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- Hacker News
- Increasingly seeing retro/throwback projects even within AI systems. Love to see itby kaizenite
- So software with an UI comparable to a modern GTK3/4 uses 50X less RAM. Take notes.by anthk
- Man, I miss pre-OSX Macintosh operating systems. They just had more personality than most modern operating systems.by NoSalt
- Great work developing for OS9 still. I had taken started developing in Think C for a few months as a fun side project to work , and it still has some interesting ideas for development. Plenty of communities for this nowadays still.by ktallett
- I have a 2003 iBook sitting in one of my boxes, but I still haven’t had time to reinstall Mac OS 9. I tried with some CDs, but so far I haven’t been able to reset the volume, and Tiger loads automatically. I want to go back and keep using one of the most beautiful OSes Apple ever made.by meerita
- I love stuff like this. Even though I don’t have a machine capable with running OS 9 natively, I’m glad this exists. Looks awesome!by robot_jesus
- Would love to see the source code for this and the underlying details like Classic or Carbon, and the libraries mentioned on Tinker Different for TLS, HTTP/2, and Unicodeby nhubbard
- If anyone wants to buy a refurbished PowerPC Mac, I've had good luck in the past with Operator Headgap.
This is one of those hobby businesses that got out of hand and had to go full time.
But they seem to be selling old Macs, in 2026.
They were a great source for parts etc to keep my old Macs running.
by watersb - Self promotion but relevant:
I have a hobby business doing something very similar, except I focus on a specific model—pretty much the most power efficient PowerPC desktop Mac you can get that can still run Mac OS 9, the Mac mini G4. It's at https://os9.shop
by WoodenChair - This is really cool, time to dust off an old PowerPC. I've been thinking about building apps for old Mac OS versions for a while with the advent of LLMs, glad to see someone is doing it.
- This got me wondering if vibecoding might bring with it a newfound interest in developing apps for vintage computers. Are the LLMs that most people use trained as well on these older coding languages / platforms as they are on modern ones?by chriscjcj
- 16 MB RAM required, 32 MB RAM recommended... how refreshing! Great work.by generalpf
- Wow. As a comparison, I just opened a new Google Maps tab in Chrome. According to the Chrome Task Manager, the tab alone uses 433mb RAM and 34mb GPU memory footprint after first load.by ethanpil
- For the time when OS 9 was relevant that would have been a RAM hog. My iBook (first generation) had 32 MB RAM on board (plus an upgrade slot, how refreshing).
Sure, that wasn't top of the line, but it would definitely restrict your ability to multi task with other programs at the same time. My memory is that many programs used far less than that, allowing you to easily have 5-7 programs open (I had a RAM upgrade for a total of 64 MB).
by VorpalWay - Reminds me of this guy's solid work that includes an LLM integration that works on classic macs 68k and PPC https://www.macintoshrepository.org/68191-legacyai. Use it on my OS 9 PPC.
- I’m the author. This is an experiment of mine in figuring out how to let Mac OS 9 connect to modern network services and environments.
Since Mac OS 9 doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for modern secure networking protocols, you often have to go through a proxy, which is pretty painful. I wanted to make it possible for an old Mac to connect to modern web services on its own.
There are also two related projects for connecting to Bluesky and Mastodon:
https://yllan.org/software/PlatinumSky/ https://yllan.org/software/Palaeomastodon/
Those also add emoji text rendering, since emoji have become such an important part of modern internet culture. Mac OS 9 does support some early Unicode, but it is, after all, nearly 30-year-old software, so that support is naturally incomplete.
The main reason I chose Mac OS 9 is that these modern services are actually fairly demanding for old machines: parsing JSON instead of a more compact binary format, handling generally large images, doing cryptographic computations, and so on. I think 68k machines would probably struggle too much. If the goal is to run independently without relying on a proxy, you really need something with relatively modern specs.
BTW, I haven’t actually run this on real hardware either. I used QEMU during development. I do have an iBook G4 signed by Woz, but it stopped booting a few years ago.
I’d also like to thank bbenchoff’s MacSSL:
https://bbenchoff.com/pages/MacSSL.html
and cy384’s opentransport-mbedtls:
https://github.com/cy384/opentransport-mbedtls
Both were a big help.
by yllan - As a retro enthusiast, these projects are all absolutely delightful!
I need to get a GPU for my MDD G4 and then I'd love to try them out on real metal
- I can't wait for the development postmortem ;)
Any hunches on why the iBook might not be working? I've been having hell with PRAM watch batteries recently.
by nxobject - I absolutely applaud you. I'll try running it on a PowerBook G3. About the emoji support: is it something that could work system-wide?by lampiaio
- Missed opportunity to call it OpenStreetMac or OpenStreetMac9.by Firehawke