Joselyn McDonald's Emulated Mac Mini 128K Is a Fully-Functional Ceramic Piece of Art

Creative technologist Joselyn McDonald has built a miniature Apple Mac 128K with a difference: it's ceramic art, yet houses a working touchscreen display powered by a Raspberry Pi and running a real Mac OS operating system.

"I've made ceramic art for ~7 years (primarily on the wheel) and started working on larger hand-built pieces this summer," McDonald explains. "I decided to make a DIY Macintosh 128K (because… it's ICONIC) from ceramic slabs (you roll clay through a hand-cranked rolling machine and voila!) As I sculpted the piece, using the original Mac 128K specs, I started considering how fun it would be to add a Raspberry Pi and touchscreen to the piece to make it interactive!"

That's exactly what McDonald would do. After forming the chassis — built as a ceramic box, with a cut-out at the front for the display, an indentation where the floppy drive would be on an original Apple Mac, and even a miniature three-dimensional Apple logo in sadly-now-abandoned rainbow livery — McDonald fitted a small touchscreen display connected to a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

"I was determined to use Processing to make a fake old-school OS GUI, but before I got too far on that (fun yet tedious) task I came across Jaromaz's MacintoshPi [project]" McDonald explains. "His repo steps you through installing Mac OS 7, 8, and 9 emulators on a Pi. You can even go online, and there’s a modem emulation feature. Thanks to sites like Macintosh Garden and Macintosh Repository you can download a variety of software (think Doom II, Carmen Sandiego, SIM CITY!!!) that will run on Mac 7, 8, and 9 operating systems."

As a result, the sculpture took on new life as a fully-functional emulated Mac. The project isn't finished yet, though: McDonald has plans to find a way to display household schedules on the screen, in between playing favorite childhood games and entertaining guests.

The project's full write-up is available on McDonald's website.