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My apologies, I'm remembering wrong. On PPC you could either dual-boot or run OS9 (and 8?) apps seamlessly on an OSX desktop, which was pretty impressive. The

My apologies, I'm remembering wrong. On PPC you could either dual-boot or run OS9 (and 8?) apps seamlessly on an OSX desktop, which was pretty impressive. The seamless emulation of OSX-PPC apps on an Intel processor was extremely impressive though. I remember the majority of stuff working surprisingly well with little slowdown (though this might now be rose-tinted).

philwelch 9y ago
Mac OS 9 could run apps written for anything from System 7 onwards, and sometimes even System 6 apps though that was hit or miss. It could even run 68k binaries. Mac OS 9 inside of “Classic” (the VM that ran OS 9 inside of OS X) wasn’t especially seamless, but what was seamless was “Carbon”, a transitional API that allowed developers to build apps that ran natively on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It didn’t take nearly as long to port code from OS 9 to Carbon as it would have taken to port to Cocoa, so many early OS X apps were Carbon ports.