The tech and the sites aren’t new (and they’ll probably crash shortly) but it’s great to see these old OSes living again on the Internet and, more important, you can also play PCjr Adventure while you watch our Disrupt coverage. The PCjr implementation was built by Jeff Par using similar technologies. It used to be a commercial product, but it is now a free download. SoftMac is a windows-only emulator of 68xxx based Macintoshes. Good for earlier Mac games that were in color. To this end, I wanted to make important early personal computer systems available to a newer generation of creators as working, interactive demos, so that they might have a chance to learn from the past. Basilisk II is a Windows/Linux/OSX emulator that works as a virtual 68k Mac, and it runs runs Mac OS from 7.x to 8.1. I was particularly inspired by Bret Victor’s talk at the DBX conference, where he demonstrated a bunch of technologies from the 1970s which attempted to solve problems which we’re still wrestling with today, and effectively asked the question ‘Why haven’t we figured this stuff out yet?’, and more implicitly, ‘Why are people who are working on these problems today unaware of this earlier work? Why have we gone backwards?’. In other words: not making the same mistakes again-and-again due to a lack of historical perspective. So, why port emulators of outdated computers to the browser? Well, to start with, I feel very strongly about the importance of learning from the past.

Mac system 7 emulator windows