Infinite Mac OS X
32 comments
·June 20, 2025WoodenChair
One of the most intriguing items in the article is a link to a PPC CPU emulator in less than 700 lines of code:
https://github.com/kwhr0/macemu/blob/master/SheepShaver/src/...
You see that kind of succinctness in 6502 emulators, not usually relatively modern architectures.
userbinator
It's a RISC, so that's not too surprising. MIPS emulators are also roughly that size.
treve
> Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh and NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a web browser.
nickm12
Thank you! The blog post really should hyperlink or define "Infinite Mac" so it stands on its own.
thomassmith65
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!"
AnnikaL
I'm 20, and I vaguely remember using 10.5 or 10.6 when I was a young child, so nostalgia I guess?
thomassmith65
I had nostalgia for the original Macintosh GUI, whose look was similar to 'flat design'.
null
kristianp
Surprising that he had success with a project (pearpc) that had its last commit 10+ years ago: https://github.com/sebastianbiallas/pearpc
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...
plun9
I love things like this. Aqua was such a revelation at the time.
mingus88
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
> 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.
(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.
cosmic_cheese
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
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.
bigyabai
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
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.
rafram
> 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.
alsetmusic
> 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
jonhohle
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
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.
ChrisMarshallNY
> Aqua was such a revelation at the time.
Liquid Glass seems to hearken back to that era...
smallmancontrov
I am so glad that we seem to be starting to crawl out of the minimalist local minimum.
ChrisMarshallNY
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.
Bjartr
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
Wrong thread.
smallmancontrov
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.
> [PearPC] did this successfully for a few years, until interest waned after the Intel switch
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/