A media archaeologist a couple of years back stumbled upon an older Macintosh running a prototype operating system that never saw commercial release: System 7.7 was subsumed by MacOS 8 a few months later. But the early-alpha version of 7.7 still exists, and thank goodness someone with the appropriate skill set found and archived this precious and rare slice of computing history.

I love that the Special menu was renamed "Speedy" but in all other ways, this feels very much like one of the older Mac System 7 setups...with a few interesting internal testing tools and some unexpected hints about who was using the device in the artefacts left behind on the drive image.

I plan to install this on real Mac hardware soon, but it does work great right now using SheepShaver, the emulator.

http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macos-77-pre-release

#MediaArchaeology #MediaArchaeologyLab #Mac #ClassicMac #RetroMac #RetroComputing