Emulating Mac OS X 10.0
In honor of the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0, I wanted to boot it up in an emulator. I became a Mac user much after 10.0 launched, so I never experienced the first release for myself.
After some trial and error, I got it running in QEMU. Here’s a few screenshots of what the system looked like then. It’s interesting to see what’s the same and what has changed…
What’s amusing here is I’m running this on a M1 Mac. At this point, OS X only supports PowerPC, so I need QEMU to emulate that. QEMU does have a native Apple Silicon build, but I found PPC emulation to be buggy (basically crashes at launch). So, I had to use the x86 compiled QEMU. What I ended up with is QEMU emulating PowerPC in x86, and Rosetta 2 translating x86 to Apple Silicon’s ARM variant. So many layers, it is incredible that it works at all, yet alone with reasonable performance.
Even from the first release, Mac OS X had the terminal and it’s UNIX core under the hood. Java on OS X was, uh, a thing at the time.
vi included out of the box!
If you want to try this for yourself, here’s some links I found useful:
