Dropping Rosetta and Classic
Now it was PowerPC that was emulated, using Rosetta. In Snow Leopard, the first Intel-only version of Mac OS X, Rosetta wasn’t installed by default; it would be downloaded and installed automatically the first time a PowerPC application launched, but the hand was already writing its ominous message on the wall. The rumor, which has become as loud as a roar, is that Mac OS X Lion will not support Rosetta. Snap!
As of this afternoon, PowerPC-only software that I had installed was:
- AppleWorks
- I don’t use it anymore, but I have lots of AppleWorks documents, as well as files from ClarisWorks 4, 5, and 6. From what I’ve read, it’s not a good idea to rely on Pages and Numbers to read the word processing and spreadsheet files, so I should probably convert these to Word and Excel format while I can still run AppleWorks. The data from AppleWorks databases can probably be saved as CSV, but I guess there’s no way to use it short of recreating the layouts in another database program.
- Copilot
- Presumably, FogCreek will have an update for this before Lion ships.
- Eudora
- I only have this for testing with SpamSieve. The plug-in will likely not be updated again, and in fact it was built with CodeWarrior, which I no longer have installed.
- FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML
- These only run in Classic, and unfortunately there are no other applications that understand their files. I suppose I should try to fire up Acrobat Distiller to convert the documents to PDF while my PowerBook still works.
- Internet Explorer
- It’s been a long time since I even used this to test pages.
- RealOne Player
- I can’t remember the last time I used this.
- Web Confidential
- I converted my files to 1Password a while ago. I do have one file with unknown contents and an unknown passphrase; at this point, I have no real need for it and will probably never get it open.
- wget
- This was easily updated by recompiling the source.
I suppose it goes without saying that the most future-proof old documents that I have are in Microsoft Office, LaTeX, and plain text formats. Annoyingly, Office 2011 warns about opening files with type/creator codes but no extension, making me get at them through the Open dialog instead of by double-clicking or drag and drop.
Update (2011-05-2): I found that, Office 2008 is much more reliable than Office 2011 at opening files from Word 5.
