Found and Archived: The Mac magazine cover floppies 1994 to 1997
Published: Wednesday, 21st August 2019
Sometimes I *really* love eBay. I have nearly 100 Macintosh-related saved searches on eBay and check through them most days for newly-listed Mac goodies, and have found some really great deals on rare and exciting Apple hardware, software, and ephemera over the years. But I recently had a great find; 57 cover floppy disks from The Mac, a UK magazine from the Dennis Publishing stable, spanning 1994 through to 1997. What was most awesome about these disks was that nearly all of them were *still sealed in their protective plastic wrapping*! Human hands had not touched these floppies since they were duplicated 25 odd years ago!
Of course, the only sane and decent thing to do when you’ve purchased a near-unique collection of sealed retro computer artefacts is to rip them open, copy them to your vintage Mac, and start exploring! 😀
I copied each floppy disk to the hard drive of my Macintosh LCIII+, then transferred the lot via Zip Disk sneakernet to my trusty OS9 G4 MDD battlestation to pore through them, and I’m pleased to report that there’s an absolute wealth of mid-90s Macintosh shareware, freeware, demo treasure across these disks. Nearly all of the disks were able to be copied; only the few very oldest were dead (and these happened to be the unsealed ones, which probably accounts for their failure). There was one pair of disks, from October 1995, that had been incorrectly duplicated so both had the same files on. But that’s a small gripe in a sea of joy!
I will be stuffing each individual program/game and placing in the vintageapplemac.com archive, but for your downloading pleasure here’s a self-extracting StuffIt file containing all of the floppies. 🙂 Give it a download, transfer it to your old Mac, unstuff and have a look through; you may find that old program or game that you loved when you were a youngster. Let me know!
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