Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla...
by philwelch on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @05:45PM
(#16749638)
Mac OS 9 could run apps written for anything from System 7 onwards, and sometimes even System 6 apps though that was hit or miss. It could even run 68k binaries.
Mac OS 9 inside of “Classic” (the VM that ran OS 9 inside of OS X) wasn’t especially seamless, but what was seamless was “Carbon”, a transitional API that allowed developers to build apps that ran natively on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It didn’t take nearly as long to port code from OS 9 to Carbon as it would have taken to port to Cocoa, so many early OS X apps were Carbon ports.
Mac OS 9 inside of “Classic” (the VM that ran OS 9 inside of OS X) wasn’t especially seamless, but what was seamless was “Carbon”, a transitional API that allowed developers to build apps that ran natively on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It didn’t take nearly as long to port code from OS 9 to Carbon as it would have taken to port to Cocoa, so many early OS X apps were Carbon ports.