The Visual Almanac: An Interactive Multimedia Kit (January 1990)

The Visual Almanac is the earliest Apple Education multimedia product in my collection. According to the kit’s Laser Disc, pictured on the Domesday86 website:

The Visual Almanac is composed of 3 parts: the Visual Almanac Videodisc, the Visual Almanac software, and the Visual Almanac Companion (a book). This two-sided videodisc contains an Introduction, over 7000 images and 2 channels of sound organized into 12 collections. It is designed to be used under control of a Macintosh computer.”

The printed materials include a guide (First Steps in the Visual Almanac) and a spiral-bound book. Media includes three 3.5-inch disks: HyperCard 1.2.2; Visual Almanac Home (home HyperCard stack; Collections Directory (pre-made collections), and a CD-ROM. The kit also includes a cable.

The cable is described as a “LaserDisc Player Serial Lead,” designed to “connect a Pioneer player (with a 15 pin D-Sub connector) to the Apple Macintosh mini-DIN serial port.”

The box containing all the items in the kit measures 12.75 inches square and is 1.5 inches deep. The accompanying spiral-bound book is titled The Visual Almanac: An Interactive Multimedia Kit Companion, measures 11 x 8.5 inches, and contains 216 pages, printed in full color.

The Preface of the book contains a welcome message that states the resource’s intent:

“Welcome to The Visual Almanac! We designed the The Visual Almanac to give everyone a glimpse of potential computer-centered futures and have tried to show how current multimedia technologies might be used to do something new. We tried to make something that could be used now, but would also provoke the development of methodologies, technologies and pedagogies for the future. It is an interactive multimedia kit aimed at children and all their teachers—in schools, in homes and in various public environments—as well as business people, researchers and developers who make educational and other materials for our youth.”

Although the full package is dated January 1990, the accompanying CD-ROM is dated 1989 and the CD (as well as the Laser Disc) specifies that it was “Produced by the Apple Multimedia Lab.”

The box in my collection is missing the accompanying 2-sided LaserDisc that contains the primary content in 78 “collections” for the kit:

Side A Collections
Animals and Plants
Earth View
Everyday Physics
Solar System
Sounds Side A

Side B Collections
American History
Around the World
History of Daily Life
Everyday Objects
Historical Portraits
Sounds Side B
Studies in Time

Special thanks to the Domesday86 website for providing an excellent, detailed entry about this kit that allowed me to better describe this early educational multimedia example.

Source: Apple, Domesday86

Apple Education Review periodical (1992)

The Apple Education Review was an 8-page periodical aimed at the education market. This is Issue 2 from the 1992–1993 school year.

This issue contained five feature articles:

  • Multimedia Turns Five: What’s going on today? (celebrating HyperCard’s fifth “birthday”)
  • Education/Business Partnership
  • Research Review: Computers and Colleagues
  • News and Events
  • Spotlight on Innovation: Good-bye to Hide-and-Seek with Policies and Laws

The publication was printed on heavy white paper in two colors (black and gold) and the pages measured 8.5 x 11 inches.

Source: Apple

Macintosh Educational Software Guide 1992 (3.5-inch disk, 1992)

The 3.5-inch floppy disk was used in the very first Macintosh computer in 1984 after its initial introduction by Sony in 1981. By 1992 the format had evolved several times and was used as a relatively inexpensive and reliable way to share digital files before the Internet. At the time, the CD-ROM was gaining popularity, but most users had access to 3.5-inch floppy drives.

This Macintosh Educational Software Guide from 1992 contains a compressed HyperCard Stack.

HyperCard was a software application and development kit for Apple computers that allowed users to create and/or read hypermedia documents, a format that was used before the World Wide Web. The system was developed and used extensively between 1987 and 1994, and retired in 2004.

According to its accompanying envelope—found digitally, but not a part of my collection:

The “MacEduGuide ’92” compressed HyperCard stack on this floppy disk includes information about more than 1,300 software programs for students, teachers, and administrators in K-12 schools. Each product listing includes the following information:

  • Product description
  • Publisher’s name, address, and phone number
  • Education pricing (when available)
  • Grade range
  • System requirements
  • Additional items included with the software
  • Product review citations in educational software journals
  • Publisher’s policies (copy protection, site licensing, 90-day free trial, and so on)

The special features of this stack allow you to search for information using any combination of elements: title, publisher, subject and topic, specific grade or grade range, and system requirements.

You can print any or all of the product lists and product information. The “mailer” button that appears with each product description allows you to print a letter to the publisher requesting additional information.

Further, the HyperCard Stack was compressed using the .sea compression method popular at the time for Macintosh computers. While Windows primarily used .zip for compression, Apple used .sea (Self Extracting Archive). The format was built into the Macintosh Operating System at the time and did not require a “helper app” to open and decompress the file.

Sources: Macintosh Repository, Wikipedia (floppy disk, HyperCard, archive formats)

Apple Service Source CDs (1995-1998)

This collection of Apple Service Source CD-ROMs is from 1995–1998. These CDs were provided by Apple to allow authorized repairs of Apple equipment.

The CDs contain the following types of files and information:

Service Source Startup—A HyperCard document explaining the contents of the CD-ROM and a folder containing Service Source Files.

System Stuff (folder)—Applications and system files such as Apple QuickTime extension file, the Apple CD-ROM driver, 32-bit Color Quickdraw, and TeachText.

Disk Images (folder)—Applications such as HyperCard.

Clips (folder)—QuickTime movies and animations that demonstrate difficult repairs and the locations of hard-to-find components.

Viewer (folder)—Inside Mac Viewer, a utility to display archived and international-only service information.

Apple TechStep (folder)—release notes for late-breaking and critical information about TechStep tests.

AppleOrder (folder)—AppleOrder application.

Q-Stack TAC (folder)—HyperCard stack to send technical questions to the Apple Technical Assistance Center.

What’s New.Archive (TeachText document)—text file that archives the “What’s New” section of previous releases of Service Source, organized by release date and product.

Source: Macintosh Repository (1995, 1997, 1998)