Emulating Mac OS X Developer Preview

After getting the first consumer release of Mac OS X 10.0 running in an emulator, I was curious if I could get one of the earlier, pre-Aqua UI, builds running.

From my own trials and what I could find online, it seems the first Developer Preview can’t boot on QEMU, but people reported success with DP2 and newer…

Success! DP2 works in QEMU.

It’s easy to see right off the bat how this operating system is a bunch of different technologies duct taped together…

It’s very surreal to see Mac OS X without a dock and a UI that’s really NeXTSTEP with a Mac OS 8 like coat of paint on it. As John Siracusa says in his article on DP2, “Actually using DP2 is akin to logging into a demented Xterm running a poorly designed window manager theme meant to look something like Mac OS.”

The “File Viewer” is especially rough. I’m not sure if it was an issue with the install on my emulator or if this was how it behaved on real hardware at the time, but I had a hard time even browsing to and launch applications. Instead, I was happy to find that I could use the ‘open’ terminal command I’m familiar with from modern releases of Mac OS X to launch applications and open the “File Viewer” in a particular folder.

I’m curious if Mac developers were actually productive in this environment considering how limited everything was. I suspect it involved heavy use of the embedded Classic Mac environment to get anything done.

Nerdy note: here I’m running a virtualized Mac OS 9 in a virtualized on Mac OS X which is itself running in an virtual G3 PowerPC computer in an emulator that’s compiled for x86 which is being translated on the fly via Rosetta 2 to my MacBook’s native M1 Apple Silicon instructions. Whew. Can’t believe it works.