We are slowly going through the boxes we packed for our move to Minnesota. You find interesting things you have not seen in years. This is not because of our opening the boxes from the move, but because you just take a lot of stuff with you so you don’t have to decide whether or not to throw it out.
The most interesting treasure in the last couple of boxes was this old MacBook Pro 165.
After a couple of tries, I was able to get the hard drive to spin up and the software still worked. I had to use my phone to take images of the screen. Even if I could screen capture some images, this machine has no card for web access and no USB port. I might have a disk somewhere, but none were included in the boxes we unpacked.
We kind of made our publishing careers based on a couple of apps and both were on this machine.
HyperCard was a great app that had the characteristics so many value in an educational app – low floor, high ceiling. It was easy to learn to use and allowed coding that allowed a user to create very sophisticated products. Some see HyperCard as heralding the linking now allowed online.
I found a HyperCard stack that must have been created by our youngest daughter probably in 1992 or so. The stack provides her comments on different rooms in our house.
Here is her comment on the toy room. Evidently she saw the toy room as kind of a junk or storage room. This seemed to be fine with her because we did not bother to clean this room when we prepared for the cleaning lady.
Some of the projects that initially allowed us to attract a publisher were created by elementary students (with our help) using Kid Pix and Hypercard. The projects I remember must have been based on the next generation of hardware because these projects included images the students “colored”. This MacBook pro was still monochrome. It seems interesting to use a machine again that does not allow color.