Preserved and Archived: Letterland Software 2 For Mac
Published: Friday, 29th March 2019
Educational software has long been a mainstay across all computer platforms, intended to encourage children to use computers as tools for learning rather than just for gaming or writing essays, and the Macintosh had an absolute galaxy of educational titles published for it throughout the eighties and nineties. One of those titles has found its way into my collection; Letterland Software 2.
Depending on your age, “Letterland” may or may not trigger a wave of nostalgia. Around the early-90s the Letterland series of books, designed to help young children learn to read and spell, was a real big deal. I was a little too old to experience letterland directly first time round but my son was gifted a stack of these books around 2010/2011 and he absolutely fell in love with them, leading to me reading the adventures of Clever Cat, Hairy Hat Man, Lucy Lamp Lady, and all the other incredibly bizarre characters, to him over and over again. Despite my initial scepticism as to their use as teaching aids (they are really weird books, to be honest!), my son became a good reader very quickly, so the authors probably knew what they were doing!
I spotted this software package in an eBay auction a while ago and, given our family exposure to Letterland, I had to buy it. I normally don’t bother picking up this sort of software, I’m all about big-box game releases when it comes to my Macintosh software hoarding, but I’m glad I did, it’s a neat little release.
Letterland Software 2 (there is apparently a “Software 1” package, so I’ve added that to my list of things to find) contains three games; Muddled Words, Fill the Gap, and Find the Pair. These are very simple games built around pointing and clicking to solve puzzles featuring the Letterland cast, and test skills including spelling, word recognition, hand-eye co-ordination, sound recognition, and so on. There’s also a tool to create a greeting card using Letterland artwork. All straightforward stuff, well presented and nice and colourful, and certain to tickle the interest of the 5 to 7 year old audience it’s targeted at.
The mad thing about it, for me, though, is that it was released in 1997! The minimum spec lists the Macintosh LCIII, a computer that was released in 1993, and the package was released on floppy disks rather than CD, so it does feel quite “out of its time”, considering where computing was by 1997. When you look at it in the wider context of the Letterland franchise, though, it makes a little more sense as the whole thing feels like it’s in a time warp from the 1980s, even today!
I have preserved and archived this software package, creating disk images of both floppy disks, using both Disk Copy 4.2 and Disk copy 6.3.3 for maximum compatibility and ease of writing back to floppy if one chooses. The whole thing is on the Internet Archive, including scans of the manual. Go give it a download and fire it up for your kids to do some learning on your old Mac!
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