admin October 18, 2021 4 min read
The Internet Archive's emulated Early Mac collection, which was announced last week, has had all its content screenshotted by hand for maximum visual beauty and accuracy.
Normally, we utilize a set of automated scripts that do screenshotting, allowing for a large amount of uploads to be visually described, but the combination of many different permutations of where to click and which folders to open meant we weren't getting the best shots for each item. Now, they're doing justice to the unique and interesting early Mac experience.
Like many other cases in computer history, the seeming limitations of black-and-white-only screens on early Macintoshes gave rise to truly beautiful and complicated art, which expressed itself crisply on the 9-inch monitors.
Response to the early Macintosh collection has been resoundingly positive; thanks again to all the volunteers who helped the system work as well as it does. With 60+ titles added and more to come, this is likely to be one of our most memorable and stellar playable software collections on the Archive.
But one more thing….
Throughout the testing process and discussions about emulating Macintosh, a steady drumbeat of requests could be summarized as: "What about HyperCard?"
HyperCard, a hypertext authoring system for the Macintosh, is a legendary environment for creating "Stacks", which were clickable cards with a wide range of options and features. It is absolutely the inspiration for what ultimately became the World Wide Web.
It was possible to write truly complicated and complete applications in HyperCard, and stacks allowing everything from reference books to games to music – whatever the authors of stacks could come with. It was particularly popular with academics and writers. A great retrospective of HyperCard at its 25th anniversary was written by Ars Technica.
So.. what about HyperCard? Yes, we have HyperCard.
The Emularity Loader utilized by the Internet Archive allows the combining of the content of two items in the Archive's collections, meaning there can be a "general boot disk" with HyperCard, and then pulling in an uploaded Hypercard Stack.
As of this writing, we've added a small number of Stacks to prove the technology, including the "BeerStack" beer-reference, the Adventures of Sean (an interactive cartoon), and a re-created Stack designed by none other than Douglas Adams for calculating the volume of a Megapode nest.
Adding new stacks is relatively complicated, and we're working on adding more from such sites as HYPERCARD.ORG who have been gathering amazing Stacks for years. If you're someone who worked on a HyperCard stack in the past, or oversee a collection of Stacks created by others, please feel free to contact hypercard@textfiles.com to receive assistance in adding your stacks, emulated, to the Archive.
We hope this is the start of a large, quality collection of emulated programs at the Archive around the Macintosh, and thank you for spreading the word about it, and the importance of providing instant worldwide access to historical software.
A shout-out to volunteer Stephen Cole who has taken on the mantle of adding new titles to the Macintosh collection over time, including the ingestion of HyperCard stacks.
Posted in News, Software Archive |
Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive
Posted on April 16, 2017 by Jason Scott
After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984.
While there are certainly predecessors to the computer desktop paradigm, the introduction of the Macintosh brought it to a mass market and in the 30 years since, it has been steadily adapted by every major computing platform and operating system.
The first set of emulated Macintosh software is located in this collection. This is a curated presentation of applications, games, and operating systems from 1984-1989.
If you've not experienced the original operating system for the Macintosh family of computers, it's an interesting combination of well-worn conventions in the modern world, along with choices that might seem strange or off-the-mark. At the time the machine was released, however, they landed new ideas in the hands of a worldwide audience and gained significant fans and followers almost immediately.
The story of the creation of the operating system and the Macintosh itself are covered in many collections at the Archive, including this complete run of Macworld magazine and these deep-dive Macintosh books.
As for the programs currently presented, they are in many cases applications that have survived to the present day in various forms, or are the direct ancestors.
While it is a (warning) 40 megabyte download, this compilation of System 7.0.1 includes a large variety of software programs and a rather rich recreation of the MacOS experience of 1991.
Enjoy this (9-inch, black and white) window into computer history!
Many people worked very hard to bring this emulation system to bear: Hampa Hug created PCE (the original Macintosh emulator program). Experiments and work by James Friend (PCE.js) and Marcio T. (Retroweb) ported PCE to javascript via Emscripten. They all provided continued assistance as the Emularity team approached refining the emulator to work within the Archive's framework. Much work was done by Daniel Brooks, Phil-el, James Baicoianu, and Vitorio Miliano, with Daniel Brooks putting in multiple weeks of refinement.
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