very noticeable!

But yes - your broader point stands and drives me nuts!

Somewhat gone are the days of upgrading your computer and everything being noticable faster because the software is the same! (to be fair, the M1 upgrade from Intel was impressive)

These days to have a decent experience (as a self confessed geek with high standards) you need an M1 Mac or on Linux and Windows a modern CPU, decent GPU and as much RAM as you can fit!

dri_ft• 4 years ago

Let's see Paul Allen's operating system.

iaabtpbtpnn• 4 years ago

That'd be MS-DOS.

jzelinskie• 4 years ago

If this is intended to be an American Psycho reference[0], it's a pretty great comment.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iixytdJqZg

mk_stjames5• 4 years ago

I've lived to see the day where someone made an American Psycho business card reference and a follow up comment would - in context mind you - be able to reference Paul Allen as both the movie character and the Microsoft founder.

miohtama• 4 years ago

Web browser and mobile happened.

foobiekr• 4 years ago

NeXTSTEP was peak traditional UI. Everything since has been gradual degradation. And I include with that Apple's butchering of what made MCCA on NeXTSTEP so amazing.

mattl• 4 years ago

MCCA?

aj73• 4 years ago

An Excel 4.0 was peak Excel. It brilliantly chose axis limits for you in scatter graphs, rather than wasting two minutes of your time every time you created one. Create new data series in the formula bar. Write your own functions and macros without consulting documentation. (I had to create my own ATAN2 (quadrant sensitive two-variable input arctangent. Ironically, when it began appearing as a standard function, it was called ATAN2!)

walrus01• 4 years ago

What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.

People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.

It's "less terrible" than most other modern GUIs that waste space and are full of bubble shaped smooth looking jellybean UI elements.

bacchusracine2• 4 years ago

People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.

Mate desktop might also be something they'd enjoy. I personally recommend the Ubuntu-Mate version since it inherits a lot of the papercut fixes from when it was used in Ubuntu as Gnome 2.x. I was very excited to hear that the lead developer of Ubuntu-Mate was working with Debian to port those changes over.

heather45879• 4 years ago

I think it’s the compounding effect of digital clutter over time. It’s easy to create digital things and the tendency to keep adding features never stops.

Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it easier to use.

Another thing to note: there’s a lot or duplication in modern software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one, and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive, ever-expanding set of search bars—yuck.

And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things, one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but flexible, and apps shouldn’t have to roll their own, they should be able to gracefully use the one provided.

We’re at a weird point in software where the browser is basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting thought but it’s more like a limited-feature OS designed to sell Google services.

We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation more—and then make a nice little OS :)

mk_stjames5• 4 years ago

I completely understand people like Andreas from SerenityOS and the idea that there was a time that was a peak of GUI simplicity yet usefulness for power users.. In their case it's the Win2K aesthetic but I think OS9 is pretty close to that level of streamlining.

As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that started us down the path of making GUI's 'form over function'.

This is bleeding over from OS into power-user-oriented software like CAD and engineering tools and most everyone hates it. The whole "lets take away buttons and make the ribbon icons bigger and more graphically pleasing" to make products look more modern is a cancer for power users and productive people who just want access to everything as best and fast as possible. It's a delicate balance that I do indeed believe peaked well over a decade ago.

asveikau3• 4 years ago

As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched

This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to imitate that.

SoftTalker• 4 years ago

I have always felt that Win2K Pro was the pinnacle of the Windows UI.

hahamrfunnyguy• 4 years ago

I lived through these times, and I thought OS X was a huge improvement over MacOS, I'd never want to go back! Software in general has gotten more bloated and slow since the '90s, but I don't blame it on the OS.

I didn't have too many major complaints about working on MacOS, but I've always preferred windows. I used Windows 3.1 before MacOS. It's probably since I used Windows first, but I've always preferred the Windows approach of window management. Whenever using a Mac, I would always end up with a jumble of windows and I'd frequently click the wrong one when and it would pop to the front and hide what I was looking for. Then the wrong application's tab strip would be visible. Arrrgggh! It was a common point of frustration for me when using Photoshop and Illustrator since there are a number of similar Windows.

In Windows 11, I like that there is reasonable support for dark UI and multiple desktops. I haven't used OS X that much in the past 10 years, so I can't comment on the improvements that have been made since then.

deergomoo3• 4 years ago

I would prefer we leave the window borders in the 1990s but I do wish we'd stop hiding controls in overflow menus when we have more pixels available than ever before.

I appreciate that dropping a user in a window with 150 unlabelled icons is intimidating for them, but needing to hover over the magic space or find the correct icon abstraction of "junk drawer" to find core features is hardly intuitive either.

kitsunesoba6• 4 years ago

Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed.

Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it has some quirks.

Cockbrand4• 4 years ago

You can change the color depth in the Control Strip in the bottom left corner. It's indeed set by default to "256 Colors", setting it to "Millions of Colors" (=24bit) removes the dithering from the icons.

kitsunesoba6• 4 years ago

Nice catch. Opening the Monitors control panel yields an error but didn't think to check the Control Strip.

Cockbrand4• 4 years ago

Oh man, it's even got the "Grouch" extension for the Trash Can. Can't install it on Chrome/Mac, though, as it can't be read.

Still, very very nice! And as others have pointed out, the UI/UX design is immaculately well thought out, discoverable and very clean.

DrBenCarson• 4 years ago

Really cool. Is this running in Web Assembly?

lowbloodsugar• 4 years ago

Oh no... it has a working Civilization...

WraithM• 4 years ago

Ohh! Don't tease me with Escape Velocity! It apparently needs 2050K more memory?

trafnar• 4 years ago

I really wanted to play Barrack but it doesn't work :(

webwielder2• 4 years ago

Very excited to see Infini-D. Hands down the most Macintosh-esque 3D rendering software ever created.

kirykl• 4 years ago

Love the inclusion of ClarisWorks, spent so much time in there

lprd2• 4 years ago

Wow, what a blast from the past. I was only 9 at the time this was released and every bit enamored with the world of computers. My dad owned a data recovery business that also developed software. I was home-schooled and would visit his office frequently after class as I loved looking at all the hard drives and also loved the "computer room smell". There was also the office tradition of playing a game of Bungie's Marathon (which ran natively on Mac OS 9) before closing up shop. It wasn't too long after I would be saving up for my first tangerine iBook.

Good times.

dheera• 4 years ago

Reminds me of a fake MacOS website that we naughty students used to load up on IE on Windows machines at school and then full screen it, which would make it look like it was converted to a Mac.

Except it was just a webpage designed to look like a Mac with some very basic GUI features.

It was an extremely popular prank, I just can't remember the name of the website now.

And today we have actual real MacOS in a browser.

genewitch9• 4 years ago

the smell being dust, or ozone? Working in a computer repair place when i was ~19 ruined my sinuses forever. I have a lot of old hardware kind of sorted in cabinets, and whenever someone needs some old hardware i have to either dust mask or take an antihistamine.

So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is, and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice.

lprd2• 4 years ago

the smell being dust, or ozone?

I'm not exactly sure the origin of the smell. Perhaps its the silicon/plastic they use on the electronics? Maybe even the heat combined with all the rest of the components produces that unique smell that I love so much.

sroussey• 4 years ago

I can’t seem to install McDraft on it, unfortunately.

s1k3s3• 4 years ago

Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I build, thanks!

bovermyer2• 4 years ago

Two questions:

1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic?

2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?

s1k3s3• 4 years ago

I am serious, and it's all about how things are named and how the OS interacts with you.

Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before):

- "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to users, among many other names

- a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square with no color differentiation on the Mac

- a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right

- taskbar showing date + time and the calendar "on click" on Windows vs. time, date on click & no calendar on the Mac

... and the list can go on. I honestly believe they screwed up by acting too smart, when people wanted something simple that makes sense to them.

Mogzol2• 4 years ago

I don't know if they were being serious, but as someone who never used a mac back then, I really struggled with this UI. Why do folders all open in a new window? Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner? What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors that often? Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders? What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to their title bar? How do you even turn off the computer?

These are all features that work how I would expect on Windows 98. I'm sure if I had used a mac back then this would all make sense to me, but even as someone who uses modern macs, I was very lost in the old UI.

s1k3s3• 4 years ago

I apologize to everyone who got triggered by the above comment. Please remember that Nike makes great shoes, but they also make a lot of crap.

hardnose2• 4 years ago

One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder days!

j1elo• 4 years ago

Oh well, I almost got to play Another World :-) (I recently finished it on PC so it was the first thing to catch my eye).

Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome (memory access out of bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore) but I get it, playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator!

dkonofalski• 4 years ago

And here I thought the purpose of this emulator was to play Battle Chess. Unfortunately, that doesn't work either.

ehaliewicz23• 4 years ago

Escape velocity seems to work, I recommend it if you haven't played it.

mbauman• 4 years ago

Man, I miss all those Ambrosia Software games (Apieron, Barrack, Escape Velocity, etc). I love how many are pre-loaded there, but the few I tested all seem broken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software

BillFranklin• 4 years ago

The A-10 attack game works! Controls are at http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/A-10_Tank_Killer....

Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware. The price hasn't decreased in about 20 years though.

danaris• 4 years ago

Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware.

There's also an open-source clone, Endless Sky [0], and a recently-Kickstarted project to re-create EV Override for modern systems, Cosmic Frontier: Override [1].

0: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky

1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...

ehaliewicz23• 4 years ago

Escape velocity works here!

alana314• 4 years ago

Oh I was really hoping Barrack would work!

mdasen• 4 years ago

I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. Likewise, it wasn't the blinding white of light-mode in macOS/Windows today. The purple used was soft and pleasant, unlike the harsh yellow of folders in Windows or the harsh royal blue of Windows progress bars.

Plus, everything had lots of contrast without feeling harsh. One of the things that bugs me about modern UIs is the lack of contrast. I don't need a high-contrast mode, but it would be nice to get back to the contrast of 90s operating systems.

kitsunesoba6• 4 years ago

I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98.

I feel similarly. The Win9X gray is just a touch too dark, it reminds me of a dark overcast day or something.

Platinum's shade of gray is great, and the shade that they switched to in Windows 2000 is also very good. For this reason on the Windows side of the fence I've always considered Win2K's UI the peak of Win9X-type UIs.

akx2• 4 years ago

The win9x default gray was from an age where you didn't necessarily have the option to use an arbitrary shade of gray - meanwhile Macs had full control of the hardware (as they still do) and could pick any old color.

That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

I would take Mac System 6, 7, 8, 9, OS X 10.1 aqua, windows 95, 98, ME, or XP over Windows 11's GUI.

siruva07• 4 years ago

I can hear "Sosumi" while clicking around :)

"Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company, regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi

spongeb00b• 4 years ago

For me it was weird not hearing that very specific sort of grinding noise of old hard drives while watching the boot screen :)

GingerMidas• 4 years ago

Warcraft II actually plays, I wasn't expecting that.

cortesoft• 4 years ago

I still play quite a few games from MacOS using SheepShaver. Still find it pretty fun.

ben_w• 4 years ago

Hah, Marathon Infinity, running in real time on a Javascript emulation of MacOS, in Safari, on my phone.

What a difference 26 years makes.

hadrien01• 4 years ago

Question from someone who never used MacOS 9: why does the Sherlock UI look so... OS X like?

johnzim• 4 years ago

Because it was built with the newer design language that Apple was developing - they used it in Quicktime too. I'd hazard a guess that the key difference was that at the time that MacOS 9 came out, you could get something in as long as it appealed to Steve.

It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out the door.

Lammy2• 4 years ago

ty_2k• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. It's stuff like this that really makes the web feel mysterious and magical.

samhickmann• 4 years ago

Brings so much good memories! [Edit] and their macos8 emulation is even better

aj73• 4 years ago

It’s amazing how much more central search is in modern OS’s. This feels more like the original’84 Mac, but gussied up. I like OS6 better. It was 10 years ahead of anything else, except perhaps Amiga, in the hands of a developer. This Mac OS9 actually looks like it came from a low point in Mac’s penetration and power.

adolph2• 4 years ago

Agreed, 6 was the high point, 7 wasn’t bad and 8/9 were skeuomorphic slow lipstick on the core OS pig. Gimme 6 with original iPod any day of the week.

IIsi50MHz3• 4 years ago

I started with System 6, and after getting 7.0.1, would only begrudgingly go back to 6 for apbs that needed it.

aj73• 4 years ago

The low point was when someone at Apple had decided that dragging a document over a print icon to print the document was an important innovation. That’s about the time I switched to Windows for 18 years.

ok123456• 4 years ago

How do I send the command key (propeller)?

genewitch9• 4 years ago

at the bottom of the non-fullscreen browser window there's a rectangle, hover over that, or if on touch, move your finger about 5 words to the right, there's a "settings" button hidden (at least on my monitor) that lets you swap ctrl and command. Doing that lets you press ctrl-I for info, or whatever.

davepeck• 4 years ago

In addition to being impressive technically, this is just plain fun. I downloaded a game my friends and I wrote way back in the day [1] and... it worked in my browser. Such a nice blast from the past.

[1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2851-infotron

erksa• 4 years ago

Sherlock, I've forgotten about this beautiful software and how it opened the internet for me.

papandada2• 4 years ago

Not a Mac user. Figured this was a new announcement. Clicked and then remembered -- I was at a "System 7" launch as a youngster, 30+ years to get a couple version would be very, very slow.

genewitch9• 4 years ago

when mac os X was announced they said "we're done with the versions! forever!" and it took them about 16 years to start incrementing the versions again. I get announcements from a discord server about mac OS checkpoint releases and they're over version 15 now, i think.

edit to add: also when windows 10 came out microsoft was like "we're done with the versions! forever!" and then a couple years later "windows 11!"

papandada2• 4 years ago

I wonder if any company is successfully keeping any of its "forever" promises. ("unlimited gmail storage") -- I guess Costco's hot dog price is still holding strong.

blastro• 4 years ago

Turns out I'm nostalgic for an operating system...

chuckreynolds• 4 years ago

idk why but... cool. I had that Hellcats and Glider game... probably f-18 one too.

rcarmo2• 4 years ago

This sort of UI elegance is why I keep around an XFCE container with the Platinum theme: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330

I love using it when I need a break from GNOME.

etc-hosts• 4 years ago

how do I use this to play Dark Castle and Crystal Quest?

tren• 4 years ago

I went for dark castle first thing as well. Says you need to change the display to 2 colours for it to work, I couldn't figure out how to do it.

genewitch9• 4 years ago

on the bottom left there's a thing that looks like the color bars from old TV stations, click that and pick your color depth. the one with the checkerboard pattern to the right is the resolution settings.

emrah• 4 years ago

No matter how good anything is, it has to be resigned every year/major version/etc because it is far more "fashion" based whether we like it or not. And fashion is all about creating novelty by changing stuff not for utility but for the sake of generating a different neural firing pattern in our brains so the item doesn't simply fade into oblivion even if it is designed and works perfectly

wildrhythms• 4 years ago

I am not unsurprised by the fact that Photoshop in this little browser emulated Mac OS 9 starts up faster than modern Photoshop on my decked out modern Macbook. What the hell happened?

mihaip2• 4 years ago

I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission.

This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work.

If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7).

The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.

jxdxbx• 4 years ago

I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline or in some kind of encapsulated web app form?

mihaip2• 4 years ago

macintosh.js (https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/) is an Electron packaged version of an earlier iteration of the BasiliskII Emscripten port.

JonathonW2• 4 years ago

There's a professor at Columbia University that has good prebuilt SheepShaver packages with OS 9:

Mac: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html Windows: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html

There's not much in the way of third-party software included in these images, but it's a good starting point.

sharikous2• 4 years ago

If you have experience with QEMU now there is good support for MacOS 8/9/X in ppc and there is an alpha version with initial support for System 7/8/A/UX on 68k. It's still a PITA but at least it's similar to the PITA of other QEMU VMs, which you may be familiar with.

thealienthing• 4 years ago

I love that this exists. Time to time I crave playing some of my childhood games that are OS9 based and setting up sheepshaver is a pain. This will help me to get my kicks playing some old games for the few minutes I intend to play them :) thanks!

p_l• 4 years ago

Hi, it's a great project, although I found out that some 68k and PPC software seems to have required things that aren't emulated by either BasiliskII nor Sheepshaver, or at least so it looked when I was playing with it - tried running Macintosh Common Lisp and it always seemed to crash.

Still, reminds me of plying with vMac long ago and this weird world of, to our perception then, barely usable machines ;)

CydeWeys3• 4 years ago

Awesome, this is so cool! I remember MacOS 9 with a mix of fondness, hatred, and nostaglia. OS X was definitely a big improvement when it came out (I remember OS 9 having so many crashes), but some of the charm was definitely lost.

And these .app domain names you're all using in this space are great and totally apt. I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like this.

dylan604• 4 years ago

OS9 always seemed like little improvement over OS8. The biggest thing I remember was this was when they introduced the Applications folder. It's like they were trying to get you to get used to how the structure in OS X was going to be, but with no explanation.

Naracion• 4 years ago

I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like this.

Out of curiosity and ignorance--what is the work you're referring to here which is being used for the project / website? The comment makes me feel it's the (dot)app TLD, in which case--fascinating! But also what does it even mean to work on something like that?

badrabbit• 4 years ago

Doesn't load on my mobile firefox and it tries to hijack browsing history (have to fight with it hitting the back button to get back to HN).

JeremyHerrman• 4 years ago

so cool, thanks for making this! Love that you have escape velocity!

iamstef• 4 years ago

I immediately checked for EV and was stoked to see it!! I haven’t played that game in decades…so many good memories. SOL?

legutierr• 4 years ago

This is really great. I can't seem to get sound working on Firefox, though.

ralphc3• 4 years ago

I'm a little disappointed that "Just Grandma and Me" isn't a first person shooter but other than that, great work!

heavyset_go• 4 years ago

Having worked with it extensively, how would you say the performance of SheepShaver compiled to WASM compares to a natively compiled VM binary?

stuaxo3• 4 years ago

Fantastic work.

Could this have implement dynamic screen resolutions, like Qemu/Virtualbox/Vmware guest extensions do when virtualising other operating systems ?

steviedotboston• 4 years ago

wine em, dine em, OS 9 em!

BerislavLopac• 4 years ago

Is there a way to browse the Web somehow?

blonky• 4 years ago

Oh boy. Those extensions loading. So many times I held my breath when adding a new extension. If it doesn’t then you have to restart in Safe mode, or something. I won’t miss the extensions. OS 9 was cool. I used it a lot on my lime-green imac.

ubermonkey• 4 years ago

That's the version of Mac I started with, back around the turn of the century, on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook.

I was in a job that was mostly analysis and presentation and writing, and Win95/98 on a laptop was just a NIGHTMARE of freezes and crashes and excruciatingly long boot times. I had a colleague, though, that was using a Mac (because his background was design), and while OS 9 definitely did crash, too, it was far less frequent -- and boot times were faster. Plus, sleep actually WORKED.

Maybe 18 months later, that firm tanked, OS X came out, and I was keeping the lights on with freelance LAMP work using that same Mac as a dev environment. I'm on OS X to this day.

PeterCorless• 4 years ago

OMG. Original Warcraft was so terrible. But at the time, we thought it was SO COOL. Very simple "guns or butter" simulator. [Also runs slow like molasses in the emulator.]

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

A tiny nit — this refers to showing the experience of using a Mac in the mid-90s, but the screen looks like it's the 15" display that Apple released in 2000. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and they had something like this in the 90s?

TazeTSchnitzel• 4 years ago

Mac OS X came out in 2001, so even though Mac OS 9 was mostly a 1990's experience, it did survive into the 2000s.

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

Oh sure, I remember running OS 9 on my Cube in 2000 before the OS X beta was available. My point was that the monitor frame shown is not consistent with the note in the stickies that indicates a mid-90s timeframe.

genewitch9• 4 years ago

mac os x server came out in 1999.

zczc• 4 years ago

Apple logo on the bottom does not render on non-apple machines, because it is apple-specific PUA code-point U+F8FF. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use

mitchitized• 4 years ago

First thing I did was look for Shufflepuck Cafe and Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War.

Anybody else do the same?

calmconviction• 4 years ago

Does anyone know the address of a website that used to bring up a full blown VM in the browser as a background to whatever the main site was loading?

sfpotter• 4 years ago

Just FYI, anyone who wants to play any of the Marathon games, be advised that they have been available open source for a long while now:

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

ChrisArchitect• 4 years ago

Related discussion from only 7 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646

1038 points, 323 comments

TacticalCoder• 4 years ago

Oh the memories! I've spent countless hours on MacOS 8 and then 9 IIRC, running QuarkXPress to do professional desktop publishing. Mostly on a beige Powermac G3 tower. I still have that computer somewhere in a garage, don't know if it still boots and still has my software of yore installed.

Our physical tools of the trade were Iomega Zip drives and Iomega Zip disks (100 MB then 250 MB IIRC), Apple II Extended keyboard (the M3501, with ALPS switches: incredible keyboards for the time), HP LaserJet printers (600 and then 1200 dpi) and Sony Trinitron CRTs.

GoofballJones• 4 years ago

Now you just need QuarkXpress loaded on it and use a weird 3rd party font manager to load the customers weird fonts....and then have it simulate crashing every 5 minutes or so.

Would really bring back that OS 9 feeling.

scelerat• 4 years ago

I was stoked to see Apeiron in the Games folder. One of the best Centipede clones ever.

Too bad it doesn't work -- hope that's a temporary thing.

genewitch9• 4 years ago

it's missing inputsprokets, which i spent about 2 minutes looking for in other folders before the system crashed...

scroot• 4 years ago

Would really appreciate if someone could get SK8 running in one of these environments!

jejones3141• 4 years ago

I've never owned a Mac, but I remember Mac OS 9 because some of its users would post their questions on comp.os.os9.

damontal• 4 years ago

I want to zap the pram and fire up Myst.

fdr• 4 years ago

Nice to see Escape Velocity in there. It's a shame that its distribution is endangered ever since Ambrosia closed up, without selling or releasing the source and rights.

1letterunixname• 4 years ago

I'm installing 9.2.2, Internet Explorer 5.1.7, and Netscape 7.0.2, so I'll backup to your AFP server over AppleTalk. Cool?

Ah, the old days of watching extensions load and single-tasking.

EDIT: Stable Google Chrome on a M1 MAX with a bazillion other tabs open is ~7-78x faster than real hardware. Chrome beats Safari beats Firefox.

nodesocket• 4 years ago

Oh my god, its got Hotline[1]. Hotline Client 1.2.3.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

jrnichols• 4 years ago

you might be surprised at how many Hotline servers are still up and running today. :)

vishnuharidas• 4 years ago

Open Photoshop, press Ctrl+Alt+"About Photoshop" for an easter egg.

glitchc• 4 years ago

Is it slow for a reason or to mimic real-life performance in its heyday?

sandgiant• 4 years ago

I love projects like these! I don't have anything to add to what others have already said about nostalgia and simpler times, except I watched the Civilization intro and almost started a play-through. The original Civilization tile set is so pleasant to look at.

jwr• 4 years ago

A desktop where windows remember their positions… so refreshing in today's world, where every window and app has total amnesia and launches in random places.

SentientAtom• 4 years ago

Spent a lot of time restoring candy imacs in p.o.s. applications with OS 9, was always fun getting the PostScript dependencies loaded for Laser-Writers; periphery like plate-makers and Design-Jets, and getting them to see network shares. OS 8, and 9 were both lean as fuck and full of utilities. Back when distros were stable and code was efficient.

Mac OS 9

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