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"BeOS would not be able to run Classic MacOS PowerPC/68K apps. They'd have to use some sort of emulator if Apple went with Be." That is exactly how Mac OS X ra
by Reason077 9y ago
"BeOS would not be able to run Classic MacOS PowerPC/68K apps. They'd have to use some sort of emulator if Apple went with Be."
That is exactly how Mac OS X ran classic MacOS apps in the early days. It was called "classic environment" or "blue box".
It was removed after OS X 10.4, as by that point most "classic" apps had been updated to the Carbon API and recompiled as native OS X apps.
- fzzzy 9y agoJust a slight correction, Blue Box was a version of the classic environment that only ran full screen. It only made it as far as some of the developer previews. When Aqua was announced, it became the classic environment, where classic apps could be run along side modern cocoa apps without having to switch full screen between the blue box and the NeXT-derived OS.
- mikeash 9y ago10.4 also marked the Intel transition. Classic was a virtual machine, so making it work on x86 would have been a huge undertaking. 10.5 still supported PowerPC, but by then it was obviously not the future.