macos circa 1984

I had fuzzy warm flashbacks looking at these screen shots of the original MacOS 1.1 the other day. I had a “fat mac” back in high school — a 512K mac stuffed with another 512K for a whopping 1Meg of RAM — and then a MacPlus at school and later on. I wrote about it a couple times way back when.

I’ve considered on and off over the years buying back my MacPlus from ebay (well, not MINE, you know). And then I’ve realized that my heart rate monitor has more computing power than the mac plus has. Plus old macs tended to have screen and logic board issues. Plus I have no clue how to get software onto the machine. I think it only read 800K floppies and current macs won’t read or write anything smaller than 1.4M (a fact I only discovered recently — I actually still had old stuff STORED on 800K floppies darnit.) Maybe it has ethernet? I think it had ethernet. Actually I might still have my old appletalk cables around here somewhere. Do new macs do appletalk? Uhhhhhhh. (boggle)

This just now got me thinking about emulation, which let me googling to Basilisk II{.broken_link}, the official open source 68K Macintosh Emulation home page. Well, hey. I can have a 1.2Ghz G4 Mac Plus. Cool. Alas, you need access to Mac ROMs to run it, so I’ll STILL have to buy the darn box from ebay.

In my COPIOUS SPARE TIME I’ll have to play around with that.