If you select Thousands of Colors it changes the resolution and everything looks like negatives, I thought it only supported 256 Colors, but unexpectedly choosing Millions of Colors is also supported. ex: https://imgur.com/a/nqo8v0e
Fantastic! It even has Adobe Photoshop 3. So much fun.
Makes me wonder if in the year 2040, we'll be able to do anything similar at all.
"Oooh! Photoshop CC on Microsoft Windows 13 running inside a browser running on macOS 43! Oh, wait. 'Cannot connect to DRM server.' 'Cannot connect to advertising server.' 'Cannot connect to marketing server.' 'Cannot connect to telemetry server.' 'Cannot authenticate login. Aborting.'"
(I'm not harshing on MS. Just moaning that software is so tied to ephemeral services these days.)
Photoshop is one of those things that easily illustrates how far computers have come.
Anyone who used graphic design software, even well into the PowerPC days, remembers having a tiny preview window to show filters/effects, and then waiting seconds or even minutes for the filter to be applied to the entire image. Yes people, even a blur took a long time in the old days.
The real-time manipulation we have on our phones these days is insane by comparison.
With the amount of in-browser emulators how there it doesn't seem particularly difficult to recompile something existing to WASM. Archive.org has been doing something like that for years at this point
This project is a nice resume badge. Just wish it was called that
The idea that we could one day run todays operating systems in emulation (in the browser) seems so insane and infeasible but maybe one day it'll be possible. Advances in computation is one rare thing that cheers my spirit up in a world where a lot of scary trends are pointing down.
FWIW: The emulator dynamically loads chunks of the hard disk over the network, and will usually crash if that fails -- which can happen if the site is busy.
Found another greybeard Mac user! I learned this trick under System 6 and used it religiously until just recently. (My clock keeps perfect time, but seconds don't update, under MATE Compiz. Go figure.)
Cooperative multitasking architecture. If the frontmost thread doesn't `WaitNextEvent`, not even the OS gets a chance to update the UI (with some key exceptions... I think the mouse was interrupt-driven?).
OS 8 started to add preemptive multitasking, but it wasn't mandatory and apps had to buy-in to it (so they didn't break backwards compatibility).
Incidentally, games would squeeze a few more cycles out of the computer by using `getNextEvent` or accessing the input drivers directly, which wouldn't give other processes a chance to do things. This would lead to the hilarious consequence (especially when the networking era came along) that you'd play a game for a couple hours, quit it, and be greeted by several error dialogs as various processes that had been wanting to poll for timed events discovered they'd missed their polling windows because they essentially just came out of suspended animation.
The need for always-available network access finally spelled out the death of the non-preemptive architecture; networking simply couldn't tolerate the client dropping out of the universe for ages at a time.
Note, the Mac OS and the apps in this emulator are running proprietary code. So it can't be "compiled" because the source code isn't available. The only options are binary recompiling or binary translating or emulation.
This is probably because the emulator is using relative mouse coordinates, rather than absolute mouse coordinates. I use a high-DPI/sensitivity mouse and as soon as my cursor touched the screen of the Mac the response was off.
You know what's nice? The 13" (rescaled) 4:3 screen is easier to read than my current setup. Also, the menu's are nice and short. Very focus. I totally understand how I, and many people in the past, were able to pump out huge amounts of code in a week
Yes. This matches to what was thought (at the time? I'm not sure if research has changed the thinking on this) to be the size of human working memory.
7 ± 2 was believed to be about how much a human could understand with zero layers of abstraction, i.e. "in parallel" (you can imagine your brain has 7 ± 2 registers, though that's a highly inaccurate model). Any larger, and your brain has to build abstractions to reference the item (i.e. item 10 becomes "the last item in the second half of that honkin' huge menu").
As opposed to "nested two levels deep under one item or another on the File…or was it View…or maybe Window…menu? No? Okay, then try holding down Option…"
I still think that searchable menus was one of the killer features of OS X vs. anything else at the time, and it's frankly amazing that the majority of Windows apps still don't have menu search.
Menus were short because they had to fit on the screen of a classic Mac (342 pixels) and the pull-down operation used to require holding the mouse button. I think by Mac OS 8 you could click to open a menu and yhey could probably expect at least 480 pixels if not 600.
Just for giggles, I tried launching with extensions disabled, and it worked so that "Extensions Disabled" appeared in the boot screen. Didn't click around enough after that to see if things no longer worked without these extensions.
Also noticed the scroll bar when navigating folders did not behave as expected. It's the only thing I noticed that made me notice which I find very impressive.
Amen to scrollbar not right -- although the folder contents do scroll, the "thumb" never moves from the top position. It should reflect how far you have scrolled, and be draggable.
Does anyone know of a way of running Windows 98 in a browser, but with a custom hard drive image that you can point it to? There's several sites for running 98 in browser but none let you use a custom virtual hard drive image. I'd like to do it for some fun retro stuff. I guess self hosting, but how do you do the whole QEMU <-> Browser part?
(custom floppy/CD image would also be an option as I could load the retro app that way)
I couldn't get Battle Chess to work. It kept giving me a memory error. I even read the readme file that says how to fix it but the option it mentions isn't available in the Controls pane for Memory. :(
That digs up some memory from my childhood - an aunt had an Apple with the OS looking very similar to this one, and there was a game where you had to place railroad tiles and could then operate a train. Anyone here remember that game?
This took me on a trip down memory lane back to my days in elementary school. I recall our class going to the computer lab once a week and having an hour to spend on an iMac G3, of which some were on OS8 and others OS9. Going back even further to kindergarten, our logins on those Macs were forced to use a simplified UI that displayed only icons/tiles of applications -- no browsing files or anything sophisticated from what I remember (edit: looks like they were called "Panels") [0]. The Incredible Machine [1] was what I personally looked forward to playing most. I'm sure nostalgia plays a big role in the feeling I get when toying around with emulators like this, but I'm also convinced that the simplicity, curiosity, and novelty of computing in the late 90s/early 2000s is something that I may never be able to replicate again in my lifetime.
This is exactly what I'm remembering. Thank you for sharing.
We had one staff member in charge of both the library and computer lab at my school, and I always admired her know-how when we'd watch her demonstrate something or troubleshoot a problem. Looking back now at the selection of software she curated for us, the uniformity of the look-and-feel across all Macs on campus, having a networked file share accessible from the 2-3 iMacs/Macintosh LCs we had in each classroom and in the lab, I appreciate how she really went above and beyond for that period of time and fostered so much intrigue in me. I really have to attribute a lot of my interest in tech to her during those formative years.
I don't have any specific memory of using At Ease on a school computer, but we had a couple of them in the children's section of the local library.
My middle school is where they got really into computers, a bunch of early G3 iMacs in each classroom and each student had a networked home folder with a schoolname.org/~user website, back in the early 2000s.
I ended up not going into computers as a profession (so far), but I poke around with hobby projects and really appreciate how powerful the modern web tooling has gotten, though it's also vastly more complicated.
I got in so much trouble due to a gaping security hole in At Ease back in 7th grade. You could put a floppy disk in and it would present the documents and folders, but no applications. However, it would allow you to open Desk Accessories (a System <6 era type of special app which could multitask before multi-finder).
So being the nerdy troublemaker that I was, I used a DA to launch other programs such as ResEdit and bob's your uncle. I had installed all the cool After Dark screen savers on each machine including the little space game one.
They never figured out how I did it, but they did put two and two together that I was the one who had done it. They tried to suspend me for 2 days for it, but my Dad argued that they weren't providing interesting classes using the technology. Not only did I not get suspended, next year they ended up making Sim Earth into a class and using it as a teaching aid.
Security at the time was an afterthought, when I was in high school on OS 9 they whitelisted what programs could open on student accounts, but if you created a custom "Open X" button in the AppleWorks toolbar it would first show you an error that you weren't allowed to open it, and then open it anyway.
The check for whether a program was on the whitelist used the executable's 4-character "creator code", so you could also change that to an allowed code in ResEdit and make anything you want open without argument straight from Finder.
I used to use "RASM" which was the remote access status monitor, and was enabled for all counts by default.
This looks great! But is there any way to turn off the blinking LED light on the faux monitor? It's so spastic it keeps drawing my eye away from the actual software. I never had a monitor that did that in real life!
I'm using Orion (Webkit-based) on macOS. It was blinking non-stop while just reading the Stickies. I couldn't get past that to do anything else because it was so distracting. It definitely wasn't HDD-related for me. It was constant.
I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.
I’m sorry this is so vague, I’m in transit right now; so I’m a little lazy to try to Google this from my phone - but there is some sort of proxy-type thing for these old Macs that allows you to use the ‘modern web’, to an…extent?
I think it kinda works the way Opera Mini does or something, if that makes sense?
It does totally solve the HTTPS issue. You could easily access HN using this method through even Netscape.
There is also - I want to say - again pardon me if I’m wrong here, but I believe it’s called ‘Classzilla’?
This is for - AFAIK - at least MacOS 9 (you might be screwed for 8, though) and does old.Reddit.com pretty okay for me as long as I have enough RAM in the unit, so it should also handle HN totally fine.
I actually think it - along with, unfortunately; an absolutely incredible modern Firefox port for PPC Macs running 10.4/10.5 called ‘TenFourFox’, are now abandoned - but very much still available.
It was a pretty big hit to the (admittedly small) PPC Mac community when it happened.
I personally still use TenFourFox almost every day as I use my PPC Mac collection often for various tasks, especially my quad G5 that has 16GB(!) RAM.
(Yeah, a PPC Mac with I believe 2 processors/4 G5 cores at 2.5(?)ghz, 2 512 GB SSD’s and 16GB of RAM. There is literally no better way to experience the heights of the PPC Mac days. So cool.)
Not specific to the HTTPS issue, but useful for older browsers on lower-powered machines:
Youtube creator and classic mac community contributor Sean/Action Retro has been running a proxy called FrogFind[0]. The project uses the Firefox "reader view" algorithm to serve stripped-down web pages for older machines. It's great for G3 and older machines that expect the web to be a bit more 90s. It really reminds me of using Google in/around 1998-99.
Boy did I go down the rabbit hole today with this. I found so many sites from my past that I ended up looking up in the Internet Archive just now. I really miss the web from 25 years ago. Design was simpler and things loaded fast. The focus was on content, not chrome (and tracking the heck out of you).
I know this is rose-colored glasses but hell, even interacting with the old Windows and Mac OSes was a breath of fresh air. There are things that show their age but there are also things that make it really easy for me to find my way around a computer.
Thanks for the link. That was a great trip down memory lane. I wonder if we'll ever adopt some of that old stuff ever again.
Did they really, though? Or did we just have more patience for general slowness back then? Things were simpler, no doubt, but the computers were also much slower (if you didn't have much RAM, loading a webpage would probably result in paging to the disk), the network was slower (even if you were lucky enough to have a T1, you were probably connected to it via 10 Mbps half-duplex ethernet), the servers you connected to were slower...
Don't get me wrong, I adore the simplicity and hackability of older systems, but I have a PowerMac G3, and even after maxing out the RAM at 768 MB (at launch, the max was 384 MB because there were no 256 MB DIMMs to test with), swapping the old 12 GB IDE HDD for a 32 GB CF card, fixing the ATI extensions to enable the dedicated GPU, and connecting it to a multi-gigabit network with symmetric gigabit fiber internet, there's only so much performance you can squeeze out of these things. Even loading 90s-era webpages on 90s hardware (with 2000s upgrades) is slower than loading many modern webpages on modern systems.
Font rendering seems off. It looks too pixelated and the pixels aren't even the same size. That said, I haven't used a real Mac so I don't know if that's how it's supposed to look.
This system was designed to be used primarily with CRT based displays, so back in the day it wouldn't have "looked" as pixellated even though these things were definitely defined that way.
When I look at this I think how these old UIs like MacOS, windows 95 or 2000 were designed for clarity and usability. And how things have gone downhill since then. I really miss easily distinguishable UI elements.
The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.
But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then not), etc...
The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed with the design and said so — it looked to me like the URL was being text-selected as the page loaded. (Ah well, it appears to be gone now anyway.)
But I digress. I had begun to consider that users are now more comfortable with inconsistent UI with the ubiquity of the Web. That has perhaps freed designers to try random stuff on a per-app basis and not adhere so religiously to User Interface Guidelines.
But, yeah, it made life easier for developers too.
> The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.
> But then designers came along
I mean, the Guidelines were written by designers. I don't have a problem with designers; I don't care for the Mac design, but at least it was consistent. But I don't think there's an OS with guidelines anymore; at least not any OS where 95%+ of what ships with the OS follows the guidelines (never mind what else the OS developer ships or 3rd party software). </rant>
before the OS vendors started ignoring their human interface guidelines, we had Kai's Power Tools, which some people loved--but I hated. I dont know if that was the beginning of custom UIs for every applications, or if it was just an outlier.
I'm happy for people to try things, but please at least draw outlines around / highlights on the actionable UI elements. We're at a point now so far into flat UI extremism that opening a new application is like a giant guessing game to find out which parts of the UI you can click on and what they do.
(Even the HN page I am staring at right now has styled all the links to an indistinguisable gray / black that looks totally inactive.)
I was just on a website - can't remember which - that said something along the lines of "to learn more, visit the documentation." I wasted a few minutes trying to find the documentation before realizing that the words "the documentation" were in fact a clickable link in the same color and font as the rest of the text, which you could only discover by hovering over those particular words.
339 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadMakes me wonder if in the year 2040, we'll be able to do anything similar at all.
"Oooh! Photoshop CC on Microsoft Windows 13 running inside a browser running on macOS 43! Oh, wait. 'Cannot connect to DRM server.' 'Cannot connect to advertising server.' 'Cannot connect to marketing server.' 'Cannot connect to telemetry server.' 'Cannot authenticate login. Aborting.'"
(I'm not harshing on MS. Just moaning that software is so tied to ephemeral services these days.)
Anyone who used graphic design software, even well into the PowerPC days, remembers having a tiny preview window to show filters/effects, and then waiting seconds or even minutes for the filter to be applied to the entire image. Yes people, even a blur took a long time in the old days.
The real-time manipulation we have on our phones these days is insane by comparison.
8 current Photoshop experts using Photoshop 1.0 and recording their reactions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtA46JT2q_0
The funniest I think is when they all find out they only have 1 undo.
Neither Sim City 2000 nor Warcraft II could start.
Is this just another enscripten rush port or something?
This project is a nice resume badge. Just wish it was called that
[1] https://ostechnix.com/run-linux-operating-systems-browser/ [2] https://bellard.org/jslinux/
Click around a little bit, and boom, it is frozen. Do you wait? Do you force quit? The watch gives little feedback.
Was on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383
OS 8 started to add preemptive multitasking, but it wasn't mandatory and apps had to buy-in to it (so they didn't break backwards compatibility).
Incidentally, games would squeeze a few more cycles out of the computer by using `getNextEvent` or accessing the input drivers directly, which wouldn't give other processes a chance to do things. This would lead to the hilarious consequence (especially when the networking era came along) that you'd play a game for a couple hours, quit it, and be greeted by several error dialogs as various processes that had been wanting to poll for timed events discovered they'd missed their polling windows because they essentially just came out of suspended animation.
The need for always-available network access finally spelled out the death of the non-preemptive architecture; networking simply couldn't tolerate the client dropping out of the universe for ages at a time.
Working on OS X and beyond has always felt slower (animations) compared to window shading. It's been 20 years and I still prefer it.
Note, the Mac OS and the apps in this emulator are running proprietary code. So it can't be "compiled" because the source code isn't available. The only options are binary recompiling or binary translating or emulation.
It's awesome, but I could see the copyright police coming after it.
source: I wrote the MPW setup scripts for MWerks on a contract, presented to MWerks VP of Engineering; subsequently Jobs+black ops locked them out
7 ± 2 was believed to be about how much a human could understand with zero layers of abstraction, i.e. "in parallel" (you can imagine your brain has 7 ± 2 registers, though that's a highly inaccurate model). Any larger, and your brain has to build abstractions to reference the item (i.e. item 10 becomes "the last item in the second half of that honkin' huge menu").
I still think that searchable menus was one of the killer features of OS X vs. anything else at the time, and it's frankly amazing that the majority of Windows apps still don't have menu search.
Also noticed the scroll bar when navigating folders did not behave as expected. It's the only thing I noticed that made me notice which I find very impressive.
(custom floppy/CD image would also be an option as I could load the retro app that way)
This might be a good start:
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98
The emulation has load/save state (.bin file), and apparently includes a floppy disk controller.
https://github.com/copy/v86
Unfortunately it bombs with a Type 10 error.
Always wanted a proper 3D remake of Marathon - Halo didn't really scratch the same itch
https://alephone.lhowon.org/
That digs up some memory from my childhood - an aunt had an Apple with the OS looking very similar to this one, and there was a game where you had to place railroad tiles and could then operate a train. Anyone here remember that game?
[0] http://toastytech.com/guis/macos9users.png
[1] https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-incredible-machine-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease
We had one staff member in charge of both the library and computer lab at my school, and I always admired her know-how when we'd watch her demonstrate something or troubleshoot a problem. Looking back now at the selection of software she curated for us, the uniformity of the look-and-feel across all Macs on campus, having a networked file share accessible from the 2-3 iMacs/Macintosh LCs we had in each classroom and in the lab, I appreciate how she really went above and beyond for that period of time and fostered so much intrigue in me. I really have to attribute a lot of my interest in tech to her during those formative years.
My middle school is where they got really into computers, a bunch of early G3 iMacs in each classroom and each student had a networked home folder with a schoolname.org/~user website, back in the early 2000s.
I ended up not going into computers as a profession (so far), but I poke around with hobby projects and really appreciate how powerful the modern web tooling has gotten, though it's also vastly more complicated.
So being the nerdy troublemaker that I was, I used a DA to launch other programs such as ResEdit and bob's your uncle. I had installed all the cool After Dark screen savers on each machine including the little space game one.
They never figured out how I did it, but they did put two and two together that I was the one who had done it. They tried to suspend me for 2 days for it, but my Dad argued that they weren't providing interesting classes using the technology. Not only did I not get suspended, next year they ended up making Sim Earth into a class and using it as a teaching aid.
Thanks Dad, I miss you.
The check for whether a program was on the whitelist used the executable's 4-character "creator code", so you could also change that to an allowed code in ResEdit and make anything you want open without argument straight from Finder.
I used to use "RASM" which was the remote access status monitor, and was enabled for all counts by default.
Edit: it seems like it's the HDD activity light? It blinks during boot.
related site: system7.app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30893212
And plenty of previous discussion over here from earlier this month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875259
I think it kinda works the way Opera Mini does or something, if that makes sense?
It does totally solve the HTTPS issue. You could easily access HN using this method through even Netscape.
There is also - I want to say - again pardon me if I’m wrong here, but I believe it’s called ‘Classzilla’?
This is for - AFAIK - at least MacOS 9 (you might be screwed for 8, though) and does old.Reddit.com pretty okay for me as long as I have enough RAM in the unit, so it should also handle HN totally fine.
I actually think it - along with, unfortunately; an absolutely incredible modern Firefox port for PPC Macs running 10.4/10.5 called ‘TenFourFox’, are now abandoned - but very much still available.
It was a pretty big hit to the (admittedly small) PPC Mac community when it happened.
I personally still use TenFourFox almost every day as I use my PPC Mac collection often for various tasks, especially my quad G5 that has 16GB(!) RAM.
(Yeah, a PPC Mac with I believe 2 processors/4 G5 cores at 2.5(?)ghz, 2 512 GB SSD’s and 16GB of RAM. There is literally no better way to experience the heights of the PPC Mac days. So cool.)
Youtube creator and classic mac community contributor Sean/Action Retro has been running a proxy called FrogFind[0]. The project uses the Firefox "reader view" algorithm to serve stripped-down web pages for older machines. It's great for G3 and older machines that expect the web to be a bit more 90s. It really reminds me of using Google in/around 1998-99.
[0] http://frogfind.com
I know this is rose-colored glasses but hell, even interacting with the old Windows and Mac OSes was a breath of fresh air. There are things that show their age but there are also things that make it really easy for me to find my way around a computer.
Thanks for the link. That was a great trip down memory lane. I wonder if we'll ever adopt some of that old stuff ever again.
Did they really, though? Or did we just have more patience for general slowness back then? Things were simpler, no doubt, but the computers were also much slower (if you didn't have much RAM, loading a webpage would probably result in paging to the disk), the network was slower (even if you were lucky enough to have a T1, you were probably connected to it via 10 Mbps half-duplex ethernet), the servers you connected to were slower...
Don't get me wrong, I adore the simplicity and hackability of older systems, but I have a PowerMac G3, and even after maxing out the RAM at 768 MB (at launch, the max was 384 MB because there were no 256 MB DIMMs to test with), swapping the old 12 GB IDE HDD for a 32 GB CF card, fixing the ATI extensions to enable the dedicated GPU, and connecting it to a multi-gigabit network with symmetric gigabit fiber internet, there's only so much performance you can squeeze out of these things. Even loading 90s-era webpages on 90s hardware (with 2000s upgrades) is slower than loading many modern webpages on modern systems.
The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.
But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then not), etc...
The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed with the design and said so — it looked to me like the URL was being text-selected as the page loaded. (Ah well, it appears to be gone now anyway.)
But I digress. I had begun to consider that users are now more comfortable with inconsistent UI with the ubiquity of the Web. That has perhaps freed designers to try random stuff on a per-app basis and not adhere so religiously to User Interface Guidelines.
But, yeah, it made life easier for developers too.
> But then designers came along
I mean, the Guidelines were written by designers. I don't have a problem with designers; I don't care for the Mac design, but at least it was consistent. But I don't think there's an OS with guidelines anymore; at least not any OS where 95%+ of what ships with the OS follows the guidelines (never mind what else the OS developer ships or 3rd party software). </rant>
(Even the HN page I am staring at right now has styled all the links to an indistinguisable gray / black that looks totally inactive.)