May 24, 2000
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Applefritter, one of my favorite retrotech Macintosh sites, has just posted a disk image archive of the entire Boston Computer Society software library. The BCS shut down in 1996 leaving a sizable collection of shareware and utilities to drift into obscurity. The disk shown below is packed full of circa 1986 Desk Accessories such as infamous BaseToBase calculator, and µPaint, a 7KB paint program (yes, 7KB!) that still runs under Mac OS 8.5.1 on my Power Mac 8500/233. Woof!
Just getting this screen dump was an adventure in itself. First of all, the files on the Applefritter site are images of 400KB MFS (Macintosh File System) formatted floppies. Unfortunately, backwards compatibility in any OS only goes so far and current versions of Mac OS cannot read MFS disks. I downloaded DiskCopy 4.2, which will read MFS images and create a new disk, but this only did me so good because my Mac can’t mount 400KB floppies. I ended up popping the newly formatted disk into my nine year old PowerBook 170, took a screen dump, turned on file sharing, and copied the file over to the Power Mac. Now relaxed and scrolling through the listing one more time, memories of simpler days are coming back to me. Just a boy, his Mac II, a 40MB hard drive, and a Talking Moose.
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