I’m the author. This is an experiment of mine in figuring out how to let Mac OS 9 connect to modern network services and environments.

Since Mac OS 9 doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for modern secure networking protocols, you often have to go through a proxy, which is pretty painful. I wanted to make it possible for an old Mac to connect to modern web services on its own.

There are also two related projects for connecting to Bluesky and Mastodon:

https://yllan.org/software/PlatinumSky/ https://yllan.org/software/Palaeomastodon/

Those also add emoji text rendering, since emoji have become such an important part of modern internet culture. Mac OS 9 does support some early Unicode, but it is, after all, nearly 30-year-old software, so that support is naturally incomplete.

The main reason I chose Mac OS 9 is that these modern services are actually fairly demanding for old machines: parsing JSON instead of a more compact binary format, handling generally large images, doing cryptographic computations, and so on. I think 68k machines would probably struggle too much. If the goal is to run independently without relying on a proxy, you really need something with relatively modern specs.

BTW, I haven’t actually run this on real hardware either. I used QEMU during development. I do have an iBook G4 signed by Woz, but it stopped booting a few years ago.

I’d also like to thank bbenchoff’s MacSSL:

https://bbenchoff.com/pages/MacSSL.html

and cy384’s opentransport-mbedtls:

https://github.com/cy384/opentransport-mbedtls

Both were a big help.

Shameless plug : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web OpenStreetMap app.

Far less difficult as coding for an old OS obviously, but still a challenge !

The Web has plenty of potential, but constraints too, mostly because of dominant actors, such as Apple that hid the PWA install button... Or Firefox not having any install banner, whereas chrome does.

Can't post it yet as a proper subject, it can't handle top page load.

Reminds me of this guy's solid work that includes an LLM integration that works on classic macs 68k and PPC https://www.macintoshrepository.org/68191-legacyai. Use it on my OS 9 PPC.

16 MB RAM required, 32 MB RAM recommended... how refreshing! Great work.

This is really cool, time to dust off an old PowerPC. I've been thinking about building apps for old Mac OS versions for a while with the advent of LLMs, glad to see someone is doing it.

Would love to see the source code for this and the underlying details like Classic or Carbon, and the libraries mentioned on Tinker Different for TLS, HTTP/2, and Unicode

Great work developing for OS9 still. I had taken started developing in Think C for a few months as a fun side project to work , and it still has some interesting ideas for development. Plenty of communities for this nowadays still.

I was hoping this article had something to do with Microware OS-9, but it doesn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

I love stuff like this. Even though I don’t have a machine capable with running OS 9 natively, I’m glad this exists. Looks awesome!

I'll be trying this out on my 500Mhz Powerbook Pismo running 9.2 tonight!

Hmmm. I wonder what the most beefed up OS 9 computer would be... I loved that OS so much.

The cool thing isn't so much os9map (yes it's cool) , but the fact that the data wasn't locked behind some wall and they were able to do whatever they wanted with it. There are a lot of cool ideas out there that are thwarted because the data is just locked away behind something only a very limited web gui can access, and you are at the mercy of people who's greatest ideas are ways to make the most horrible money extracting experience they can.

Wait but why isn’t it an Electron app? I thought visual apps like this required at least 1-2GB of RAM to run. How can it possibly only need 16MB?! Must be vaporware.