You see that kind of succinctness in 6502 emulators, not usually relatively modern architectures.
userbinator 5 hours ago [-]
It's a RISC, so that's not too surprising. MIPS emulators are also roughly that size.
classichasclass 4 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, depending on the generation, PowerPC can have a whopping number of instructions.
ck45 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, POWER is an acronym for Power Optimization With Enhanced RISC.
There are some wild instructions like cntlzd and lwarx that are more CISC-esque, and everybody’s favorite instruction (by name), eieio
thequux 58 minutes ago [-]
There was an ISA I saw a while back that featured an "enhanced multiply and accumulate signed" instruction, which of course got the mnemonic "EMACS"
treve 8 hours ago [-]
> Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh and NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a web browser.
Thank you! The blog post really should hyperlink or define "Infinite Mac" so it stands on its own.
mattl 3 hours ago [-]
The first link in the post links to the infinite MAC website which explains itself.
aardvark179 1 hours ago [-]
And without knowing that in advance I’d have assumed that link would have been to a commit or PR.
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…”
davewongillies 3 hours ago [-]
There's no need to yell when saying Mac
thomassmith65 6 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine what it would feel like to be a 20 year old tech enthusiast today confronted with OS X 10.4 (or .5 or .6)
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!"
karel-3d 5 minutes ago [-]
10.4 looks and behaves basically the same as ... whatever is the latest macOS version. (I stopped caring about macOS versions few years ago) even with Liquid Glass it still behaves similarly.
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!
jabwd 1 hours ago [-]
Started out as a developer in the 10.4/10.5 days. Mostly coz I was messing around with trying to get stuff to run in a semi-darkmode :) and theming things. Messing about in the system folder wasn't as complicated back then
AnnikaL 5 hours ago [-]
I'm 20, and I vaguely remember using 10.5 or 10.6 when I was a young child, so nostalgia I guess?
thomassmith65 5 hours ago [-]
I had nostalgia for the original Macintosh GUI, whose look was similar to 'flat design'.
I love things like this. Aqua was such a revelation at the time.
mingus88 8 hours ago [-]
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.
A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well. Home run.
ylee 6 hours ago [-]
> Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.
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.
[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.
gmac 3 hours ago [-]
100% agree on the unreliability of older Mac OS. In the late 90s my university computer room offered a mix of Mac and Windows machines, and I only ever took a Mac if that was all that was free, because there was a good chance it would at some point show you a sad Mac face alongside a cutesy and uninformative crash message, while losing the essay you’d half-written (or, hopefully, only the unsaved changes).
prmoustache 2 hours ago [-]
And I never understood that as it wasn't remotely good looking with what I would call "unnecessary scan lines" in the windows background and those pills like button only made me think of being in an hospital.
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.
cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago [-]
There were plenty of Kaleidoscope schemes and Appearance Manager themes for those with Macs who liked Aqua but either couldn’t or didn’t want to upgrade to OS X yet. There were some interesting “remixes” of Aqua too, including one that gave it BeOS-like tab titlebars!
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.
kalleboo 7 hours ago [-]
The classic Mac OS (Toolbox) menu routine took over exclusive use of the machine when it was tracking the mouse in the menu - all multitasking stopped running.
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.
classichasclass 4 hours ago [-]
There were extensions that got around this, though. iTunes for the classic Mac OS (and I'm pretty sure SoundJam before it) could continue to play music with a menu open, for example.
kalleboo 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah you could do things like set timer interrupts, and starting in somewhere like MacOS 8.6 there was an actual multitasking (and multi-CPU) nanokernel running beneath everything that allowed you to schedule tasks in a more modern way.
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.
mattl 3 hours ago [-]
This is my new favorite comment.
“ 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.
irusensei 2 hours ago [-]
IMO this is the part that hits harder:
> A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well.
bigyabai 7 hours ago [-]
Liquid Glass feels like a reprisal of all the visual garishness of Aqua with none of the usability lessons. Aqua was good because it could be learned quickly, it made a lot of sense to copy back then.
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.
cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago [-]
Personally I found System 7.6/Mac OS 8’s Platinum to be a step up in usability compared to System 7 and before. The light mid-gray it used in most of its UI was pleasant and easier on the eyes than the stark white that made up the majority of the original Mac UI, but it was still plenty legible.
duskwuff 7 hours ago [-]
The System 7.0 UI appearance - before Platinum - was a mess. It was little more than a partially colorized version of the monochrome System 6 user interface; in fact, it mostly fell back to the System 6 appearance on machines with monochrome displays, like the (brand-new in 1991!) PowerBook series.
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.)
rafram 7 hours ago [-]
> arguably continuing since System 7
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.
bigyabai 7 hours ago [-]
Along the same line of logic we could argue that Windows became more usable since XP because more computers have it installed. Computer demand is an extenuating factor that doesn't really reflect the quality of UX design.
jonhohle 6 hours ago [-]
Aqua is still a revelation. We've taken a huge step back in being able to just identify window controls. My hope is that some of that comes back with Liquid Glass, but honestly, Aqua still looks great.
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.
forgotoldacc 5 hours ago [-]
Mac OS design at the time was so good that I switched from Windows to Mac and never went back. Been over 20 years now.
Now I find myself frustrated with Mac OS quite often, but the competition is so bad that I'm just kind of stuck.
alsetmusic 7 hours ago [-]
> So this is the architecture, except there’s one more thing. The one more thing is, we have been secretly for the last 18 months designing a completely new user interface. And that new user interface builds on Apple’s legacy and carries it into the next century. And we call that new user interface Aqua, because it’s liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.
Steve Jobs
ChrisMarshallNY 8 hours ago [-]
> Aqua was such a revelation at the time.
Liquid Glass seems to hearken back to that era...
smallmancontrov 8 hours ago [-]
I am so glad that we seem to be starting to crawl out of the minimalist local minimum.
ChrisMarshallNY 8 hours ago [-]
The one thing that I remember about Aqua, was what it did to performance.
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.
classichasclass 7 hours ago [-]
That sounds like Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server (which would have been Platinum). And it is, indeed, quite snappy. I have it on a Wallstreet G3 and it runs very well.
mrkpdl 7 hours ago [-]
The aqua interface first shipped in Mac OS X Developer Preview 3. So they could be referring to DP2 which had a platinum like interface but was released after Apple had moved on from the rhapsody concept.
ChrisMarshallNY 12 minutes ago [-]
That sounds about right.
It was a while ago, so my memory is fuzzy.
wmf 7 hours ago [-]
The slowdown was probably the switch from Display PostScript to Quartz.
TekMol 3 hours ago [-]
The screenshots... wow!
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?
Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
floppyd 34 minutes ago [-]
I feel like I'm becoming a fan of old gray interfaces (win 95, macos 9). They feel like tools to me, like a calculator is just a tool, and it's comforting.
speedgoose 3 hours ago [-]
My favourite one is 10.3 Panther with the mix of aqua and brushed metal. 10.4 Tiger is similar but it has a glossy top menu bar that didn’t age well in my opinion. 10.5 Leopard has the fancy cheesy 3D dock, transparent top menu bar, and the more modern gradients. It looked great at the time but gradients aren’t as cool as brushed metal and aqua.
Everything after is a bit boring.
nabhasablue 2 hours ago [-]
yes, i wish we could choose themes from the past to use in modern macs
mattl 3 hours ago [-]
Yep. My friend texted me during the keynote with “I don’t want liquid glass. I want brushed metal.”
lavelett36 2 hours ago [-]
I went through several sections of the article and I am still none the wiser about what this project is. Is it a software emulator? If so, on which platforms does it run? How do I download it? Or is it a hardware device? The article jumps right into the middle of things and bombards the reader with jargon without explaining anything for the HN user like me, who just stumbled upon the link on the home page and is trying to understand the project.
marmarama 1 hours ago [-]
It's a website that has compiled existing open source emulators that are capable of running old versions of MacOS and NeXTStep, to WebAssembly so they run inside a modern browser.
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.
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
> It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware
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.
wk_end 4 hours ago [-]
Those early OS X years were a real golden age for the Mac - the hardware was quite competitive with x86, and the OS was as good as it's ever been. Eventually the wheels started coming off both.
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.)
thfuran 4 hours ago [-]
>Mac OS will be amazing again.
I don't think it's even heading in that direction.
LtWorf 3 hours ago [-]
I had one of the early x86 models.
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.
wk_end 3 hours ago [-]
I'm talking about pre-x86. I don't recall any kernel panics or segfaults when I used a G4 Power Mac back in the day; it was certainly more stable than the Windows 98 PC I was coming from.
prmoustache 2 hours ago [-]
Windows 2000 and then XP were already a thing at the time and much more stable than win 98.
Bjartr 7 hours ago [-]
I think this is one of the things that makes systemd popular. A consequence of it being such a baseline of cross-cutting functionality is it necessarily goes against the classic unix philosophy.
wmf 7 hours ago [-]
Wrong thread.
smallmancontrov 6 hours ago [-]
launchd, which inspired systemd, was an artifact of Mac OS X in this era. But yes, the post is probably just in the wrong thread.
LtWorf 3 hours ago [-]
I think upstart inspired systemd :) And cgroups support in the linux kernel. Does osx have a comparable thing to cgroups?
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.
https://www.wired.com/2004/07/pearpc-coauthor/
[0] https://www.macwelt.de/article/931666/pear-pc-entwickler-toe...
https://github.com/kwhr0/macemu/blob/master/SheepShaver/src/...
You see that kind of succinctness in 6502 emulators, not usually relatively modern architectures.
https://infinitemac.org/
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…”
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!
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...
A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well. Home run.
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.
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.
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.
“ 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.
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.
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.
Steve Jobs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.