A little while ago, I stumbled upon an interesting project whose goal it is to emulate the Apple II DeskTop environment in the web browser. Emulation in browsers has been gaining traction in recent years as computers become powerful enough to run an entire operating system in a browser. Earlier this year, I wrote about a website that allows you to boot up almost every version of the classic Mac OS right from your browser.
I’m not incredibly familiar with the Apple II as I wasn’t around yet during its heyday, but I do know that for much of its life, its primary interface was a terminal. Eventually, Apple created a GUI desktop environment for it and you can certainly tell that both it and the Macintosh desktop environment shared a lot of the same UI principles. Anyone who has used a classic Mac OS desktop will feel right at home here.
So here are the links:
- The project’s homepage: https://www.a2desktop.com/
- The emulator: https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple//e?accelerator_toggle=true&gl_canvas=false&mono_screen=false#https://a2desktop.s3.amazonaws.com/lkg.2mg
- More information about the Apple II DeskTop: http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html
- And an open-source disassembly of it: https://github.com/a2stuff/a2d
