My Emulator Mac and Bridge Mac side-by-side. While I can run all of them on my day-to-day MacBook Pro, I don’t really have enough space to keep all of them on it at once and risk breaking them each time I update the Mac OS.

I have a number of different emulators running nearly 20 different Operating Systems, each one configured with its own hardware and storage.

Using emulators I can run anything from Mac System 1.0 (1984) to Mac OS 10.13 (2017) to Windows 95, 98, and many others. It allows me to run Mac OS from 1984, written for a completely different architecture, on a current machine. Emulators are applications that trick software into thinking it’s running on real hardware of a certain kind, even if it is different than the real hardware. Copying data to and from them is possible through my Bridge Mac, but it’s still slow and requires multiple trips to physically shuffle data around. It’s awesome that I can run down to the basement and play with real hardware whenever I want, however, it can be a pain to pull them out, set them up, and plug them in to use software from a certain era. I own over 60 Macs that can run any version of software that Apple has released. My bridge Mac is both a part of the museum and a utility for the museum. This allows me to get software and documents off of the modern internet and translate them into a form that can be loaded all the way back onto my 1984 Macintosh 128k. It’s System software can read current data formats and write it to older data formats that only exist on my older machines. It does this because it can read Compact Flash cards through its PC Card slot, read CDs through its CD module, write floppy disks through its floppy module, and even transfer data over a Mac serial cable. I often refer to my PowerBook G3 Wallstreet as my “Bridge Mac” for my Mac Museum because it allows me to move data from my new Macs to my old ones.

Mac os 10.13 emulator