An amazing graphic from Steve Troughton-Smith. Steve used a variety of emulators to emulate a huge representative range of Mac OSes, from System 2 through System 7.6.1, then Mac OS 8.6, then on to Rhapsody developer release 1 and so forth, ending with Yosemite.

Steve then captured screen shots of each emulation and built the graphic below. Click on the thumbnail to embiggen. And on the Mac, once you have the bigger version, click the magnifying glass to make it even larger.

Interested in the details? In Steve’s words:

I’m using a variety of emulators; Mini vMac for systems 1–7, SheepShaver for 7.6.1–8.6, qemu for 9.2.2 to 10.3, and VMWare Fusion for anything newer. I’ve been working for the past week in making some of the older ones (as in older OS X) boot in QEMU—they didn’t, before now.

And Steve gives a shoutout to:

…the amazing work in the past year done over at emaculation.com to get QEMU (the emulator) capable of emulating old G3 & G4 Macs.

Steve’s original was more than 800MB. Obviously, we had to reduce size and clarity to get it shoehorned down to a size that was acceptable to our Loop posting plugins. Remember, click it, then click it again to see the detail.

Great job, Steve.