Classic Mac OS has been 'ported' (that is to say, emulated) on many, many platforms. It can still play many impressive games and the original hardware wasn't terribly beefy, so it's a great candidate for emulation on weaker devices. That's not to say the iPhone is weak (it isn't), just that this has been done more impressively elsewhere.
It also helps that a lot of the emulation materials are legally free. Apple gives out the disk images for System 6 and 7 on their website, for example.
Mac OS 7 was the reason I hated mac's from 1996-1998. I am curious what virtues it could possibly have because I just remember having to run around the UCLA computer lab troubleshooting that OS futzing with the network printer daemon.
Virtues? It runs in comically small amounts of memory and on processors without much puff; yet is beefy enough to handle serious DTP, early Photoshop and the web.
I'm not saying it's something to switch to today, but System 7 has features that OS X still hasn't got around to matching, especially in Finder speed/snappiness.
Just keep in mind that the other major GUI available when 7 launched was Windows 3.0. It has multitasking, virtual memory and peer-to-peer networking. Quite impressive for the time.
Agreed, MacOS 7 brings back more bad memories than good. I think the virtue here though is not Mac OS 7 itself, but rather the interesting exercise in OS porting.
It's neat, but not particularly impressive or interesting. It's an emulator running as a user space application; The iPhone isn't running Mac OS 7 natively (of course, it can't, since they use different CPU architectures, etc).
There have been classic Mac emulators for OS X for awhile now, and porting it to the iPhone was probably quite easy.
Reminds me of the current Louis CK meme floating about. System 7 is running on your phone. While it in itself right now isn't the most amazing thing, the series of events leading up to it is.
As I drift off to memory land, I still remember the System 7.5.3 update that made icons that were being dragged translucent. That was so exciting back then :)
agreed. Sadly, I cannot change the url, only the title. Editors/PG feel free to change to the less ad happy source RMS provided: http://www.macosiphone.co.cc/
The article writer complains about not being able to enter text, but that's what the Key Caps desk accessory was for. It provided text entry via copy/paste for keyboard-less "kiosk" systems, which were common back in the day. (My university used them for printing stations and short term internet/e-mail terminals. Unlike Windows 3.1 (which could to be used without a mouse), classic era Macs could be feasibly used without a keyboard.)
