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Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

The era of it having a port of Mac System 7 is so interesting, somewhere there must be disks with that on it (project Star Trek).

Who is still alive that might have it?

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Probably some developer still has a stack of floppy disks with the source code on it. Issue is, they aren’t supposed to, do they want to risk getting in legal trouble with their former employer over it?

These floppies won't be readable forever.

There's a level of moral obligation to do preservation.

The problem is that copyright laws were not designed to encourage historical preservation, at least not for computer software. Source code escrow should be a condition of copyright for closed source software.

Apple gave versions up to 7.5.3 for free on its page. Not libre, but there's Executor (a fork of it) under Github which can run System 6/7 binaries.

That’s not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the unreleased “Star Trek” project in which Apple ported System 7.1 to run on top of Novell DOS 7 (descendant of DR-DOS) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

We're talking about something else entirely.

But even for "up to 7.5.3", it is just binaries; no source code.

> But even for "up to 7.5.3", it is just binaries; no source code.

There is a leak of the System 7.1 source code floating around, although apparently it is missing some major components (such as the 68K emulator for PPC Macs)

Might need 7.1.2 for that.

Sounds like that never made it to market. Would have been great for me at the time, I was stuck having to trade my Outbound notebook in for a PC one because I couldn't get system 7 on it, and 7 was a game changer compared to 6 (Multi-tasking!!). Would likely have never left mac if it weren't for that.

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