Some friends recovered several old Macintosh computers that our school was
throwing away. I had a working 640x480 monitor from my semi-functional Centris
610, so I took one of the desktop CPUs (a Performa 475) and hooked it up.
To my dismay, it didn't work-- but it was easily fixed by replacing the motherboard
battery. The computer worked flawlessly and had most of its original contents
on the whopping big 545 megabyte hard drive:
- Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego
- Mario Teaches Typing*
- Super Munchers— like Number Munchers except with a multitude of great
topics such as music, animals, and geography!
- The original Math Blaster
- Myst— However, there is no Myst CD to speak of, and the computer doesn't
even have a CD-ROM drive.
- A mysterious app called The Animals!. I don't know what it is and I can't
play it because there is no CD.
- Spectre Challenger— a vector tank game that plays like Battlezone
except faster
- ClarisWorks 2.0— unfortunately, there were no interesting saved files
- The American Heritage Dictionary, with a word list that doesn't even match
my small red Merriam-Webster
- Quicken 4— hey, I thought this was a school computer!
- A HyperCard reader, but no editor
- Connectix Ram Doubler
- Mouse Practice— the ultimate newbie initiation.
*I had never heard of Mario Teaches Typing until I found it on this Mac.
It is similar to any typing software-- you are given various things to type,
being judged in accuracy and wpm. With each completed sentence, Mario moves
one position forward through a level. This doesn't make the game any more fun,
but it's kind of interesting to see Mario's graphics adapted to a set of still
images.
This computer is a flashback to 1995. I remember using almost all of this software
back in the day. Most of it has aged well, except for Spectre which is really
no fun at all on the ADB keyboard (you know, the one with the arrow keys in
a row). The edutainment software isn't much different from today's. System
7.1 is simple, compact, stable, and easy on the eyes. This computer never crashes,
and you can't say that about the expensive Dell I'm using now. It may not
be ill shit like my Macintosh 512k, but it can communicate with today's
computers, and it's pizza box design is nearly as elegant as the Classic Macintosh.
It's surprising what one can do with 307200 pixels.