Mac OS 9 for OS X/macOS
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Run classic Mac OS apps in OS X/macOS How to use it Customization What it contains Acknowledgments Support and contributions
An easy way to run 'classic' Mac OS applications under OS X/macOS
Under OS X or macOS, software written for the 'classic' Mac OS (i.e. versions 6 through 9) can only be run through software that emulates Macintosh hardware from 1980s and 1990s. The most advanced of these emulator programs is SheepShaver. SheepShaver is no longer supported by its original author, Gwenolé Beauchesne, but updates are available from an active support forum at E-Maculation.
This page provides a fully functional SheepShaver system that runs Mac OS 9.0.4 (US English version). Unlike other SheepShaver-based systems, it makes it relatively easy to exchange files between SheepShaver and OS X/macOS, and makes it easy to print from Mac OS applications to OS X/macOS printers, or to create PDF files on the OS X/macOS desktop. It requires OS X 10.10 Yosemite or later.
To install this system, download and expand Mac OS 9.zip. (The file is about 620MB in size; it contains a 1.5 GB hard disk image file.) You may copy the Mac OS 9 application to your Applications folder or run it from anywhere else.
Note:For a similar, experimental system that runs System 7.6.1 under the BasiliskII emulator, download System761.zip; the System761 application works in essentially the same way as the Mac OS 9 application described below. Note the special instructions for temporarily mounting disk images for installing or copying software in System761. (And if you insist on going back to System 7.5.5, download the similar System755.zip.) Open source webserver for mac high sierra.
If, when you start the application, you see a long error message that includes the string 'translocation', then you must move the application to some other folder (and, if you want, move it back) before you run it. This is the effect of a new macOS security feature. The easiest thing to do is copy the application to your Applications folder.
An older version, with a slightly different feature set suitable for single-user systems (or for installation in the home folder of different users, is available here.
For a similar system that runs Mac OS 9 under Windows, see another page.
How to use it
I assume that you know something about Mac OS and don't need any advice from me. A few points are worth mentioning.
You can hold down the Option key while launching the application in order to access an options menu. See below for some details.
The Mac OS 9 system includes a startup script named ~MacOS9BackgroundScript. This script is used for transferring files from the host OS X/macOS system to the desktop of Mac OS 9.
As in all SheepShaver-based systems, you may use the Unix folder for transferring files to and from Mac OS 9. However, this system has other methods.
To run your own applications in Mac OS 9 (or System761), you absolutely must copy the application to the Mac OS 9 (or System761) emulated disk itself (or some other disk mounted in Mac OS 9 or System761). Do not try to run your application from the 'Unix' folder. Your application will not run, and will produce an error message instead! Do not drag an application directly from the 'Unix' folder to the destkop: that does not copy the application to the Mac OS 9 (or System761) system disk.
To transfer a file from OS X/macOS to Mac OS 9, drop the file on to Mac OS 9 app. After a few seconds, the file should be copied to the Mac OS 9 desktop. The original file remains on your OS X/macOS host system.
To transfer a file to OS X/macOS from Mac OS 9, use the standard SheepShaver method of dropping the file into the Mac OS 9 Unix folder; a copy of the file will appear in your OS X/macOS Documents folder.
To print from Mac OS 9 to your default OS X/macOS printer, simple use the File/Print menu in your Mac OS 9 application, and print with the default desktop printer, 'Print to OSX/macOS.' After a pause, the document should print to your default OS X/macOS printer.
To print from Mac OS 9 and select a Windows printer for the current print job, follow the instructions immediately above, but choose the desktop printer named 'Select OS X/macOS Printer.' After a pause, a popup list of OS X/macOS printers should appear; choose the one you want.
To create a PDF file in OS X/macOS when printing from Mac OS 9, follow the printing instructions above, but choose the desktop printer named 'PDF to OSX/macOS Desktop.' The resulting PDF file on the OS X/macOS desktop will have an arbitrary name based on the current date and time.
Screen and other options are as follows:
To toggle between windowed and full-screen mode, press Ctrl-Option-Enter. The custom build of SheepShaver used in this application uses this key-combination instead of the standard SheepShaver toggle key (Ctrl-Enter).
To use full-screen mode by default, hold down the Option key when launching Mac OS 9, and set the screen size option to full-screen. When SheepShaver starts up, use the Monitors control panel to set the screen resolution to the resolution that matches your OS X/macOS screen.
Multi-user systems:This application works in a multi-user system if installed in the Applications folder of the Mac's hard disk. If you want to enable the multiple-user features in OS 9, use the Extensions Manager control panel, and switch the extensions set to the one with 'multiple users' in its name and restart. You may then set up the OS 9 system for multiple users in the same way you did with a real Mac.
Starting with the version posted 10 August 2017, this application includes an additional feature that allows each user in an OS X/macOS multi-user system to create a second disk image that will be accessible in Mac OS 9 only to that user. Hold down the Option key when launching the application to access this and other options.
Customization
This system uses a special build of SheepShaver that does not use the Preferences pane. Instead, hold down the Option key when starting the app, and use the menus. Most of the menu items are self-explanatory.
To change the window size, hold down the Option key when starting the app, and choose the option to change the screen size. When SheepShaver opens, you will probably need to use the Monitors control panel to select the size that you want (especially if you select the full-screen option).
To add or replace a disk image with the Mac OS 9 system, shut down the Mac OS 9 app and drop a disk image file on its icon. After dropping a disk image file you will be prompted to perform the next steps.
Note: This method should work smoothly with disk image files that have the file extension .dmg, .dsk, .iso, or .toast. If your file has the extension .cdr or .hfv or .img, the app will ask whether you want to mount the disk in the system (as you probably do) or copy it to the Mac OS 9 desktop. If your disk image has some other extension, change it to .dsk and use the Finder's Get Info (Cmd-I) window to make sure that the old extension is not still being used.
For disk images used for games or software installation: If you want to mount a CD-ROM image that will let you install a game or other software, shut down the Mac OS 9 app, then drop the image on the Mac OS 9 app. Then follow the prompts to add the image as an additional disk, and choose the option to leave the image in its present location and link it to the application. Then, launch the Mac OS 9 app and install your game or software. Then shut down the Mac OS 9 app and either delete, move, or rename the disk image that you added and no longer want to use in Mac OS 9. The next time you start up the Mac OS 9 app, the disk image will no longer be on the desktop.
Again, the disk image must have the extension .dmg, .dsk, .iso, or .toast. If you drop an image with any other extension, then Mac OS 9 will try to copy the disk image file to its hard disk, which is not what you are trying to do. What you are trying to do is mount the image as a disk for use in the system.
To add or replace a disk image with the System761 system: Two methods are possible. Either hold down the Option key when starting the application and follow the prompts; or, if you only want to mount a disk image temporarily, create a folder on your home folder named 'System761 Disks' (without the quotation marks). Drag into that folder the disk images that you want to mount in System761, and launch the System761 app. When you no longer want to mount those disks, move them out of the folder or delete or move the whole folder.
Other customization options will be described if you ask for them.
What it contains
The Mac OS 9 application contains a standard US-English Mac OS 9 installation, without features that can't be used in this system, such as filesharing. It also includes a large number of standard Mac OS applications, plus some Control Panels, Extensions, and Scripting Additions. It adds two desktop images that are used by the supplied AppleScripts.
When the Mac OS 9 app starts up, it creates (if it has not already done so) a SendToMacOS9 folder in your OS X/macOS Documents folder; this folder is thus visible in the Unix folder in the Mac OS 9 system.
The file-transfer system uses the ~MacOS9BackgroundScript script described above. The Files from Host folder in the System Folder uses a CopyFiletoMacOS9 folder action script found in the Scripts:Folder Action Scripts folder.
Acknowledgments
This system is built on software provided by many people who are more expert than I am. The AppleScripts used in this application could not have been written without the help of many experts at Macscripter.net.
Support and contributions
Please do not ask me to help you customize the 'classic' Mac OS or advise you about any applications. Please ask for support in the E-Maculation support forum for SheepShaver. If you want to get in touch with me about the AppleScript used in this system, then please visit this page.
If you find this system useful, please feel free to make a contribution via PayPal from the link on this page.
Edward Mendelson (em thirty-six [at] columbia [dot] edu, but with two initials and two numerals before the [at] sign, not spelled out as shown here).
On May 6, 2002, Steve Jobs opened WWDC with a funeral for Classic Mac OS:
Yesterday, 18 years later, OS X finally reached its own end of the road: the next version of macOS is not 10.16, but 11.0.
There was no funeral.
The OS X Family Tree
OS X has one of the most fascinating family trees in technology; to understand its significance requires understanding each of its forebearers.
Unix: Unix does refer to a specific operating system that originated in AT&T’s Bell Labs (the copyrights of which are owned by Novell), but thanks to a settlement with the U.S. government (that was widely criticized for going easy on the telecoms giant), Unix was widely-licensed to universities in particular. One of the most popular variants that resulted was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
What all of the variations of Unix had in common was the Unix Philosophy; the Bell System Technical Journal explained in 1978:
A number of maxims have gained currency among the builders and users of the Unix system to explain and promote its characteristic style:
- Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
- Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
- Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
- Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.
Mac Os X Update
[…]
The Unix operating system, the C programming language, and the many tools and techniques developed in this environment are finding extensive use within the Bell System and at universities, government laboratories, and other commercial installations. The style of computing encouraged by this environment is influencing a new generation of programmers and system designers. This, perhaps, is the most exciting part of the Unix story, for the increased productivity fostered by a friendly environment and quality tools is essential to meet every-increasing demands for software.
Today you can still run nearly any Unix program on macOS, but particularly with some of the security changes made in Catalina, you are liable to run into permissions issues, particularly when it comes to seamlessly linking programs together.
Mach: Mach was a microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University; the concept of a microkernel is to run the smallest amount of software necessary for the core functionality of an operating system in the most privileged mode, and put all other functionality into less privileged modes. OS X doesn’t have a true microkernel — the BSD subsystem runs in the same privileged mode, for performance reasons — but the modular structure of a microkernel-type design makes it easier to port to different processor architectures, or remove operating system functionality that is not needed for different types of devices (there is, of course, lots of other work that goes into a porting a modern operating system; this is a dramatic simplification).
More generally, the spirit of a microkernel — a small centralized piece of software passing messages between different components — is how modern computers, particularly mobile devices, are architected: multiple specialized chips doing discrete tasks under the direction of an operating system organizing it all.
Xerox: The story of Steve Jobs’ visiting Xerox is as mistaken as it is well-known; the Xerox Alto and its groundbreaking mouse-driven graphical user interface was well-known around Silicon Valley, thanks to the thousands of demos the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) did and the papers it had published. PARC’s problem is that Xerox cared more about making money from copy machines than in figuring out how to bring the Alto to market.
That doesn’t change just how much of an inspiration the Alto was to Jobs in particular: after the visit he pushed the Lisa computer to have a graphical user interface, and it was why he took over the Macintosh project, determined to make an inexpensive computer that was far easier to use than anything that had come before it.
Apple: The Macintosh was not the first Apple computer: that was the Apple I, and then the iconic Apple II. What made the Apple II unique was its explicit focus on consumers, not businesses; interestingly, what made the Apple II successful was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet application, which is to say that the Apple II sold primarily to businesses. Still, the truth is that Apple has been a consumer company from the very beginning.
This is why the Mac is best thought of as the child of Apple and Xerox: Apple understood consumers and wanted to sell products to them, and Xerox provided the inspiration for what those products should look like.
It was NeXTSTEP, meanwhile, that was the child of Unix and Mach: an extremely modular design, from its own architecture to its focus on object-oriented programming and its inclusion of different “kits” that were easy to fit together to create new programs.
And so we arrive at OS X, the child of the classic Macintosh OS and NeXTSTEP. The best way to think about OS X is that it took the consumer focus and interface paradigms of the Macintosh and layered them on top of NeXTSTEP’s technology. In other words, the Unix side of the family was the defining feature of OS X.
Return of the Mac
In 2005 Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Return of the Mac explaining why it was that developers were returning to Apple for the first time since the 1980s:
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?
Graham argued that hackers were a leading indicator, which is why he advised his dad to buy Apple stock:
If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they’re doing, you’ll be doing.
Mac Os X 10.11 Download Free
In the matter of “platforms” this tendency is even more pronounced, because novel software originates with great hackers, and they tend to write it first for whatever computer they personally use. And software sells hardware. Many if not most of the initial sales of the Apple II came from people who bought one to run VisiCalc. And why did Bricklin and Frankston write VisiCalc for the Apple II? Because they personally liked it. They could have chosen any machine to make into a star.
If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good. And open and good is what Macs are again, finally.
What is interesting is that Graham’s stock call could not have been more prescient: Apple’s stock closed at $5.15 on March 31, 2005, and $358.87 yesterday;1 the primary driver of that increase, though, was not the Mac, but rather the iPhone.
The iOS Sibling
If one were to add iOS to the family tree I illustrated above, most would put it under Mac OS X; I think, though, iOS is best understood as another child of Classic Mac and NeXT, but this time the resemblance is to the Apple side of the family. Or to put it another way, while the Mac was the perfect machine for “hackers”, to use Graham’s term, the iPhone was one of the purest expressions of Apple’s focus on consumers.
The iPhone, as Steve Jobs declared at its unveiling in 2007, runs OS X, but it was certainly not Mac OS X: it ran the same XNU kernel, and most of the same subsystem (with some new additions to support things like cellular capability), but it had a completely new interface. That interface, notably, did not include a terminal; you could not run arbitrary Unix programs.2 That new interface, though, was far more accessible to regular users.
What is more notable is that the iPhone gave up parts of the Unix Philosophy as well: applications all ran in individual sandboxes, which meant that they could not access the data of other applications or of the operating system. This was great for security, and is the primary reason why iOS doesn’t suffer from malware and apps that drag the entire system into a morass, but one certainly couldn’t “expect the output of every program to become the input to another”; until sharing extensions were added in iOS 8 programs couldn’t share data with each other at all, and even now it is tightly regulated.
At the same time, the App Store made principle one — “make each program do one thing well” — accessible to normal consumers. Whatever possible use case you could imagine for a computer that was always with you, well, “There’s an App for That”:
Consumers didn’t care that these apps couldn’t talk to each other: they were simply happy they existed, and that they could download as many as they wanted without worrying about bad things happening to their phone — or to them. While sandboxing protected the operating system, the fact that every app was reviewed by Apple weeded out apps that didn’t work, or worse, tried to scam end users.
This ended up being good for developers, at least from a business point-of-view: sure, the degree to which the iPhone was locked down grated on many, but Apple’s approach created millions of new customers that never existed for the Mac; the fact it was closed and good was a benefit for everyone.
macOS 11.0
What is striking about macOS 11.0 is the degree to which is feels more like a son of iOS than the sibling that Mac OS X was:
- macOS 11.0 runs on ARM, just like iOS; in fact the Developer Transition Kit that Apple is making available to developers has the same A12Z chip as the iPad Pro.
- macOS 11.0 has a user interface overhaul that not only appears to be heavily inspired by iOS, but also seems geared for touch.
- macOS 11.0 attempts to acquire developers not primarily by being open and good, but by being easy and good enough.
The seeds for this last point were planted last year with Catalyst, which made it easier to port iPad apps to the Mac; with macOS 11.0, at least the version which will run on ARM, Apple isn’t even requiring a recompile: iOS apps will simply run on macOS 11.0, and they will be in the Mac App Store by default (developers can opt-out).
In this way Apple is using their most powerful point of leverage — all of those iPhone consumers, which compel developers to build apps for the iPhone, Apple’s rules notwithstanding — to address what the company perceives as a weakness: the paucity of apps in the Mac App Store.
Is the lack of Mac App Store apps really a weakness, though? When I consider the apps that I use regularly on the Mac, a huge number of them are not available in the Mac App Store, not because the developers are protesting Apple’s 30% cut of sales, but simply because they would not work given the limitations Apple puts on apps in the Mac App Store.
The primary limitation, notably, is the same sandboxing technology that made iOS so trustworthy; that trustworthiness has always come with a cost, which is the ability to build tools that do things that “lighten a task”, to use the words from the Unix Philosophy, even if the means to do so opens the door to more nefarious ends.
Fortunately macOS 11.0 preserves its NeXTSTEP heritage: non-Mac App Store apps are still allowed, for better (new use cases constrained only by imagination and permissions dialogs) and worse (access to other apps and your files). What is notable is that this was even a concern: Apple’s recent moves on iOS, particularly around requiring in-app purchase for SaaS apps, feel like a drift towards Xerox, a company that was so obsessed with making money it ignored that it was giving demos of the future to its competitors; one wondered if the obsession would filter down to the Mac.
For now the answer is no, and that is a reason for optimism: an open platform on top of the tremendous hardware innovation being driven by the iPhone sounds amazing. Moreover, one can argue (hope?) it is a more reliable driver of future growth than squeezing every last penny out of the greenfield created by the iPhone. At a minimum, leaving open the possibility of entirely new things leaves far more future optionality than drawing the strings every more tightly as on iOS. OS X’s legacy lives, for now.
I wrote a follow-up to this article in this Daily Update.
- Yes, this incorporates Apple’s 7:1 stock split [↩]
- Unless you jailbroke your phone [↩]