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{ 2009-03-16 }

Old Mac CDs #2: The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1

Well, I’ve actually gone ahead and made a second installment, which officially makes “Old Mac CDs” a feature!

This one is another Centris 610 CD: The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1 (CDRM-1044940)

The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1 disc

Presumably, since this is version 1.1, there was more than one version of the CD produced.

This CD is, well, it’s pretty self-explanatory: it’s just a big ol’ collection of demos, mostly software but there are a few hardware demos too. Where the Apple Chronicle had HyperCard navigation of most of its demos, The Macintosh Demo Applications CD harnesses the extreme power of At Ease:

At Ease program launcher, displaying several product demos and read me files

Remember some of these from my previous post? The Apple Chronicle also had demos of ClarisWorks and Cinemation, and a few others not shown in this screenshot. For this post, I considered the same approach as my last one of diving into some of the demos on the CD, but let’s do something different. Let’s play a game!

I am going to list every single software demo on the CD (some grouped when appropriate), along with the icon and link to more information, where possible. For each demo, give yourself 1 point if you’ve heard of the program before, 3 points if you’ve used it before, or 5 points if you’ve used it some time recently, let’s say in the past year or so, I’m not really trying to be a stickler for this one. Quite a few of these programs have changed names and/or developers over the years, so go ahead and count future versions or revisions: count ClarisWorks if you’ve used AppleWorks recently, etc.

If you’ve got JavaScript enabled, you should have a bunch of radio buttons below and an auto-updating score at the bottom. If not, you’ll have to keep count by hand. And, of course, if you don’t want to play, you can still enjoy this list of 1992 cutting edge technology:

So that’s 99 possible choices, and my score on this list is a stratospheric 75. There are quite a few big name products on this CD that are still being developed in the present; it’s pretty easy to forget just how old some of the software we use today really are.

Posted by CHz on Monday, March 16, 2009, at 8:46 pm. Filed under binary. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment, but trackbacks are closed.

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