Persistent.info
blog.persistent.info · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Persistent.info is the blog of the developer behind Infinite Mac, which runs classic Mac OS in the browser via emulators.
What HN saysHN links it for technical write-ups on Infinite Mac. Commenters call the project very cool, noting its Cloudflare-based AppleTalk networking.
40HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
38stories submitted
1.3Kstory points
8 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser5 people · 281 points · first shared 2022 · 103 comments on HN
- 2Infinite Mac OS X4 people · 287 points · first shared 2025 · 121 comments on HN
- 3Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side3 people · 237 points · first shared 2024 · 51 comments on HN
- 4Screenshot-proof images via temporal dithering3 people · 162 points · first shared 2012 · 65 comments on HN
- 5Infinite Mac: Macintosh Garden Library3 people · 23 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6Infinite Mac: Resource Fork Roundtripping2 people · 53 points · first shared 2025 · 13 comments on HN
- 7Infinite Mac: Infinitemac.org2 people · 25 points · first shared 2023 · 3 comments on HN
- 8Infinite Mac Construction Set2 people · 20 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Say good-bye to the people behind Google Reader2 people · 7 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 1010th Anniversary of Google Reader Shutdown2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 11Getting all your data out of Google Reader1 people · 86 points · first shared 2013 · 26 comments on HN
- 12Google Reader shutdown tidbits (2013)1 people · 74 points · first shared 2024 · 44 comments on HN
- 13Disabling the click delay in UIWebView1 people · 26 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 14Teaching the Closure Compiler About React1 people · 15 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 15Google Reader Social Retrospective1 people · 12 points · first shared 2011 · 2 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
kristianp · 2026-03-10
https://infinitemac.org/ is an example of a good use: users can try out old versions of Mac OS, to see what's changed and what software used to be available for old versions. It doesn't use JSLinux, but other emulators [1]
[1] https://blog.persistent.info/2025/03/infinite-mac-os-x.html
msephton · 2025-07-09
They are paused as required. Here's the making of: https://blog.persistent.info/2025/07/infinite-mac-embedding.html
The site loads just fine on my iPhone XS from 2018.
mac-chaffee · 2023-06-09
I've been messing around with this for the past week, it's very cool. There's even a CloudFlare Durable Objects-based AppleTalk networking stack, which I think is such an interesting fusion of old and new: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/07/infinite-mac-networking.html?m=1
em3rgent0rdr · 2022-04-26
According to https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html it is emulator.
Note, the Mac OS and the apps in this emulator are running proprietary code. So it can't be "compiled" because the source code isn't available. The only options are binary recompiling or binary translating or emulation.
mihaip · 2022-04-26
Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/
paulshen · 2022-04-01
Announcement tweet: https://twitter.com/mihai/status/1509718311403241474
Technical blog post: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
Github repo: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac
xuhu · 2013-03-09
HFS+. Searching for 'git osx performance' turns up these:
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3313908/git-is-really-slow-for-100-…
- http://lists-archives.com/git/652294-git-performance-on-os-x.html
- http://blog.persistent.info/2010/12/making-git-faster-on-large-reposit…
corin_ · 2012-12-28
jonnytran · 2008-05-13
The creator's blog post on it:
http://blog.persistent.info/2007/08/twitter-digest.html
chrisco255 · 2022-12-06
This conversation went on a tangent. It started off with people complaining about modern GUIs then moved onto Outlook and then someone rushes to blame JavaScript / Electron. JS runs 50-80% as fast as native, which is more than fast enough thanks to Moore's law, for virtually any GUI application. The web has a reputation for being slow, thanks to a traditional lack of GPU acceleration as well as 25 years of legacy code attached to its Document Object Model, that are pretty gnarly for browser vendors to deal with. That has nothing to do with JS itself.
JS can run full GPU accelerated graphics with WebGL (and soon WebGPU), with shaders, complex geometries, textures, etc at 60 FPS: https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_keyframes.
The MacOS 9 demo as shown, is impressive, but it is far from optimized, given that it is a side project. But it's impressive all the same that it's emulating a full Mac environment in the browser. Read the developer's own comments on it: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
smusamashah · 2025-04-15
There aren't many VMs that can run in browser
https://copy.sh/v86/
https://webvm.io/
https://bellard.org/jslinux/
https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ (https://github.com/jsdf/pce)
https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) (https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs)
Mac OS
https://infinitemac.org/ (https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.html)
https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-worker.html
https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/