Apple Mouse

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Sun May 9 10:56:31 1999

Tom Owad wrote:

> >Speaking of which, does
> >anyone here know of a program called Catalyst, designed to imitate a mac
> >on a //c?
>
> I've heard of it (in fact, I think I own a copy). Isn't Catalyst just a
> program launcher?

I'm glad you said that, because I was going to say the same thing! The
problem is that I remember almost nothing about the program, so I wasn't
sure if I was imagining it.

The one we had was made (I think) by a company called Quark. We used it as
a menu-driven shell to run programs off a ProFile. (Yes, this WAS on an
Apple //e. The ProFile came from the Lisa in my dad's office after his
company scrapped it. Sorry, I don't have the Lisa or the ProFile or the
interface card or Catalyst or even the //e. I wish I did.)

It was supposed to do fancy things, and it was copy-protected pretty
heavily. I don't know why the company hyped it so much. It might have
helped you install ill-behaved programs on the hard drive. I kind of
remember using it as a boot disk though I also kind of remember that the
hard drive was capable of booting itself. I would put Catalyst in the
category of "software produced by a small company that thought they were
great and made great software, except no one else agreed."

The company copy-protected their disks very heavily, too... I was never able
to back Catalyst up, even with Copy ][+. I think I wiped out one of the two
identical diskettes we got, and I think it was when I was trying to copy the
software.

I hope this message is useful -- I just like to reminisce about my Apple
experience. :)

-- Derek
Received on Sun May 09 1999 - 10:56:31 BST