The Internet Archive focused on the Apple II era for a few reasons: It was a finite period of time, it represents a particularly rich moment in computing history, and people remain especially interested in the era. “What is all this for? What do people need from the original Mac operating systems in the modern era?” ( Internet Archive)īut regardless of how well they run, the big question is why it’s worth the drudgery and the painstaking work of presenting ancient programs this way in the first place.

Screen shot of Dark Castle, as played in the Internet Archive’s emulator. (It seemed to run pretty smoothly to me.) When I tried playing it on the emulator this morning I was repeatedly killed by rabid bats, which I can confidently say is a reflection of my own rustiness and has nothing to do with the emulator quality. “But it looks beautiful, and the sound is beautiful, so I knew Dark Castle would be a big deal,” he added.įor what it’s worth, I only vaguely remember Dark Castle from when I had an Apple IIc.

“They are like, ‘This runs too slow for it to be good,’” Scott told me, “when what they really mean is the game was originally so unfair.” Reviews like: “I can't tell if the emulator is laggy, making my controls unresponsive? Or is this just a terrible game? Maybe a bit of both,” as one person commented on the site. “Everyone remembers Dark Castle because it was a particularly well-made, good-looking game-but not even a fun one, I want to point out! People playing it on the Mac emulation are not happy. “The main one was Dark Castle,” Scott told me. (It includes thousands of titles.) But Scott also knew the early Mac programs that people would want to see at the outset. He’s still fielding tech-support requests for the MS-DOS emulator the archive released in 2014. One big reason for this is quality control. Whereas Scott went with a “shock and awe” approach to earlier software emulators-making hundreds of programs available all at once-he decided to go for a more methodical, curated strategy this time. “The presentation represents some shift in philosophies, in terms of what we wanted to do,” says Jason Scott, an archivist at the Internet Archive. The emulator doesn’t just launch the software itself, but situates users in the old-school Mac operating environment, meaning you often find yourself looking at a 1984-style desktop, and opening the program yourself. ( Internet Archive)Īlong with MacWrite, the collection includes MacPaint, Dark Castle, The Oregon Trail, Space Invaders, Frogger, Shuffle Puck, Brickles, Prince of Persia, and dozens more. I started writing this article in the a MacWrite emulator, a simulation of 1984. The Internet Archive’s latest in-browser emulator lets anyone with internet access play and use dozens of games and programs originally released for the first Apple Macintosh computers in all of their black-and-white, low-resolution glory. The only problem is, how am I going to file this story into The Atlantic’s 2017 web based content management system? (Also, the hyphen key isn’t working.) But more on that in a minute.įirst, let me get out of here and switch back to my regular text editor. So here I am, awash in 1980s computing nostalgia, clacking away in an emulated version of the original software, thanks to the Internet Archive.

Now here’s a first for me: I’m writing a story for The Atlantic in MacWrite 4.5, the word processing program first released with the Apple Macintosh in 1984 and discontinued a decade later. But I still write first drafts in reporter’s notebooks, and in the Notes section of my iPhone, and on scraps of paper when necessary. Most of the time, I’m typing away in a plain text editor on my laptop. I write everywhere, with whatever technology is at hand. Not just geographically unusual, though there’s that, too. I’m a reporter first, and a writer second, which means I often find myself writing in odd places.

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