Infinite Mac OS X
blog.persistent.info
blog.persistent.info
Well, until the original maintainer was hit by a train and killed. It lost most of its momentum after that.
I was an avid user and community member at the time. It still brings a tear to my eye thinking about it.
[0] https://www.macwelt.de/article/931666/pear-pc-entwickler-toe...
I used to regularly check for years after he stopped posting, just in case...
The last it was active was in 2019, then it disappeared forever.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191007180901/http://www.drunke...
https://redsweater.com/blog/383/drunkenbatman-is-not-a-racis...
A link to a project is useful, but a succinct description of a project can be far more helpful. Something like, “tl;dr: Infinite Mac (the software for running classic Mac and NextStep in your browser) can now run…”
Big oversight by the blog writer. Without your comment I'd never have found this amazing site.
https://github.com/kwhr0/macemu/blob/master/SheepShaver/src/...
You see that kind of succinctness in 6502 emulators, not usually relatively modern architectures.
The latter has a higher number of instructions, and a POWER CPU can execute the generic PowerPC code but not vice versa (unless compiled for the common set of instructions).
In my bitterness, it makes me think of someone in the Dark Ages, standing before a Classical sculpture: "how was it that humanity was once capable of such works?"
But tastes change. In the Dark Ages, what they actually thought was probably "what heathen decadence is this?", and today maybe they think "photo-realistic icons: cringe!"
The app installation is still the same "ikea dmg app dragging", and occasional zip or pkg. The Finder window already has bookmarks in the left bar. The dock behaves identically. (They went through their weird 3D dock phase but that was... Leopard? I think?)
There is no Mac App Store but barely anyone uses this nowadays anyway... Spotlight... was new in Tiger.
It is much more recognisable than Windows XP vs 11. XP behaves very differently to 11!
Oh also the + button didn't do full screen as today, but... it did... something. I never understood the point of the + button.
Here's a screenshot https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/0596003706/files/tagore...
When I first came from Windows I was confused about this as well, but once I got the hang of it, it became the most logical thing to me.
The green + button zoomed the window to the minimum window size that showed the full content. (For example, one page in a word processor or one slide in presentation software.)
You can also double click the title bar in most applications for the same effect.
Double clicking the title bar in many applications will also maximize the window.
Re: looks, they are admittedly subjective. To my eyes, the difference between the Mac today, and the old Mac, is night and day.
Every Mac OS, starting with 10.7, has visual elements that strike me as sloppy or ugly. The link below has many screenshots from OS X 10.6; I find every element attractive, right down to the last pixel.
I mostly agree with criticisms of modern macOS, especially how it moves randomly closer to iOS, but one thing I disagree is the new Settings. It's still ugly as sin, but it's overall easier to use because everything is uniform (not each panel being its own special snowflake), and MUCH easy to search for. I used to hate it at first, but I got used to it.
But yeah macOS is obviously second fiddle now.
What do you mean by "Dark Ages"? I do not think there was a loss of ability, but a difference in what an empire spends vs what independent kingdoms spent on. There are many beautiful artifacts and buildings from the early middle ages. A lot will not have survived, but there is some that has - things like the Sutton Hoo ship burial to Anglo Saxon churches (just drawing on things I have seen myself).
To me, Mac OS X looks so much better than todays Mac OS. It looks clear and orderly and I feel like "Great in this environment I can get some work done!".
Current Mac OS feels like "Help, I fell into a sack of candies, how do I get out of here?" to me.
Does anybody else feel like that?
Honestly, no; the parts of the UI that I see and work with are limited to the menu bar (just flat text, no embellishments), three dots and sometimes the Spotlight bar but I don't actively look at it unless it's slow. Same thing with Windows. I never work with the OS and rarely with native apps, it's all browser based and/or crossplatform applications that use third party design systems.
Everything after is a bit boring.
His fork is at https://github.com/mihaip/pearpc
I suppose it retains x86-64 support despite adding a webassembly target.
Edit: he also blogged about adding NextStep to Infinite Mac: https://blog.persistent.info/2024/03/infinite-mac-nextstep.h...
Liquid Glass seems to hearken back to that era...
Before OSX was released, we were seeded prerelease copies, but with the original System 7 UI.
It was really fast.
When the first Aqua release came out, the performance dropped like a stone.
It was a while ago, so my memory is fuzzy.
A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well. Home run.
Apple's current design language is sterile, but at least it's easy to read. The modern design trends are just a series of downgrades in usability, arguably continuing since System 7. Somehow, it looks like "overlapping low-contrast window content" has become the haute couture of UX, much to the dismay of grandmas everywhere.
In a certain sense, Platinum was an attempt to reinterpret what Mac OS could have looked like if it had always been designed for a color display. It didn't just add color, like System 7.0 had; it added depth and texture to the interface which wasn't practical to display before. It also added a ton of new controls to the toolkit which previously didn't have standardized implementations or appearances. (For instance, System 7.0 didn't have a standard progress bar control - every application which used one had to provide their own implementation.)
A downward trend since 1991?
It’s fair to say that design has moved on in the last 34 years. Totally subjective whether you think it’s all been for the better. But macOS is self-evidently more usable now than it was then; a lot more people are using it. I imagine fairly few of them would be happy if Apple decided to abandon this Liquid Glass idea and return to System 7 design instead.
There was even one Aqua scheme that through some feat of wizardry managed to give menus soft, 32-bit transparency drop shadows just like OS X had. I have no idea how that worked, classic Mac OS itself was only capable of 1-bit transparency as far as I'm aware.
So an extension could draw whatever fancy effect it wanted when the menu was down without worrying about a background application drawing over it (drawing over the transparency) as long you made sure to restore what was beneath when the menu was let go.
But those tended to have some pretty gnarly limitations (like I think in interrupts you can't allocate memory) so AFAIK they were only used for stuff like real-time audio, I dunno if anyone ever used those to do screen drawing, so in practice I can't think of anything that would interfere with menu drawing.
Indeed.
I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it,[1] but OS X was a revelation.
I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.
(I wrote the above on Slashdot in 2012 <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)
[1] People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.
“ Every Linux WM had an aqua theme. Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.”
It perfectly captures more than two decades of work in a couple sentences.
> A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well.
But maybe I am the only one who didn't dig this look. The later brushed metal from panther and tiger was much more interesting but it would have looked better without the aqua styled sliders.
- Chuck Moore, interview in "Masterminds of Programming", 2009
I love this quote, but the Mac OS showed a benefit Moore completely missed: an OS can gave a uniform appearance to every bit of software on a machine, giving the impression of hardware and software meant for each other. I think there's a psychological effect that benefits work efficiency and pleasure in using the machine. It's also undoubtedly been a great selling point for Apple in particular. Agreed Aqua was a high-water mark with this.
Of course, the downside is that the OS rules the day, so your choice of software quickly falls into a very small selection based on what OS you'd like. FOSS (or at least open source) tried to run around that, but for anything not purely command line it's very difficult to just pass around source and adapt it to wherever and whatever you'd like.
Lastly, for the past decade or more we've seen the browser take the place of the OS in this. There are quite a few downsides to that approach, especially the loss of the impression of a unified product build for the end user. But the house of cards / tower of babel continues to grow...if you'll excuse me I'll go back to my 7400-series logic now...
The operating system (as in: a kernel) provides applications with an abstraction of the computer that allows applications to co-exist.
The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
We don't write applications to run on bare metal any more (or rather, very, very few people do), because that's neither desirable or cost-effective.
That "subroutine called a disk driver" is just ridiculous. Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes is called an operating system (kernel).
I disagree. Even though we've added layers of abstraction even since then, the quote still reminds me to think "what are we really doing here?" Apart from arguing if it is crazy or genius, I will say it has broadened my mind and for that I'm very thankful.
> The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
I do stand corrected with that: desktop environment, not OS.
> Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes...
I agree, but I'll also point out that in the end I, as the end user, only want one specific thing written to disk at a time - the word document, excel sheet, game state, etc. The vast majority of disk writes are supporting the abstractions that support the abstractions that support the abstractions that support me saving my word document. I understand why that is the case, but I still think it's amusing.
so you're in some sort of text editor, and you think that's all you want written to disk at a time.
but meanwhile, you've got a messaging app running somewhere, and messages are coming in, and you'd like to have a local copy of those for performance reasons, so they're being written to disk.
you've got an RSS reader running, which just found out about a new posting somewhere; it's going to write it to disk so it can tell you about it at any time.
your media control panel - you just adjusted that because the piece of music you're listening to is a bit loud, and you expect it to remember the current setting the next time you restart, which means ... write to disk. and the music player itself - that's going to write to disk so that it knows where you were in the playlist next time.
and so on and so forth.
the idea of a computer being a device on which you run one program at a time vanished before MS-DOS even existed.
Steve Jobs
What all the copy cats missed (Windows Vista, Linux themes) is how consistent and usable everything was. It looked great, but better than that, it worked great.
Now I find myself frustrated with Mac OS quite often, but the competition is so bad that I'm just kind of stuck.
I tried to replicate this look in my Java Swing UI using a commercial Aqua-like look&feel, but got hit by issues with controls rendering their own background, resulting in stripes being misaligned.
I was so disappointed when Apple phased it out later.
I also fondly recall OpenLook on SunOS/Slowlaris and NeXTStep/OpenStep UIs and peak Microsoft Windows right on 2000 before the playskool never-ever-mix-orange-and-green Winblows XP. IRIX and plenty of Motif-esque joy on SGI.
UI elements were almost always distinct, understandable, consistent. If I was to actuate a standard UI control, I always knew exactly what I expected to happen before, and it happened exactly as I expected after.
Making them customized, themable, replaceable, more cool, well, that's what we have today, kind of in exchange I suppose..
We're in a second golden age of hardware, so I can dream that maybe one day soon Mac OS will be amazing again.
(Despite the new hardware golden age, the emulation performance here is pretty close to unusable on an M1 with Safari, unfortunately.)
I don't think it's even heading in that direction.
Competitive in price it was not, and osx wasn't as good as you think it was. Kernel panics were a daily thing, and segmentation faults of quicktime while watching videos.
Reproducing file formats like wmv or divx was a quest in finding and installing the correct codec.
Also overheating, because to make it pretty they didn't add vents for the air to flow.
I rocked dual Xenons until early 2023's M2Pro mini (the energy savings are substantial, with minimal GPU performance degredation).
The entry-level, basic-bitch M4 mini is incredible... the entire computer uses less than just a comparable-performing x86's GPU.
Dad had an Apple Lisa when I was young. Apple kindly gave it to him as he was developing an accountancy suite for Apple.
I took this incredible machine for granted, and only used it for games and MacPaint at the time. Among Dad's collection of 3.5" disks was one labelled "Dark Castle." For reasons I don't recall, it wouldn't work on the Lisa, but I guessed it was a game, and it killed me that I couldn't play it. I was beguiled by this mysterious disk.
Well fast forward to 2025... I just launched the Infinite Mac System 7 emulator https://infinitemac.org/1991/System%207.0
My heart skipped a beat. Inside the "Games" folder - there it is! Dark Castle.
Three decades later, I'm finally able to play this game!
The graphics are charming. Elements of a Sierra classic, Kings Quest, and some Prince of Persia too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Castle
That's my evening sorted!
As a Hackintosh user around ~2008, I can only second that. It adds even more to the realism that it's just as sluggish as it was on my computer back then. Luckily I didn't have to wait ~24 hours for installation to finish.
Oh what lengths I went through, just to be able to build some crappy Apps for my iPod Touch back then.
They have paired that with disk images of these OSes and a lot of tweaking, so that when you go to the website, you select the version of the OS you want to play with, and _it just runs_ in the browser.
Instant old Mac/NeXT experience, no separate download or software to install.