Every Major Mac OS from 1984 to 2000... in a browser!

today's absolutely impossible Macintosh Time Warp is brought to you by Squarespace but more on that in a bit hey look I've installed the original 1984 Macintosh OS on this M1 MacBook Pro no actually it's an old ThinkPad x230 running Mac OS 3.3 wait it's actually Mac OS 8.5 on the MacBook Pro no no no I haven't actually installed anything on these and instead I'm using a bit of web-based magic called the infinite MacIntosh and it might just be the easiest fastest and friendliest way to have the classic Mac experience without having to set up or configure anything so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoyed the thought of harnessing the vast power of modern bloated web Technologies and using them to emulate computers from a simpler time I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel I'm going to VCF East this week with a big display with my friend Steve from Mac 84 and Mike from Mike Smack Shack so I have all the computers that I'm bringing apart in various States of uh oh God please work and they're all over the place so what better time to procrastinate getting them all ready and instead play around with the coolest bit of webtech released this side of the year 2000 the infinite Macintosh hold on let me get all this stuff out of here and I think this is actually a really important topic that I'm sure some of you will find very helpful I often get asked things like what vintage Mac a first time hobbyist should get or how do you set up emulators like mini vmac because let's be honest sometimes they're more than a bit finicky to get going even with some of the amazing starter packs that you can find on sites like the Macintosh Garden so enter the infinite Mac the infinite Mac is basically an interactive Museum of every major classic Mac OS release from 1.0 back in 1984 all the way up to 9.04 in 2000 and these aren't just screenshots or simulations these are real versions of the operating systems running in an emulator in the browser powered by the literal magic that is modern web assembly the infinite Mac uses webassembly ports of mini vmac basilisk 2 and sheep shaver and it's built by mihai parparita and you might recognize that name having been behind several similar web-based emulators that went a bit viral but now in a master stroke everything is together in one place with an interactive exhibit of 35 different versions of the classic Mac OS and you could just run them all right in your browser with no setup no configuration just click and it's running and they're so fast that when you put them full screen they really feel like you're running them natively as if that wasn't cool enough there's way more built into this that uh make it really special and some really interesting things that you can do with the infinite Mac that you'd be hard-pressed to configure any normal emulator to do so we're going to start by taking a look at how I've been using this myself some of those really interesting features and some of my favorite versions of the Mac OS on here and then I want to do a super fast speed run through all 35 versions of the Mac OS on here so we can take a look at its Evolution over the years right after this word about today's sponsor Squarespace create a fast beautiful and Rich web experience for your business or brand using squarespace's powerful all-in-one platform it's really easy to get started like say I wanted to build a website detailing all the changes over the years to the Macintosh OS not only could I build it in minutes with Squarespace but I could do it without writing a single line of code there's a ton of beautiful templates that I could choose to start from and from there it's simple to build a great looking site that's also fast responsive and works great on mobile devices with squarespace's extensive built-in tool set I can also optimize for SEO manage a mailing list check by analytics and much more all geared towards managing your entire web presence so check out squarespace.com actionretro today for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use code action retro to save 10 of your first purchase of a website or domain okay so forgive my mic placement in the shot here but I wanted to make sure you could hear me well even when I'm talking kind of directly at the screen here so I wanted to start off by showing you some of the really interesting features on infinite Mac and some of the things that frankly I was shocked that you could just do in almost all of these versions of the system so I'm going to start in Mac OS 8.5 because I found that this works the best for all the different things that I tried now you can customize these with what version of the Mac that you want so I'm going to choose Macintosh G3 incidentally one of the first Macs ever featured on this channel and you can also enable Apple talk but we'll talk more about that we'll talk more about that in a bit let's run this and I'm going to show you some of this really cool stuff first of all and it's barely visible which maybe that's a good thing for aesthetic reasons but there's a menu down here if you hover over the done button and you can do things like load file full screen and settings full screen being quite cool I mean that really looks like it's just running natively on here and the speed of it is incredible I mean it's like native speed but when you first load up most of these emulators they come up with the stickies open with some information about infinite Mac and Yeah March 28th 2023 is when the infinitemac.org domain actually went live with this whole library of different versions of the classic system and there's additional tips in here like adding files downloading stuff you can actually get files in and out of the emulator here so if you wanted to use the infinite Mac as your classic development environment you can write code on your local modern computer and then test it out in all of these different versions of the Mac OS in one place that's nuts but and I'll hide the stickies here the reason it's called the infinite Mac is because of the infinite HD which is a one gigabyte hard drive full of software games utilities all kinds of cool stuff but especially games that you can just start up and run like escape velocity here which is one of my favorite games of all time now look at that it just works but I'm not just going to sit here and bore you with me playing this game let me show you some of the other features of infinite Mac it's very easy to install new Mac software on here yourself and actually I found that Wolfenstein 3D works best on system 751 so all we do is just drag these disks over restart and check it out there's my installer and I just installed Wolfenstein 3D direct from disk images that I downloaded from the Macintosh garden and it doesn't have to be just floppy disk images either check this out Wolfenstein 3D has a toast image which is for toast the CD-ROM burning application I can drag that on there too restart and yeah there's the CD-ROM loaded on the desktop that blows my mind and Wolfenstein it plays great and just look at that we are playing Wolfenstein never said I was any good but there are even more tricks that well honestly blew my mind even more than just loading ISO files and disk images and playing installed software on here check this out load file you can upload files from your computer directly into the Mac and these files go into this neat looking Network folder called the outside world check that out I can upload images in any file really directly in here and just open it up with no fuss no conversion no having to You Know download it over the network or do some weird rigmarole just upload it directly here and then I can mess with it in classic Mac OS and then download it out of the emulator and back to my local machine oh but you think that's good there's more check this out on a lot of these versions of Mac OS there is an option under customize called enable Apple talk and then we can enter a Zone name and now down in the corner here we have ethernet Zone shenanigans and apple talk equals Shenanigans as a parameter in the URL if anyone else enters that same Apple talk parameter guess what they're connected to your instance from their instance as if the computers were networked locally with apple talk and that means you can do stuff like play multiplayer games in the browser in these emulators honestly that is the killer feature that is just incredible how easy it makes it for you to relive or experience for the first time all these old multiplayer games first person shooters like Unreal Tournament you can do it right through your browser and have that almost native Macintosh experience yeah check it out here I am Network together with two instances of infinite Mac one here in Firefox and then the other one here in Chrome Network together and just working out of the box with no fiddling around all I had to do was use that ethernet Zone Shenanigans for both of them and uh enable Apple talk on the systems in control panel now a really nice touch here is that each system version in this little Museum here has a blurb about what makes it special versus the previous version so stuff that was added or bug fixes really cool so let's do a nice Montage of each one of these systems booting up and the about box for each one to see just what the look and feel changes were like over the years starting of course with 1984's system one [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] so I think it's just so cool that we're able to do all that and do that quick run through of every major version of the classic Mac OS in the web browser literally booting those systems but as always if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more Shenanigans like this well come to VCF East and uh also I hope you'll subscribe to the channel thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to Alex Hoffman Camilla noseda Chris allegreta Chris Biggs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson Control Alt Reese Daniel Hubbard Frodo Jedi Gaspar Heller Greg from Rock K mods Harris Brody John Papas Justin Hemmings Justin Reed Lyle truid Michael mulhern Paul Spencer Ryan Scott Thompson Sue Tech Tom Woodfin and Unknown Soldier 41 who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these Shenanigans possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 35,626

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: _6qA5fvfioo

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023