Fun: Retro-fy MacOS with Old System Sounds, Tiling Wallpapers, & Classic Finder
While the only Time Machine we know of is the easy to use and fantastic backup tool for Mac users, some of us have geeky dreams of digital time machines, where we can get lost in flashbacks to retro computing, like the early Macintosh days of Classic MacOS System 7. While there are ways to run System 7 in your browser or through an emulator, we’re going to present another fun option here, which is to restyle and re-theme modern MacOS (even Sequoia!) to the look, feel, and sound, of Macintosh System 7, a now 33+ year old operating system.
If you’ve been following us for a long time, you may have put this together yourself over the years, because we’ve discussed adding retro Macintosh sound effects to modern Mac OS, using some of the fun classic tiling wallpapers, and using a Classic Finder lookalike too. But if you combine them all together, you can have your modern MacOS experience looking and sounding a lot like a retro operating system.
Is this super useful? Is making your modern Mac going to increase your productivity? Is this going to revolutionize your life? The answer is probably not to all of those questions, but it is fun, if you’re into retro computing stuff anyway.
3 Easy Steps to Retro-theme Modern MacOS to System 7
Ready for a fun retro experience on your modern Mac? It’s pretty simple to put together:
- First up, you will want to grab the retro Mac OS sound effect pack that we discussed all the way back in 2012 – it’s still available! – from this Google Drive as ‘macossounds.zip’, and drop the AIFF files in that zip bundle into your ~/Library/Sounds/ folder of MacOS. Then, open System Settings > Sounds, and you’ll find all of those retro sound effects available to use in modern MacOS
- Next, let’s make MacOS use an ancient Finder lookalike, you can grab Classic Mac Finder free from the developer here, then just launch it like any other app
- Finally, let’s retro-fy the desktop wallpaper itself, and use these fun old tiling wallpapers from System 7 as your modern wallpaper
Put it all together and you’ve got MacOS Sequoia 15 looking a whole lot like System 7!
On a day to day basis, this is obviously not the most usable situation because of the limitations of the Classic Mac Finder experience, so you’ll probably just want to use your modern MacOS Sequoia Finder. The retro system sounds however, are still really great, it’s hard to beat the sounds of Wild Eep and Sosumi, which if you used old Macs many decades ago, will undoubtedly have you flashing back to some old school computer lab, library, or office, just on those sounds alone.
If you’re craving the real thing, don’t forget about the super fun Macintosh.js System 8 emulator that is packaged entirely as a single app, and works impressively well. You can also run System 7, and System 6, in emulators, and even directly within web browsers. It’s all fun for the retro fans!
