Archived: The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy HyperCard Expanded Book
Published: Wednesday, 18th December 2019
Phew! That title is quite the mouthful! It would have been longer if I’d included the author’s name (the late, great Douglas Adams, of course) and the publishing company (Voyager) but I figured I’d best truncate it. But I digress! I am absolutely delighted to present to the world the wonderful Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy “Trilogy of Four” in HyperCard format!
I stumbled across this in one of my eBay saved searches and I *immediately* placed a bid. I mean, like, seconds after clapping eyes on the thing. The starting price of £39.99 was higher than I commonly spend on Macintosh software but I am a huge Douglas Adams fan and there was no way I was allowing this rarity to slip through my fingers. Over a few minutes, I lifted my highest bid once and then a second time in my eagerness to secure it but when the auction ended a few days later I was still the only bidder so took it for the starting price. Result!
The item itself is in near mint condition, with barely a sign of age or use on it. The packaging is a slim card wallet/folder, with a pocket inside for a single floppy disk and another pocket for a paper insert of instructions. I have scanned everything and placed in the Internet Archive for posterity.
Sadly, the floppy disk is not in great shape, magnetically speaking. I inserted it into my Macintosh LCIII+ and it mounted to the desktop just fine and I was able to view the contents of the disk (a readme HyperCard stack and a self-extracting compressed file) but when attempting to copy the files to the hard drive only the compressed file would duplicate and a disk error was reported when trying to copy the readme. I placed the disk in my G4 MDD tower’s USB floppy disk to see if that would fare better, and it did indeed copy the readme but this time it refused to duplicate the compressed file! Never mind, I had both files backed up, albeit on different computers. A simple bit of sneakernet action between the LC and MDD using a Zip100 disk reunited the files and the software had been preserved! Huzzah!
I have uploaded these files to my site as a StuffIt archive, so you can download and unstuff on your HyperCard-enabled vintage Mac to enjoy a read. And what a read! The Hitchhiker’s series is pretty much the greatest comic science-fiction series of all time, and even though this HyperCard edition was published before the fifth book in the “trilogy”, Mostly Harmless, was written it’s still fantastic to have the first four books in this cutting-edge-for-1991 format.
And what a format! This release was part of The Voyager Company’s exploration of digital book selling, a couple of decades before the Kindle revolutionised the book industry. I’ve never seen one of these items in the wild before but I’d very much like to acquire more, especially the release of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves To Death”. I expect it’ll be a *long* time before I have a complete collection but I’m happy to add it to my list of life goals.
Check out the high-resolution scans of the book to get an idea of the presentation. It’s very nicely done. The software itself is also pretty neat and I’ve created an emulated-in-browser item containing it, although it’s not best suited to the limitations of the emulated Mac Plus; it’s working right at the limit of that machine’s computing power and is also optimised for larger screens than the 9 inch compact Mac display. But you can get a rough idea from it. It’s best if you run it on your own Macintosh, something with a display at or greater than 640 x 400.
I’m really pleased with this find, and very happy to share it with you all.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
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Thanks for sharing. This is wonderful!
This is fantastic – thank you for your efforts to source this! Looking forward to giving this a go.
I’ve got one of these, bought it years ago!
I am desperately in search of the Voyager Expanded Book of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. If you hear of one, anywhere, I’d love to get my hands on it. I can pay cash, but I also have a pristine, still in shrink wrap, copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide Expanded Book to offer in trade.
Apropos your earlier If Monks had Macs; sadly it doesn’t load into Safari on Sequoia 15.1.1 Is there a fix? Thank you.