In order to open a Macintosh Virtual Machine (i.e., an application that emulates an early Macintosh), you’ll need It also had 128K of ROM (Read Only Memory) that contained all the core software that made it a Macintosh. That original Mac Plus had a whopping 1MB of RAM (Random Access Memory), upgradable to 4MB. I’ll describe below how to do this using the Mini vMac emulator, created as part of Paul C. Okay, I assume you’re reading this because you have some interest in emulating a vintage Mac on your own computer.
In fact, the emulator has to deliberately delay execution of machine instructions to run slow enough not to alter the behaviour of the emulated Mac. Point is, it’s not remotely taxing a contemporary computer (even a tiny computer like a Raspberry Pi) to emulate a vintage Macintosh. My HP laptop has an 8 processor 1.8 GHz Intel i7 CPU running at around 54 BIPS (maxes out at 61 BIPS). That almost sounds fast until you compare it to my 7 year old iPhone 5, which runs at 20,000 MIPS or 20 Billion Instructions Per Second. Released in 1986, the original Macintosh Plus could execute 700,000 instructions per second, or 0.7 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). ( 1 | 2 | 3 | Vintage Macintosh Resources )
This article is the third in a multi-part series related to the vintage Macintosh computers of the late 1980s, and why old software needn’t die, even if it is abandoned by its creators.
