Imagesource: https://system7.app/

Most friends of slightly aged Apple hardware and software will know Basilisk II. Christian Bauer first released the initial version in 1999, and since then different ports for various platforms have been developed by a huge community.

From James Friend later came a JS port for the browser, but Mihai Parparita was not satisfied with some of its shortcomings.

In particular, issues like CPU load, memory usage, persistence and ease of loading programs were more or less well solved problems for example in macintosh.js by Felix Rieseberg.

And so Mihai decided to optimize Basilisk II for in-browser use, and upgrade it. The result is impressive.

On system7.app and macos8.app the emulator is available directly in the browser with System 7 and Mac OS 8 respectively. The loading times are extremely short, file exchange via drag&drop works like a charm and the performance is impressive.

Mihai has documented what happened in detail,  and if you want to know the background of his fantastic work, you get all the details.

What a time to be alive.