Apple recently completed the shift from Intel X86 processors to their new family of M1 RISC chips. RISC is an acronym for Reduced Instruction Set Computer.

This is the third time Apple has switched the Macintosh to a new instruction set architecture. The first was from the Motorola 68000 series to PowerPC chips in 1994 and the second from PowerPC to Intel processors using the x86 architecture in 2005–2006.

With the shift from the Motorola 68000 series to the PowerPC, Apple introduced a new Macintosh O/S, System 7 (Later renamed MacOS 7).

On the last day of March this year, Mihai Parparita released two utterly spectacular web-based emulation systems that can run System 7 and it’s successor MacOS 8 in a browser. There’s a demo on YouTube, and you can try them yourself at https://system7.app and https://macos8.app. Each has some pre-installed apps, including Adobe’s Photoshop 3. You can drag and drop files from your desktop to the browser and edit them in the emulation. Uploading and downloading files is supported as well as session-to-session persistent storage.

Read details about the current state of the project, and the work on which it is based in Mihai’s blog.