Comment by duskwuff
21 hours ago
> They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going.
Not for long. The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU - it would not have run on Intel systems. (Rosetta translation would not have been applicable.)
I know it didn’t last long. But why do you say Rosetta wouldn’t have worked?
For essentially the same reason that Rosetta 2 can't be used to run Windows - they're userspace JIT translators, not system-level emulators. The Classic Environment was, for all intents and purposes, an entire virtualized PowerPC system running Mac OS 9, and allowed software running inside it to do some pretty wild things like patching system "trap" routines, writing graphics directly to the framebuffer, or even setting breakpoints in and handling exceptions from other applications.
The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU.