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Internet Archive Adds Early Macintosh OS and App Emulators (macstories.net)
An anonymous reader writes: The Internet Archive has added a curated collection of Mac operating system and software emulators from 1984 through 1989. The Internet Archive already hosts browser-based emulators of early video games and other operating systems, but this is its first foray into Mac software. The collection includes classic applications like MacPaint, programming tools such as MacBasic, and many games including Dark Castle. Each app can be run in an in-browser emulator and is accompanied by an article that chronicles its history. It's fun to play with the apps in the collection and realize just how far apps have come since the earliest days of the Mac. It's also remarkable how many computing conventions used today were introduced during those earliest days.
The real cause of the decline of software and user interfaces in particular is actually the pressure to continually release new versions and propel the continual upgrade cycle. A fully mature, bug-free, usable piece of software that does everything its users want it to do flawlessly is a very unprofitable piece of software because people will buy it once and use it forever without ever upgrading it. The answer is to keep adding useless features and revise and clutter up the UI with more and more crap to create the illusion that people are making productivity leaps by plunking down money on new versions, when in reality they are simply treading water or even going backwards as it becomes more difficult to do simple tasks that were once trivial and impossible to figure out how to do new things due to the overwhelming number of baubles and options.