Run Mac OS System 7 in your browser | Hacker News Reader

Run Mac OS System 7 in your browser

jamesfriend.com.au

385 pointsmambodog100 comments

Hi, I hacked this together, though most of the credit should go to Hampa Hug's very nice emulator[0]. I'm posting this now as I saw the neat Windows emulator project and figured today was a good day to talk about emulation :)

My reasoning for putting this together is that I think it's really important for people to learn from what's come before, and the web is the most accessible place to do that. I've written a post[1] that goes into the rationale a bit further, and also addresses the legal aspect of this demo. Ultimately I would love for there to be an interactive online museum of personal computer history.

I'd also like to get a demo of NeXTSTEP working; for the OS which begat the world wide web to be running inside the browser would be pretty neat.

[0] http://www.hampa.ch/pce/

[1] http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser

I would very much like to see a demo of NeXTSTEP working!

Wonderful job, but it would be nice to have (a) more interesting applications (e.g. MacPascal, HyperCard -- the full version not the Player) and also command-key support (it actually wigs out if you use command keys).

I was able to use Command-key shortcuts in MacPaint. (Firefox 21 on Linux). On a PC keyboard, Alt maps to Command and Control maps to Option.

Normally, the Windows key maps to Command and the Alt key maps to Option.

+1 I would love to see NeXTSTEP.

Awesome. I'd really love to see a JS alpha emulator so we can run OpenGenera in the browser.

Did you evaluate PCE against MESS [2]? Apparently some people involved with the MESS project have the Nextstep ROM images.

[2]: http://mess.org/faq

Thanks, that's fantastic.

It's funny, I found it to be very emotionally evocative. I loved my IIci so, back in the day. The tinkering with the background images, recording everyone on the dorm hall making funny noises, replacing the system sounds, making the shutdown sound be HAL, etc.

It definitely helped that campus was pretty much all-Mac, so we all could tweak the same silly noises, and all try to find the joke that sounded silliest when told by the Talking Moose.

I don't have the same connection to my Mac these days. I wonder if it's just me, if the college freshmen have the same experience in 2013, or if it's somehow just an artifact of that particular era in computing.

Did you happen to go to Cornell?

Nope, aside from marching band road trips. Ithaca was too far away, for a PA kid. New Jersey was as far as I managed.

With this and the windows emulator in the spotlight[0], I feel that I should go ahead and link to Jason Scott's project to port MESS to the browser:

http://jsmess.textfiles.com/

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3375

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3569

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624554

Wow, I totally forgot about needing to hold down on the mouse button to keep menu's open.

I came here to say that and now it is obviously a major annoyance!

Sitting on a mac right now, with a one button mouse and yep, same exact thing. I was like, what??? OH YEAH!

Hypercard "Player"? Oh the pain, it's all coming back to me!

(To those who don't understand... Hypercard was originally free but when it was spun off as part of Claris, they tried to charge for the real thing and only offered the "Player" for free. Hypercard was already disintegrating from neglect but this really hastened its demise.)

I really wish a proper version of Hypercard was in this emulator. I'm too young to have used it at the time, but from what I've read it stands for an important ideal of what personal computers can be that's been forgotten and I'd like to experience what that was like first-hand.

HyperCard was the World Wide Web...in a parallel universe. If Apple had put just a bit more work into making stacks friendly to the internet, the world might be a completely differently place right now. Or not. Who knows.

I'll see what I can do about getting a Hypercard-specific demo together.

As a kid, HyperTalk was the first language I fell in love with. It got me hooked on programming. I've always wanted to recreate it for the web, but never thought of doing it this way!

I wonder who owns Hypercard these days and if it could ever be released into the public domain.

Edit: Seems as if Apple now own it again as part of FileMaker Inc.

However, SuperCard is still around and just received an update for Mavericks. SuperCard can even convert HyperCard stacks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCard

You could tell their heart wasn't in Hypercard Player: putting "set the userLevel to 5" into the message box would essentially turn it into Hypercard.

Which to a kid learning to make neat things with his computer was a gold mine.

Incredible. I can't remember... were the labels really "Hot" "Cool" "Essential" and "In Progress"?

They sure were :)

This shows a Macintosh Plus running System 7.0.1. The computer could actually run versions up to 7.5.5 – an OS that came out in 1996. That’s quite amazing, given the Plus was released in 1986.

Try running Windows 8 or OS X Mavericks on a 10 year old computer.

That's insane to me. While people were using Win95 in 1996, full color, 3D games (Duke Nukem 3D), etc Macs were still in the dark ages with 7.5 and 8.

This was around the time I was in college. I went to a big ugly state school and a close friend went to a fancy private school. In my school, we only had PCs available for general student use. At his school, it was Mac-only with everyone got their own Mac in their dorms. It felt like we were back in the 80s with the tiny screens and the antiquated OS. A newer version of the same OS I used in elementary school when my parents bought a Mac 512k.

The labs at that school did have the newer color macs, which were nice, but were a minority there.

Incredible how long apple put off the move to a new platform. I guess 1999 wasn't too far off, but for a long while, owning a mac seemed like a step backward.

I think I remember seeing an article where Steve Jobs lamented that Apple sat stalled while Microsoft and the PC industry continued to evolve. This was from an interview shortly after his return to Apple.

Tiny screens weren't a requirement. 14", 16", and 21" color displays were available since 1992, with resolutions of 640x480, 832x624, and 1152x870. A 1987 Mac II supported up to 6 displays, forming a single desktop. Not too shabby, eh?

However, the OS was behind the times, lacking memory protection and preemptive multitasking. It is incredible how much wasted effort went into Pink, Taligent, and Copland...

> It is incredible how much wasted effort went into Pink, Taligent, and Copland...

Indeed. I remember reading Robert X. Cringely's book "Accidental Empires" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) back at that time, and in one chapter he looked over the Pink/Taligent/Copland debacle and predicted that no company would ever write a general-purpose operating system from scratch again, because doing so had just become too complicated.

That seemed pretty far-fetched to me at the time, but it turned out he was more or less right. OS X is NeXTSTEP is Mach/BSD; Windows is NT; Android is Linux/Java. Every major OS project these days starts by picking up some earlier project and using it as a base. And those who tried to defy the prediction (cough Be cough) found out that it was true the hard way.

At least there was no unethical attacks like the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco ended up being...

Contrary to what you seem to be suggesting, in 1996 Macs ran full color 3D games, could use large screens, and they were known for its graphics – remember that MYST was made on Macs. System 7.5 was a great OS, it just didn’t have the modern features that Win95 had (protected memory, preemptive multitasking.) Also, let’s not forget that before the release of Windows95, the Mac’s OS was way more advanced. We’re talking about a rough patch of 3 years.

I don't believe that Windows 95 have protected memory or preemptive multitasking. That came in with the NT versions of Windows. I switched to Windows in 97 when NT 4 came out. The Mac OS was definitely lagging behind NT around that time period.

“Microsoft made preemptive multitasking a core feature of their flagship operating system in the early 1990s when developing Windows NT 3.1 and then Windows 95. It was later adopted on the Apple Macintosh by Mac OS 9.x” [1]

You’re right about Win95 (and Win98 and ME) not having true memory protection, but when comparing MacOS and Windows back then MacOS’ lack of memory protection was always mentioned.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking#Preemptiv...

Windows 95 definitely had Protected Memory (386 style, not NX bit) and Pre-emptive Multitasking [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95

>We’re talking about a rough patch of 3 years.

Which is an eternity in the computer game.

Also, we're ignoring the price difference. A PC that could play Duke Nuke'em in 1996 cost less than the Mac you'd need for same performance.

> [3 years is] an eternity in the computer game.

Microsoft didn’t release a new OS for 6 years (between XP and Vista) and even when it did, Vista flopped miserably. Yet, Microsoft is still around.

Because XP was feature competitive and there wasn't much market pressure to do so, unlike OS7,8 from that era.

This is quickly becoming a OS war, but I think its uncontroversial to say that the few years before OSX showed us an Apple that couldn't compete and was selling products that were substandard and overpriced. 95-99 was pretty rough.

I would say 1995 to 1997 were the dark days. Not because MacOS wasn’t working well (even though its aging architecture did mean it needed to be replaced someday.) Apple’s problem was one of focus. They had too many product lines, too many managers, and too many mediocre sales locations.

Steve Jobs’ return to the company changed all that. He killed most projects and fired a lot of people (after Gil Amelio had already done his fair share of firing.) Apple released great products again far before Mac OS X came out. The iMac was introduced in May 1998.

Sounds like you're talking about old hardware though. I grew up in a Mac household and used Macs in school. We had a 128k in the 80s, but moved to the IIsi, IIci, Performa 520, PowerBooks, and PowerMacs, using various LCs in school. The PowerBooks were always black-and-white in the 68k days due to the state of LCDs at the time, but everything else I used from the 1990 IIsi on was in full color.

In 1994, IIRC, I used a Mac IIfx with a 21" Radius CRT monitor with 24-bit color. It probably also had a 34010 graphics processor (we didn't call them GPU's back then). The machine was perfectly capable of supporting multiple monitors, seamlessly extending the desktop. Preemptive multitasking excepted, it was easily on the same league as Sun 3 or HP/Apollo 400 workstations.

The IIfx was released in 1990, but yeah, it was an amazing machine. Using expansion cards, it could drive 6 monitors!

By 1996, the time GP was talking about, Apple had released dual processor PowerMacs.

Around 97, I think, I installed MkLinux on a PowerMac that sat unused in a closet at the ISP I worked for. Then I left. One year after that, I returned as a consultant and found all retired PowerMacs running MkLinux on developer and sysadmin desks. It felt good.

My (expensive) IIci of 1992 or so ran Prince of Persia (and other games like Spectre VR) in full color (256 color) at high resolution (640x480, high at the time), which the PC was nowhere near having yet. Not to mention full digitized sound was present in even the very first Mac, which PC's did not even have reliably working (soundblaster support, IRQ/DMA conflicts prevented much from actually working all of the time) until Windows 98 or so.

Well, Mavericks, fine. But I'm able to run Windows 8 on my old as hell Toshiba laptop, and it's blazing fast. I have completely regained my respect for Microsoft's engineers after Windows 8. They've proven, time and time again, that with the right management, they're able to produce stunning work.

You run Windows 8 on a 10 year old notebook?

According to Microsoft, you need a CPU with NX, which weren’t around until 2005, and you’d need a at least Pentium 4 (Prescott). Other system requirements are 1Ghz clock rate and 2GB RAM.

Windows 8 runs fine on a ThinkPad X41 Tablet from 2005. That's not 10 years, but it's pretty close. It has a Pentium M and 512 MiB of RAM. The only real issue is that you need to use the generic Microsoft video driver, which isn't quite acceptable for the video playback performance we're used to today (though it does support Aero). For all the other basics, it works great.

My G4 Cube ran everything from OS9.0 to 10.5. That's a fairly big stretch too.

I loved System 7. To me it felt like an advanced, very usable OS that could still be "understood" by the laymen.

Most crashes and bugs originated in so-called Extensions. Bugs could often be fixed by simply moving some Extensions out of the Extension folder and restarting the Mac until the buggy extension was found. Additionally it was possible to restart the Mac with all Extensions turned off by pressing the SHIFT-key on start-up.

Most of the OS could be managed by simply moving files in and out of certain System Folder directories.

Spent a good 10 minutes playing with Kid Pix, having not heard of it before. Turns out it has a fun history - it was designed to be usable by a 3-year-old: http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years/

I did exactly the same! The Moving Truck icon is inspired...Photoshop could learn a few things ;-)

Same here. Surprised to see it has more features than MS Paint! The UI is so simple. As a non-professional, Photoshop feels way too intimidating.

Is it really a bad thing that software targeted at pros isn't ideal for people who aren't pros? It seems a bit like complaining that your oven doesn't remove screws very well.

I had a Macintosh Plus when I was a kid. (My dad wrote his Ph.D dissertation on it, and he had a HD and some game disks before I somehow destroyed them.) I remember that computer fondly. When I was in first grade we got a new machine, and we took the Mac Plus out and left it next to the apartment complex dumpster that morning. By the afternoon it was gone. Sometimes, I still think about it...who picked it up, whether they plugged it in and found out it was still completely functional, and if they still have it today.

Memories.

My parents still have our old Mac Plus. And it still works. It is a gorgeous relic. I can't believe you just left it at a dumpster. Do you realize how much that thing costed, new?

Anyone knows of any Lisp Machine emulator anywhere? The later generation ones with high res graphics and stuff preferably. That's an experience I'd like to try...

There are several but none of them will run in a browser.

I've tried to get an Alpha Emulator working on OS X so I can try OpenGenera, but there really isn't anything that really works out there except for one paid piece of software. I believe the freeware emulator was the origin of the paid one and the freeware one is no longer maintained AFAICT.

Genera itself is commercial software, if you have a licence to use it then you may as well just compile the emulator for OS X, I can't see any reason to have an emulated Alpha layer as well.

Someone could try compiling either the MIT or TI Explorer emulators to js I guess.

I know it is commercial, but I think everyone here can agree that running something like OpenGenera solely on a javascript emulator in the browser is a total non-solution for anything production use and doesn't really compete for sales to customers. What it accomplishes is the opportunity to just try something out to determine if I want to purchase a copy and explore it further.

Furthermore, there is a lot of value in having something out there that brings more attention to LISP machines and the novel ideas they introduced. Right now the barrier to trying OpenGenera out is remarkably high. Even googling for Genera or OpenGenera doesn't show a product page among the top results and the symbolics website is a glorified advertisement page.

If you want to find out what a Lisp Machine was like just run an emulator for either the MIT or TI ones on your desktop. Both are still being worked on, it wouldn't help their development to have extra translation stages into javascript. Any OpenGenera emulation in a browser would need to download a disk image containing all their commercial software, I can't see them wanting to put this on the web.

There are several Mac emulators that can run on desktop machines, the advantage of this new one to me is that you can package up a snapshot of a particular System version and the software that would have been used with it, I think we need to preserve key stages of computer development for the future.

I have floppy disk images of MORE, the greatest Outliner that ever existed. Is there a way to mount the images so I can install it?

Now I just need Sim Ant, Artillery and The Oregon Trail.

Don't forget Lemmings!

And Risk!

And Prince of Persia too...

Just tried it on my Duo 230, it still looks just as good as I remembered.

I have the floppies for TaskMaker, I want to see if I can load them in this thing.

Oh my... I would be in heaven if I had Sim Ant!

This is wonderful to have. Some insta-feedback:

* Double-click stopped working for me once after I tabbed out and back, I'm not sure why. (Win. 7, Chrome 30.0.1599.101 m )

* Could you make it possible to scale up the screen? (Not to increase its resolution, of course.) As of now the screen size is very small even in comparison to the original Mac Plus or SE screens. For one thing that makes it harder to see the individual pixels, and the obvious pixelation was a significant part of the experience. Just a quick and dirty pixel-doubling would be great. (Zooming the page size in the browser causes the sidebar to overlap the Mac screen.)

* A means to load and save floppy images would be beyond wonderful to have.

Wow this takes me back. Lovely combination of apps to be there... quite impressive what was done with so little system resources. Nice to see pagemaker & word striped down to their bare essentials.

Feature request: Oscar the Grouch in the trash can.

I noticed that ejecting the Kid Pix disk made the machine unusable.

I admittably have a weakness for vintage human computer interface design, but for some reason, they don't make them like they used to anymore.

The Spatial Finder, showing which files and folders are open. sighs wistfully

Unfortunately, the "showing which files and folder are open" bit really really confused a lot of folks. I answered a lot of questions about why their icons were broken.

Otherwise though, it was brilliant.

The "Sorry, a system error occurred" dialog box is still deeply startling to me after all these years, even when I'm anticipating it. (I caused it to happen by moving the System file from the System Folder to the root Macintosh HD and restarted.)

It would be interesting to see it running System 3. This machine is almost as old as the Windows 1.0 emulator we saw the other day, but System 7 is a much more recent version of the OS, IIRC, from the same period as Windows 3.

Wow, this takes me back. Hypercard was one of my first experiences with software development. It was really nostalgic exploring all the nooks an crannies of the OS that I explored so thoroughly in my youth.

Thank you

This is really amazing. It's faster than a Mac Plus! But my brain is missing the scratching noise the floppy disk used to make as a program loaded.

The Mac Classic II was my first computer, wow does this bring back some old memories :)

Oh my god, Kid Pix! I wasted countless hours doodling stick figures. Good times.

Wow, remember when you had to hold the mouse button down to select a menu item!

It took me a few tries to quit Kid Pix because of this. But now that I think about it when the change was introduced to not require click and hold (7.6? 8.0?) I hated it.

Ah, my very first computer!

Thanks for making something as simple and silly as this emulator. It brought back a lot of powerful reminders about where the technology (and myself) have come from.

So well done! Lots of great fun memories here.

It has 4 GB memory same as my macbook air :)

4 MB. It's quite mindblowing to think that now a low-end laptop has 1,024 times more RAM.

Too be fair it has been 25 years.

Do you plan on making this open source? I ask because other similar projects were not made open source

It's already built from two open source projects: PCE[0] and Emscripten[1]. It patches Emscripten a little, and PCE a lot, so I'll need to separate those patches out and add them into the build process. Basically the code is not really in much of a state for other people to hack on just yet. However, for GPL compliance with PCE, a dump of the source is available[2].

[0] http://www.hampa.ch/pce/

[1] https://github.com/kripken/emscripten

[2] http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pcejs20131028.zip

I was totally expecting to see Talking Moose! lol.. Excellent work, totally took me back.

KIDPIX!

The Apps and Games image takes me back.

I remember Cannon Fodder giving my Mac SE nVIR. :(

1991... that's when I was born.

I'm much older than you, since I was born in the 80s. And by 80s I mean the 1880s.

Wow. That's awesome.

Just brilliant!

Nice but where's Dark Castle? My disk won't fit in the slot.

Brilliant!

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