leopardmacbook promacos
I own a MacBook which I purchased approximately 6 years ago (I'm not sure exactly what version it is, but I can get that information if needed). It is running OS X Leopard, and I want to install Mountain Lion onto it.
Is this possible? If so, how? If not, what is the most recent OS I can get on the system?
The last version of the OS to use this font as default was System 7.
For Mac OS 8, Apple decided to discard this wonderful part of their brand’s identity, and commissioned David Berlow of the Font Bureau to design Charcoal.
Apple actually released System 7 for free download here. Conceivably you could load up System 7 in an emulator like Sheepshaver and get the font out somehow. Or unpack the system images provided by Apple, though I don't know which software you would need for that.
Apple abandoned Chicago as of OSX, as evidenced by the outrage here. Locally, I can buy an original iMac running OS 9 for 50 EUR. So you could buy one of those and transfer the font :-)
UPDATE: extracting Chicago from System 7
Yes - you can download the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 and write a Lion specific Recovery HD to an USB drive with 1 GB of space on it. This will erase whatever information is on the USB partition, but then you can boot to a Lion Recovery HD and re-install Lion even if the Mac has Mountain Lion installed.
Best Answer
Probably not. The system requirements for 10.8 say "MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)". You'd also need to install 10.6.8 or 10.7 first in order to install Mountain Lion from App Store.
See these Apple KB articles:
EveryMac.com has a list of maximum OS X versions supported by different Macs: