Textual Pornography

Starting up a new feature which, in the spirit of this blog, will not even pretend to have a regular update schedule. I’ll be taking a look at some old Macintosh CDs I find lying around, giving you pictures and descriptions of content and all that good stuff. I’m planning on sticking to CDs bundled with Macs or otherwise distributed by Apple, but if I find any other interesting ones, I’ll post ’em up too. We’ll see how much content I can milk out of this.

First up: Apple Chronicle (CDRM-1023150)

The Apple Chronicle was an attempt at a periodic, CD-based newsletter. This CD was bundled with certain Apple computers produced around 1992, including the Centris 610 (introduced Feburary 10, 1993), which is where this copy of the CD came from. Even though the content hints in several places that there were supposed to be future editions of the Chronicle, to my knowledge, only this one issue was ever published.

Half of the CD is the Apple Chronicle newsletter itself, a HyperCard stack enriched with the ColorizeHC and QuickTime XCMDs to feature color graphics and embedded movies. The issue’s headline was Apple’s recently released QuickTime, which at the time was a fairly revolutionary piece of technology, allowing applications to, well it’s right there in the front page article: “integrate graphics, sound, video, and animation.”

Oh right, this was introduced at about the same time, wasn’t it? Reminds me of when I wrote an RSS feed for Folkore.org’s Newton section, which ceased updating immediately afterward. Good times.

I’d love to read the rest of this article, presumably that yellow arrow will take me to the next page.

… or not. This was definitely the better UI choice.

Let’s check out the global news:

Clicking on the yellow film icon in the top right starts a video in the picture box below of a discus thrower spinning and hurling an object, revealed to be a CD as it passes by someone stupidly using an Apple computer, right in the middle of the discus field, where people are throwing things. It is inspirational product placement at its best.

And speaking of product placement!

Most of the newsletter is dedicated to different Mac software and hardware products, especially those with interaction with either QuickTime or HyperCard. The other half of the CD consists of demos of the products highlighted or advertised in the newsletter. Some of them, like Apple’s, are merely images. Apple’s is actually a PowerPoint presentation, “Products by Apple,” exported as an animated GIF. Here are a few slides:

A lot of the demos are HyperCard based, allowing interactive displays of product information, occasionally enhanced with movies from QuickTime or Macromedia Director (now Adobe Director).

This last one is interesting because it contains possibly the greatest startup sound any program in this or any other universe has ever had:

And of course there are real demonstration apps, like FrameMaker 3.0. Claris has demos for six different languages, but, oddly, there are three different demo apps. For German, you get ClarisWorks 1.0 (the five different modes: “Textverarbeitung,” “Graphik,” “Datenbank,” “Tabellenkalkulation,” and “Kommunikation”). You speak Italian? Congrats, you’ve got MacWrite II! If you’re stuck with any of the other languages, English, French, Spanish, or Japanese, don’t fret! You can still try out a demo of FileMaker Pro.

And, oh man, demos for Discis Books, anyone ever use any of these interactive storybooks?

The screenshot really doesn’t do it justice. Every page has a music loop playing in the background, and you can click the speaker icons to the left of the text to have the story narrated. The words are highlighted as they’re spoken so you can follow along. And you can click on different parts of the illustrations to have what they are read out loud: “Peter Rabbit,” “gooseberry net,” “sleeve,” “ground,” etc. Wicked awesome.

Another demo is for Prescience Corporation’s Expressionist 3, an equation editor:

From Vividus Corporation is a save-disabled demo of Cinemation, an animation program somewhat similar to Flash and Director in terms of creating objects in frames and adding motion and interactivity to them. Cinemation’s intended use was in creating animated presentations; it even had the ability to import PowerPoint presentations as the base for a project.

Motion Works Inc. had a demo of a product similar to Cinemation, PROmotion. PROmotion’s intended use though was actually for cartoons and other animated media, not simply presentations. Also included is a stack showing off ADDmotion II, an XCMD allowing color graphics and animations to be embedded in HyperCard stacks. There are a bunch of example uses of PROmotion and ADDmotion II in a “PrimeTime Examples” folder, containing some samples of what was included in Motion Works’s PrimeTime CD Collection Vol.1, a CD of sounds, graphics, and movies to be used with PROmotion and ADDmotion II. Of particular note is the “The Principles of Animation” stack:

Most of the principles have actual animated examples, and not just a static frame like the one above.

I’ll close this post with video of a short cartoon contained in the “Editorial & Comics” section of the newsletter. The cartoon, titled “Mac ‘n’ Tish!,” has no credits save the signature of the artist “Deigert” on the frames containing the two main characters, but an advertisement in the “Classifieds” section for the company Media Design has the same two characters making a sales pitch, pointing to the cartoon as a sample of their work.

The cartoon is saved on the disc as seven Director files, so there are some pauses in the video during CD access of the next segment; I have left these intact to give you the authentic experience of viewing this cartoon off the CD. For Deigert, the uncredited voice actors, and everyone else at Media Design, I present to you “Mac ‘n’ Tish!”: