Test Drive a 1991 Macintosh online...

Ah this takes me back. If you're too young to remember 1991 then a German web site offers you the opportunity to Test Drive a System 7.0 Macintosh...

When System 7.0 came out it was a real revolution. System 6 could only run one program at a time (unless you used the flaky Multifinder). Actually there were lots of other improvements too - like automatic handling of fonts in the system folder (previously they had all just floated around unordered and bewildering) and, er, other things. It's strange that things we take for granted today were ground breaking once. I read a list of changes in System 7.0 recently and it made my eyes water, and made me feel really, really old.

When you try out the emulation, see if you can spot the primitive e-mail application. That was "big" in 1991 but I remember we couldn't think what possible use it could be, particularly as you would have to dial up using your 2800 baud modem and wait while your message was sent. Easier to phone them! We did once try emailing a 48-page catalogue to our printers, but after four hours it wasn't even getting started, so relied on "massive" 40Mb Syquest drives until we got ISDN installed.

(40Mb... how did we cope? When the iMac came out and dropped the floppy drive, it was roundly criticised in the PC press, but I can't remember the last time I had a file that would fit on a floppy. Can you?)

Four years after we got System 7 on our Macs the rest of the company had veritable orgasms over Windows 95. I was called to a demonstration by a colleague who showed my how "innovative" it was. "Look" he said, "you can copy files to a disk like this" and he dragged an icon from one window to the next. "Right," I said, completely unimpressed. Windows 95 = Mac 85, as the saying went.

The System 7.0 in the emulation isn't quite as flashy as I remember it, but it's certainly a cool reminder. What would bring tears to my eyes is if they could emulate Photoshop 1.0 or 2.0 and the interminable wait as youa asked it to merge two different documents. No layers in those days, or multiple undo. You took your chance, waited half an hour and if you didn't like the results you started again. The amount of coffee I got through in those days is unbelievable.

Mac OS X is light years ahead of System 7.0 but some things don't change. A recent demonstration of "Longhorn", the next generation version of Windows, raved on about transparent windows, drop shadows, and the ability to move your windows automatically to see what each one contains. Yawn... seen it all before!