
Run Mac OS System 7 in your browser - mambodog
http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/
======
mambodog
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/](http://www.hampa.ch/pce/)

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

~~~
oddthink
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.

~~~
lectrick
Did you happen to go to Cornell?

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

------
unimpressive
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://jsmess.textfiles.com/)

[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3375](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3375)

[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3569](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3569)

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

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

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

------
gilgoomesh
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.)

~~~
msutherl
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.

~~~
joezydeco
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.

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

~~~
reaperhulk
They sure were :)

------
Samuel_Michon
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.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
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.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
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.

~~~
vondur
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.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
“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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking#Preemptive_multitasking.2Ftime-
sharing)

------
wsc981
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.

------
muglug
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/](http://red-green-
blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years/)

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

~~~
throwaway1979
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.

~~~
chc
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.

------
austinz
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.

~~~
lectrick
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?

------
nnq
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...

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

~~~
malandrew
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.

~~~
rjsw
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.

~~~
malandrew
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.

~~~
rjsw
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.

------
ljosa
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?

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

~~~
adamzegelin
Don't forget Lemmings!

~~~
wazoox
And Risk!

~~~
dfjorque
And Prince of Persia too...

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

------
leoc
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.

------
azinman2
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.

------
tmallen
Feature request: Oscar the Grouch in the trash can.

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

------
mrottenkolber
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.

~~~
rahoulb
The Spatial Finder, showing which files and folders are open. _sighs
wistfully_

~~~
netghost
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.

------
gpcz
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.)

------
rbanffy
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.

------
plusbryan
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

------
mhewett
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.

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

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

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

~~~
kevb
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.

------
tannerc
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.

------
geuis
So well done! Lots of great fun memories here.

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

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

~~~
bluedino
Too be fair it has been 25 years.

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

~~~
mambodog
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/](http://www.hampa.ch/pce/)

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

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

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

------
tmimicus
KIDPIX!

------
taopao
The Apps and Games image takes me back.

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

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

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

------
runnr_az
Wow. That's awesome.

------
Tarang
Just brilliant!

------
elf25
Nice but where's Dark Castle? My disk won't fit in the slot.

------
elf25
Brilliant!

