Emulate classic Apple computers

Les Pounder goes back to his distant college days and reveals how to emulate the Apple desktop machines that he used for work and play.

- Les Pounder

Apple Computers was founded on 1 April, 1976, by college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. From these humble beginnings we now have a brand that is just as much about style and design as it is computing prowess.

Apple Computers’ first computer was the Apple I. In 1977 the Apple II was released and it soon found its niche in US schools. After this we saw the Apple Lisa (1983), a merging of the Apple II aesthetic with what would become the Macintosh range of machines. Sadly Lisa was a flop, but in 1984 we saw the introduction of the Macintosh range with the Macintosh 128. This small machine changed the fortune of Apple and it started a range of Macintosh machines that exists to this day, in the form of the iMac. In this tutorial we’ll take a look at the classic era of Apple Machines.

An Apple a day

There are many ways to emulate an Apple machine, and one of the most popular is to use Basilisk II which is an emulator for Apple machines using the Motorola 68000 series CPUs. This was the pre-OS X era, an era where this author was at college and using System 7.5 OS and Netscape Navigator to go online.

To install Basilisk II on our Ubuntu machine we downloaded the latest release from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/bionic/+package/basilisk2, then opened a terminal in our Downloads folder and installed the package using the following:

$ sudo dpkg -i basilisk2_0.9.20120331-4_amd64.deb

Once installed, open the Basilisk II application:

$ BasiliskII

We immediately see the