The Electronic Young Telegraph for Macintosh
Published: Thursday, 28th March 2024
Here’s something I acquired from eBay several years ago but only recently got around to actually looking at, the Electronic Young Telegraph.
Seeing an auction for a collection of Macintosh floppies always piques my interest and I can rarely resist the temptation to put in a bid and, if I win, hope that the floppies aren’t dead and that there’s some software to salvage and share. My luck proved pretty good in this instance, and most of the disks were readable and able to be copied to my Performa 5320’s hard drive. The result; a collection of EYT issues sporadically spanning 1995 to 1998.
The Electronic Young Telegraph was a mid-90s “new media” venture by the publishers of UK right-wing rag The Daily Telegraph, launched in 1995 as an interactive spin-off of the print edition’s Young Telegraph weekly supplement. Edited by journalist Adam Tanswell, the EYT launched on floppy before moving to CD-ROM distribution in 1998, and then being rebranded as T:Drive in 1999. Featuring games, quizzes, and other kid-focused “edutainment” stuff, EYT was published monthly and cost £4.95, according to a write-up in the July 1995 issue of Games World.
Now, I was a teenager in the mid-90s and the price of £4.95 surprises me, as that’s quite expensive for the time! The price of The Daily Telegraph newspaper, the EYT’s parent publication, in mid-1995 was only 35p! The UK edition of Wired in 1995 was £3.50, so even premium monthly periodicals were cheaper than EYT’s price for a single floppy disk targeted at kids. The fact that EYT lasted through to 1999, though, suggests that it was successful enough on its own terms and that it had enough of a paying userbase to justify its keep.
Anyway, the stack of floppies I’ve managed to archive probably holds some interesting material and will serve as a time-capsule of a media industry finding its feet with new forms of communication and distribution. I say “probably” because I have been totally unable to figure out how to get the things to run!
The readme file that comes with each issue says that we “need to install the disk marked Library“, but I do not have such a disk. The Games World write-up mentions needing “two start-up disks” so my gut feeling is that I’m missing that part of the jigsaw and am not going to be able to get these running. The EYT issues seem to have been made with Macromedia Authorware but no version of that software that I have to hand can do anything with these issues.
So, I figured I’ve done the important work of preserving the contents of these floppies but will leave the work of getting them to run to somebody else. Download all of these issues as a .sit and see what you can manage with them. Let me know how you get on!
There is a 1998 CD-ROM issue available on Macintosh Garden, so if you’re really keen to get a taste for the EYT you could go check that out now. I also found an archived version of the website of the agency who compiled at least the CD-ROM editions so was able to save a few of their screengrabs to get a feel for how these EYT floppy issues might look and feel. It absolutely screams the 90s, doesn’t it?
Hi there. I was a developer of EYT and have the start up floppy discs.
Oh my goodness is there anyway you could share? I also have a collection of Mac Floppys I’d LOVE to get working! Also, thanks for all the childhood memories playing these gems!