I feel like I’m a bit late on this one, but there’s still two weeks of March left. Some crazy wonderful people every year devote the month of March to classic Macintosh stuff, both hardware and software, and primarily things before the release of OS/X in 2001. The original MacOS traces its lineage all the way back to 1984’s original Macintoshes, and existed as Apple’s primary OS for 17 years. Now it’s been 24 years since the switchover, but a lot of people still like the system that served as Apple’s mainline OS for so long.
MARCHintosh has a website that organizes it, and even offers a style guide. It was created as a fruit-flavored adjunct of similar month-long pun-inspired retrocomputing celebrations DOScember (website currently down for a redesitn) and SepTANDY (doesn’t seem to have a home site at all). Should there be more? VICtober? JUNIX (thanx Ben Zuddist)? I vote yes, regardless of how terrible the pun is! Let’s fill the year with crackling, smoking old tech!
There is lots to find exploring the hashtag #marchintosh, this is just a few items. Level 2 Jeff emulated the original Macintosh on a microcontroller (15 minutes):
Michael MJD emulated Windows on a PowerPC Mac (32 minutes, but running, it should be said, OS/X, not classic MacOS):
Retro Repair Roundup did an hour-long video where they talked about old Macs:
It’s from back in 2019, but Ron’s Computer Videos showed off a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Hypercard stack! (1 hour 16 minutes) They have a whole MARCHintosh playlist too.
More MARCHintosh projects can be found through the #marchintosh tag on Bluesky and Mastodon.
MacOS Timeline
1976 Founding of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), release of Apple I
1977 Release of Apple II
.
. 6 years
.
1984 System 1, release of the original Macintosh
1985
1986 Systems 2–4 (sometime between 1985 and here)
1987 System 5
1988 System 6
1989
1990
1991 System 7, a.k.a. MacOS 7.6
1992
1993
1994 Switchover to PowerPC hardware
1995
1996
1997 MacOS 8
1998 Initial release of iMac, the beginning of the revival of Apple’s fortunes
1998 MacOS 9
1999
2000
2001 Mac OS/X 10.0 Cheetah (“OS 10,” now called MacOS), initial release of iPod
.
. 24 years
.
2026 Today
