The Macintosh Quadra 900 was released in 1991 along with the Operating System System 7. It was replaced five years later by Mac OS 8 in what would be a new generation of operating systems and machines at Apple. Happy Rieseberg has managed to make this version of Mac OS work on that computer and that you can also run it on Mac Os Catalina through an emulator. Thirty years later nostalgia is still very much alive.
Without playing with emulators, or playing with them. You choose. Mac OS 8 at your fingertips.
Macintosh Quadra 900 from 1991
Slack developer Felix Rieseberg has managed to make a new operating system that was not intended for a 900 Macintosh Quadra 1991 to work without any problem. All this has been done without using emulators, just running a standalone Javascript application.
Although it can also be operated in a virtual machine with Windows or Linux. This way you will be able to play with an operating system from thirty years ago on your new Mac. This is how the developer explains it:
The virtual machine is emulating a 900 Macintosh Quadra 1991 with a Motorola CPU, which Apple used before switching to IBM's PowerPC architecture in the late 1990s.
This machine should be able to run any program that works under Mac OS 8 environment. It also comes with several applications and games already installed to prove the facts.
Can be found various games and demos pre-installed, thanks to an old MacWorld demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons.
There are also various applications and pre-installed tests, including Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, StuffIt Expander, Apple's web page building kit, and more.
What we will not be able to do is surf the web. Keep in mind that we are talking about a computer that is 30 years old. Internet Explorer and Netscape are installed to be able to do some elemental raids, but not like we do now, far from it.
Although Javascript is not the developer's preferred environment, because as he says himself, he is using around the 100% CPU in its use. But hey, less is nothing.