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Desktops (Apple) OS X

Fresh Tools That Keep Vintage Macs Online and Weirdly Alive (theregister.com) 43

Posted by BeauHD from the good-ol'-days dept.
With macOS now 24 years old and Apple officially designating all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," The Register takes a look at new internet tools that help keep vintage Macs online and surprisingly relevant: Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally. His retro computing interests are broad, and we've mentioned him a few times on The Register, such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer, and his evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance. Back in 2020, he revived the native Classic Mac OS port of the Lynx web browser, MacLynx. Earlier this month, he came back to it and has updated it again, including adding native Mac OS dialog boxes. His account is -- as usual -- long and detailed but it's an interesting read. He also maintains some other web browsers for elderly Macs, including TenFourFox for Mac OS X 10.4 and Classilla for Mac OS 8.6 and 9.x.

If you're not up to git pull commands and elderly Mac OS X build tools, then there is a fork of TenFourFox that may be worth a look, InterWebPPC. It's not current with the new batch of patches, but we can still hope for another build. In other "Classic on the internet" news, although it's not a huge amount of use on its own, there's also a newly released Classic Mac OS version of Mbed-TLS on GitHub. This ports the SSL library -- also used in the super-lightweight Dillo browser -- to the older C89/C90 standard, so that it can build in CodeWarrior and run with OpenTransport from Mac OS 9 right back to later versions of Mac OS 7.

Modern macOS is UNIX certified and as such it's not all that dissimilar from other Unix-like OSes, such as Linux and the BSD family. Classic Mac OS is a profoundly different beast, which makes porting modern code to it a complex exercise -- but equally, it's a good learning exercise, and we're delighted to see 21st century programmers exploring this 1980s OS. That may be part of the motivation behind the newly announced and still incomplete SDL 2 "rough draft" that appeared a week ago. It builds on the existing SDL 1.2 port, but so far, it's less complete -- for instance, there's no sound support.

Fresh Tools That Keep Vintage Macs Online and Weirdly Alive More | Reply

Fresh Tools That Keep Vintage Macs Online and Weirdly Alive

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  • Bad idea to have an unpatched OS connected to the internet

    • Not really. People that are using these machines ("on the internet") are doing so as a novelty or hobbyist thing, and are aware of the risks and can mitigate them appropriately.

    • Re: Bad idea (Score:3, Funny)

      by uem-Tux ( 682053 )
      yeah I'm sure every nation-state employed hacker is hard at work producing fresh zero days for *checks notes* modern libs being backported to classic macos by a handful of devs for an even smaller handful of users. Just a reeeeaaaal juicy target there.

    • My Macs are not connected to the internet.
      They are connected to a router.

      The router routes into the internet.

      So? How would you like to try to attack my Macs? Good luck.

      • By exploiting your browser, for example.

        • Sure.

          By exploiting my browser.

          Lolz.

          How should that work?

          My browser only goes to web sites I point it at. Facepalm.

          Also this whole article is about: browsers for old OSes ... which get back ported. So, the browser is most certainly the least of any concerns.

          • You mean, these browsers are backports of more modern browsers that get security patches all the time? And you think the backported browsers are as secure as Fort Knox? Considering that the actual backporting happens at most once or twice an year?

            An old OS is not magically vulnerable... it's exploitable by its old applications, and the browser is merely one of these, plus it's one of the most used.

            • P.S. And I suppose you know exactly what advertising sites (plus some malicious ones) your browser will visit while it's visiting your selected set of web pages? C'mon. Today's Internet doesn't work like that.

            • He thinks C++ is memory safe. That should give you a good idea about how he thinks about security. Oh, and he thinks linkedlists are always preferable to deques because that's how java does it.

      • God you're so bad at technology. And you say you've been developing software for 30 years, but I guess we've already established that you don't even do that right...

        Do you even know what 'internet' means? It means internetwork. That means networks talking to networks. Your router routes packets to other routers, which then route packets to other routers, so on and so forth until they reach their destination. You're expecting NAT to protect you, but you probably have no idea what that even means.

        • Yes, you explained the internet.
          Nice :D Actually you did not, but it was close enough ...

          Yes, NAT protects me.

          Because you can not reach any device behind my NAT.

          Boing ...

          P.S. my IP address is 192.168.1.99 .... good luck.
          Oh, my mistake, that is my phone. My computer which I am using at the moment is: 192.168.1.5.

          You could reach me if you knew my IP6 address, but guess what: the router is cutting IP6 and converts it to IP4 behind "the internet"

          No idea why you are so fucking dumb that everything is an argument

  • And I am still not impressed.

  • Everything was better back in the (Score:3)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Friday April 18, 2025 @09:01PM (#65316163)
    Good old days, right? Especially Apple. So my graphic arts buddies told me. There is surely a market for a nostalgic era of computing.

    I do that myself. I have various virtual machines from over the years and my entire toolchain, databases, and server environments are frozen in time, all versions work together properly. The virtual machines from 2009 run very much faster today than they ever did on the original hardware !

  • Cameron and Floodgap (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mean Variance ( 913229 ) <mean.variance@gmail.com> on Friday April 18, 2025 @09:42PM (#65316213)

    Back when Twitter was a good thing with a robust API, he wrote TTYtter, a command line Twitter. It was the bomb for early addicts. I'd keep an active feed going in a terminal screen. He wrote the damn thing in Perl and I would try to grok the code the best I could. I miss the days of open APIs working with established commercial products.

  • No mention of one of the most useful projects of them all for keeping older Macs online – OpenCore Legacy Patcher.
    https://dortania.github.io/Ope... [github.io]

    OCLP lets you install newer versions of macOS (possibly versions that are still receiving security updates from Apple and can run current versions of apps like browsers) on older Macs that Apple have officially dropped support for.

    It won't let you, for example, run arm64 code on an x86_64 machine or anything crazy like that, but it will let you run much newer versions of the operating system than Apple will let you run on older hardware.

    • Last I saw, it also doesn't work with "newer" Intel machines. Anything with the T2 chip isn't upgradable.

      • Yes, this will become more and more of an issue as time goes on. At present there are only two Macs with a T2 chip that are not supported by macOS Sequoia – the 2018 MacBook Air and the 2019 MacBook Air.

        It's weird however that this issue doesn't seem to affect all Macs with T2 security chips, so hopefully there will be a workaround by the time more Macs drop off Apple's supported list:
        https://github.com/dortania/Op... [github.com]

  • OpenBSD / Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I imagine a lot of these Macs will be kept alive with Linux or OpenBSD.

    T2 support is very good on more recent machines and OpenBSD runs fine on the older hardware.

    I don't think there was ever a method to run in full 5k for the iMac / iMac Pro but any other Intel/Apple device is probably going to be a fantastic (screen, build quality) and cheap Linux machine.

  • Tuned (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    iTunes isn't a vintage tool. Yes it's old as fuck, but you still need it to connect devices to Macs. In 2025. Still. In 2025 you still need this. Every other device just connects automatically. But not Apple crap.

  • Mac OS 8 was released in 1997, 28 years ago.

    • You could even take it back further, if you want to consider the "System 7" and earlier as Mac OS, before they started branding it "Mac OS."

      Part of the summary wants to do this, referring to "Mac OS 7" and "this 1980s OS" (as well as "Mac OS X 10.4"). But the part where they calculate the age, does not consider any of those versions as being "Mac OS".

    • I'm assuming you're just being nitpicky, but it's apparent they are talking about what is now called macOS, previously OS X and Mac OS X, as distinct from classic Mac OS. And if we're being that nitpicky, it's the only one that's ever been stylized macOS as TFS says. :)

    • They also say âoe80â(TM)s computersâ but even Mac OS 7 came out in 1991⦠maybe they ment 34 years? Just nitpicking lol
  • people keep really old computers alive. As far as hobbies go, a person could do worse.

    But they're not really useful anymore. It's a bit like playing with model trains at this point. The M processors really were a massive leap forward, and we're pushing the 5th generation of that series. The intel macs are good as museum pieces and for social-media-retro-tech types to perform with.

    • But they're not really useful anymore. It's a bit like playing with model trains at this point. The M processors really were a massive leap forward,

      Not useful? I guess this is a mac thing?

      Let me rewind back to the begining. Hi! I'm currently typing this message on a Thinkpad W510. I bought it when it was newly released as a workstation laptop, so that would put it into its 16th year. 16! Old enough to get served at the dodgy pub in town on a good day. Is it useful? I mean... I'm still using it.

      And not in a

      • I suspect that, on average, it is a thing that skews mac without strictly being linked to it.

        Apple tends to distribute its build quality and production values a bit more evenly across its models(bad things have definitely happened; but it's not like there's a designated 'cheap plastic shit' line that exists to offer 'starting at just $399.99!' at all costs; and when the bad things do happen they are often as not a design or component problem that takes out one of the expensive ones; rather than it being

        • In fairness though the machine did come with Ubuntu 12.04, guaranteed Linux compatibility being a very big plus. Of course it didn't stay on that for long since 14.04 was months away. I think I skipped over to 18, and mayyyybe 22, then to mint after I got fed up of snaps.

          Of course there's little need to tinker: if it has guaranteed Linux compatibility in 2014, it very likely works today and while the original OS version is long out of support, the latest ones are fine. I've not found any compatibility probl

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MacMann ( 7518492 )

      But they're not really useful anymore.

      They still do all the same things people saw them useful for so many years ago.

      I think of what I did with my Mac 24 years ago and if that is all I had today then I'd find in useful. I believe at the time I had a PowerBook G4. I still have it on a shelf in my basement somewhere because I'm something of a packrat and retro-computing enthusiast, though I haven't powered it up in years. I recall I wrote a lot of papers in word processors, something still kind of useful today but that is something not needed

    • "But they're not really useful anymore."

      The 2012 Mac mini serves very well as a music player, web browser for lookup, and PDF reader in the shop. It runs the current version of Linux Mint MATE.

      My file server is a 2014 mini with 1.5 TB of storage connected to an 2 TB external drive. It's running the current Linux Mint Cinnamon.

      Not everyone needs to create 4K videos. The biggest problem with keeping Apple hardware on line is their habit of abandoning the OS version for security updates. One year it's the curr

  • Um, Linux? (Score:3)

    by Whatsmynickname ( 557867 ) on Saturday April 19, 2025 @12:16AM (#65316355)
    I have a 2011 MacBook Pro (MBP) whose operating system abandoned it a while ago. Installed Ubuntu Linux on my MBP and still use it today! I was particularly impressed that my Wacom Intuos 2 tablet works 100% (including tip pressure and tilt) on Ubuntu, as Wacom abandoned this tablet with lack of Windows 11 driver support a while ago! No extra drivers nothing, just plugged in the tablet and it worked.
    • Yeah, I have a 2012 iMac, Intel, and it works fine, still acceptably speedy - except the OS topped out a few revs back. So I installed Ubuntu on it, and it's now my host machine for Nvidia Jetson work. Short of hardware failure, I imagine it will stay like this for some time.

  • I tried to reuse a 15" PowerBook G4 (PowerPC hardware) with 1 Ghz and 512 MB of RAM. I was able to install Linux, but could never get its wifi to work. :(

    • I feel that. As I recall around that time there were so many WiFi chips on the market that nobody was keeping up on the drivers. Updating Windows could easily land someone with a no longer working WiFi because nobody wanted to bother writing new drivers for a chip with so few produced. Adding an older WiFi device often worked. Adding a new one would also. But if you have a laptop and you don't want a USB WiFi device hanging on to catch on something while being moved in and out of a bag to carry it then

  • > deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer,

    It's two pages long *with* ads and contains practically no real information. If this was a wiki article it would be marked stub.

  • Aren't they the guys that are keeping Gopher current and alive? They surely love their vintage stuff.

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