Get Retro with a Classic Mac Finder Clone for Modern MacOS
Do you miss the retro old days of an ultra-simple Finder experience on the Macintosh? You know, way back in System 6 and System 7, when there was no visual complexity to the user interface of Finder, no myriad of features, it was just a simple file system browser.
Yearn no more, because you can get that super simple Classic Macintosh Finder experience right now on MacOS and Mac OS X! Well, sort of anyway.
Classic Mac Finder is a fun open source project that aims to recreate the classic Macintosh System Finder experience for modern Mac OS system software releases. It’s a work in progress and thus will not offer a complete Classic Mac Finder experience by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s certainly fun to toy around with, and if you’re an old-time Macintosh user you’ll undoubtedly get a touch of nostalgia from playing around with the app and using it to navigate your modern MacOS installation.
Classic Mac Finder runs like any other app (as does the modern Finder too, by the way), so you can run it in parallel to anything else going on with your Mac, including the modern Finder. You’ll just get a simple retro appearance Finder along for the ride too.
Classic Mac Finder is a work in progress, and because it’s open source you could always join in the development effort if you feel so inspired.
If this is whetting your whistle for some retro Apple fun, you might also get a kick out of running Classic Mac OS in a web browser (or Hypercard too), and browsing through our other retro post archives. There’s plenty of nostalgic computing experiences to be had, you can even resurrect an old dusty Macintosh from your closet by downloading old Macintosh software and giving it a go again, or if you’re partial to stay modern you could just apply some modifications to the Mac OS X Finder to achieve a more classic look while preserving all the wonderful new modern features we have come to know and love.
Have any other interesting or fun retro computing experiences to share? Drop us an email or let us know in the comments below!
Certainly has the speed of the Classic Finder :-) Has some promise, but not really functional as a Finder replacement at the moment.
I can’t say I’ve ever wanted the old Finder back, especially one which “will not offer a complete Classic Mac Finder experience by any stretch of the imagination”.
Any chance we could get the talking moose back? I really liked it.
Bring back Oscar the Grouch when throwing things into the system garbage can. Oscar made you want to create and delete files just to hear him rise from the garbage and sing one of his two songs. One was “I love it because it’s trash” and the other one escapes me. I seem to remember there was a copyright issue that Sesame Street had no sense of humour about …
Tell me again when they (or someone else) develop an app that gives to my mac the look of the old and good Mac OS X Tiger!!!