Relive Ancient Retro Mac & PC Boot Sequences on the Web

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.

• Head on over to the self-titled “The Restart Page” and have some fun

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.

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