Relive Ancient Retro Mac & PC Boot Sequences on the Web

May 3, 2014 - 3 Comments

Retro Boot Screens of old Mac and PC computers

Miss the good old days of rebooting your Apple IIgs, Macintosh SE/30, or Performa 720? Maybe you’re a glutton for punishment and you’d like to remember with fondness what it was like to boot into DOS, Windows 1.0, or Windows 3.11? Or maybe an Amiga? Or a NeXT computer? The Restart Page has all that and more, flush with the computer boot sequence nostalgia you’re looking for with it’s microsite of boot emulations.

The diversity of operating systems is fairly complete and certainly fun for those of us who geeked around on a variety of machines at some point in time or another. You’ll find OS/2 Warp, Mac OS 7, Mac OS 9, Mac OS 6, Rhapsody (the prequel to OS X), Mac OS X 10, Apple IIgs, DOS 6, Windows 1.01, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP, NeXT OpenStep, QNX, AmigaDOS, and a few others too.

For the Mac, Amiga, and some PC sequences, you’ll even be accompanied by some lovely boot sound effects… otherwise it’s just the boot and reboot sequences, so if you’re looking for a full blown retro emulation experience you’ll need to go elsewhere (like here for Mac OS System 7 in a browser window), or turn to a real deal emulator.

All you need to do is click the appropriate controls to start a sequence. It’s usually just a restart or reboot button like we still have today in OS X, so go click around and have some fun, or browse through the screen shots below to get a feel for some of what you’ll experience.

Restart Page boot screen options for many operating systems

1994 PC BIOS Boot Screen

Amiga Workbench Boot Screen

Apple IIGS Boot Screen

Apple II Boot Screen

IBM Boot Screen

Mac OS 9 Boot Screen with Extensions loading

Mac OS X 10.0 Boot Screen

OS / 2 Warp Boot Screen

Microsoft Windows 1.0 Boot Screen

Useful? Nah not so much, but nostalgia has a value, right?

.

Related articles:

Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Fun, Retro

3 Comments

» Comments RSS Feed

  1. Tim says:

    I love Mac OS 8-9. It was so easy to see what extension might be causing problems on a system. Just wait for it to crash as it walks through all the little icons on startup.

  2. DD says:

    Thanks for bringing back those lovely Amiga memories! :-)

    The Amiga OS (GUI) is called the “Amiga Workbench” btw, the “Amiga DOS” window you see while rebooting the machine is just the CLI. (similar to Mac OS X’s Terminal, which I would not consider as the Mac’s Operating System either)

  3. robert says:

    pffft… OpenStep?!? I was expecting some original black hardware reboot sequence!!!

    … just kidding. really nice find :)

Leave a Reply

 

Shop on Amazon.com and help support OSXDaily!

Subscribe to OSXDaily

Subscribe to RSS Subscribe to Twitter Feed Follow on Facebook Subscribe to eMail Updates

Tips & Tricks

News

iPhone / iPad

Mac

Troubleshooting

Shop on Amazon to help support this site