I loved Cyberdog back in the day, the seemless integration of browser, email, ftp, fidonet, etc. If this kind of thing appeals to you, don’t miss checking out other nostalgic computing stuff in our retro archives. The developer of Macintosh.js also built the popular Windows95.js app, which bundles Windows 95 as a self-contained application in a similar manner and is also a fun digital toy to play around with if you want to recreate the old beige box PC feeling.īy the way, if you don’t feel like downloading or installing an application onto your Mac, you can also run classic Mac OS releases in a web browser too. Perhaps the only disappointment is that internet connectivity doesn’t work with Macintosh.js, not that using Netscape Navigator, Archie, or Mosaic would be wonderful experiences, but it’d certainly help to complete the retro experience.

Don’t forget you can download old classic Macintosh software from a variety of repositories if that appeals to you. You can even transfer your own apps and files between Macintosh.js with Mac OS 8 and your modern Mac (or PC), so if you want to stuff ResEdit or some other old school app or game on their you are free to do so. System startup is identical and fairly speedy, and most apps launch impressively fast in the emulator, many even faster than their modern app equivalents (which are now obviously much more sophisticated, but that’s still kind of amusing).Īnd a classic computing experience wouldn’t be complete without frequent system crashes and reboots, and you can experience those in Macintosh.js too! Remember the “Sorry, a system error occurred” bomb alerts and CHK errors? Play around enough and you’ll run into those again too. And if you didn’t, well it’s a pretty simple and intuitive point-and-click user interface. The Macintosh.js experience should feel immediately familiar to anyone who used the classic Mac OS releases of the pre-Mac OS X era.

Unzip the downloaded archive and launch “macintosh.js.app” to get started.

Get Macintosh.js from the developers GitHub page here.

Macintosh.js is a self-contained Electron app that bundles a classic Mac OS emulator preinstalled with Mac OS 8.1 along with a handful of classic applications from that era, including Adobe Photoshop 3.0.5, Adobe Illustrator 5.5, demos for Duke Nukem and Civilization 2, Oregon Trail, and more.

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