Posts Tagged → mac os

The Virtual OS Museum Is a Time Machine for Mac Nerds

If you ever owned a Mac that booted on a chime, the Virtual OS Museum is the rabbit hole for you. Andrew Warkentin has assembled a single emulation project covering more than 1,700 pre-installed operating systems and apps across 250 platforms. Classic Mac OS. A/UX. NeXTSTEP. System 1.0 through Mac OS 9.

It ships two ways. A 121GB full bundle that runs offline, and a lighter 14GB starter that pulls each VM image down on first launch. Either one drops you into a desktop you probably haven’t seen in twenty years.

The fun of a project like this is that it is not trying to be polished. It is a labor of love by one person who wanted every operating system in one place and decided to make it happen. The full list runs 1948 to today, and stepping through it is like flipping through a textbook of computing history.

If you want to see where Apple’s modern OS came from, fire up NeXTSTEP. Most of the ideas that landed in Mac OS X a decade later are sitting right there.

One caveat. The whole museum runs as an x86 Linux VM, so don’t expect speed records on an Apple silicon Mac. You can browse the screenshots and the full list of installations at the project’s site before you commit the disk space.

Finding the Active Window in Big Sur



I have received more email about confusion over the active app in the few months since Big Sur was released. Big Sur is brighter, and figuring out which window is active is more difficult than it ever has been before.

The differences are subtle:

  1. Traffic Lights
    The close / minimize / maximize buttons are lit up in the active window and gray in all inactive windows. This is the easiest way to tell.

  2. Drop Shadow
    There is a subtle drop shadow behind the active window. There is no drop shadow on inactive windows. Depending on the background, this can be impossible to see.

  3. The App Toolbar
    The apps toolbar is just slightly darker in the inactive window. Unless you have the apps right next to each other, this is difficult to notice.

The only reliable way I can tell which app is active is the traffic lights. If you find this annoying, I would suggest HazeOver (Developer) (Setapp). This simple utility darkens everything on your screen except the active app and solves this problem entirely. The app has been around a long time. It got a nice Big Sur update and fully supports Apple silicon.