Software

Long, long ago software came on physical media – actual floppies, CDs, and DVDs – and I’ve held on to a lot of it that I’ve purchased over the years.

I still have things like Windows NT 4 server install floppies, a boxed copy of OS/2, and even my old Amiga kickstart and workbench disks. But without period hardware for said period software, they aren’t very interesting outside of “I have these”.

With all of the old Macs I have, having a collection of similarly old Mac software is more interesting because I can actually install it.

And in that regard, here’s my PowerPC Macintosh shelf…

From left to right there’s Mac Office 2004, which is PPC.

The orange cardboard has OS8.5 and 8.6 CDs, the jewel case has OS9.0 CDs, the thin white folder is OSX 10 public beta, 10.0, and 10.1 (the folder is from my purchase of 10.1), then 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 (the universal PPC/Intel version), and the DVD on the far right is a 10.6 PPC Beta which never made it to the final 10.6 version.

Finally there’s a copy of iLife ’09, which was the universal PPC / Intel version. The last PPC software Apple ever made.

All told, that shelf spans the entire PowerPC decade; 1998 to 2009.

Listening to "A Thousand Lives" by At 1980