Apple Software Dispatch: The Mac App Store from 1993!

We're all used to app stores on our computers and mobile devices, powered by the Internet. But there was an equivalent in the early 90s designed for a less connected era.

Sources:
Editorial about Apple #1 PC manufacturer: "Amid price war, there is a light at the end of the tunnel", Stewart Alsop, InfoWorld. July 27, 1992.
Computer industry growth article: "Strong growth predicted for high-tech industry", Gary Anthes. Computerworld, January 18.1993.
Apple 1994 sales figures, Computerworld, Jan. 22, 1996.
AppleCD 300 advertisement: Popular Science, December 1993.
Software Dispatch news articles: Computerworld, October 11, 1993; InfoWorld, October 11, 1993; Macworld, May 1994; PC Magazine, December 21, 1993.

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[dreammfyre]

Man, imagine it being your job reading and listening to CD-keys all day.

[Kylefassbinderful]

When I was a kid in the 90's I would go around all the thrift stores and estate sales looking for these distro discs because they had Extension files that I needed such as the quicktime mpeg, text-to-speech extensions and so on. I had no way of downloading any of those files at the time. Not too mention they were usually bootable discs with the System folder and the Finder on disc.

[BillLambert]

I used to have a blast cracking these kinds of things on the PC side, back in the day. The web was minuscule and dial-up was a pain, so we didn't have much else to do, and the encryption schemes were usually very simple. Many were simple XOR jobs on a Zip file, so it was trivial to match known values in the header and find the "key".

[BaghaShams]

As a kid in the early 90's, I spent countless hours going through the demos on this disc, and it killed me that all this software and games were physically right there on the disc I had, but I couldn't access them.

[soviut]

Tim & Eric's The Innernette, right down to ordering over the phone from a CD-ROM.

[Nomad-Rogers]

Man I miss the 90s' it so much simple.

[BubbleWrapPerson]

This just brought out some deep hidden memories.

[ilkoallexandroff]

Damn I remember when I was a young boy in a third world country, in some garage stores they were selling CD-s with hundreds of pirated software, games or whatever you want, for just like 5-10 bucks! Cheers from japan, that was a very interesting video!

[emmettturner]

Another Windows counterpart: idStuff from the Quake Shareware CD. It was cracked by QCrack, which let you get everything id Software/Raven Software off the disc. Final Doom, Hexen, Heretic, Quake, and all the expansions up to that point. You even got CD audio for Quake.

I recall trying to buy Quake but their dialer did not have a pulse dialing option. :( I needed that because my mother was too cheap to have touch-tone service.

[Lurker]

I am surprised we did not get one of these CDs back in the day. As we where die hard Mac users in this period.

[jeremytravis]

When I bought a powermac 9600 it came with a lot of extra software hidden on the installer disk.
You could set the date of your computer in the future and the software would run for years and you didn't have to pay for it.

[itsgruz]

Seems like it could have been a good idea for business or schools to get their software. Me though, I'd want the manuals and everything as a lot of those old programs aren't easy to figure out without them.

[jonathankleinow]

I remember this! It was included in the Apple Multimedia Kit that my dad bought along with the LC III in late 1993. The kit included an external AppleCD 300i and speakers, as well as a small collection of software on CDs, like Groiler’s Multimedia Encyclopedia.

[gamerdude]

Thx Colin for all the vids, as a fellow twin cities denizen I love using your videos to help find old computer parts or places. Keep up the great work!

[PenguinRevolution]

These retro tech videos take me back to that time, Thanks Colin for making them!

[ynzdelta]

Thank you so much for making these videos

[Scribblescrabbly]

Thanks for a trip down memory lane. I totally remember having After Dark screensaver software.

[AnonymousFreakYT]

These kind of "encrypted compilation CDs" were fairly common, and shockingly easy to crack it turned out. I remember buying the "shareware" CD of the original Quake, and it had all of id Software's other software on it, you just had to call up a number, pay, and they read off the unlock code for each game. A crack was floating around on BBSes within a month of its release, and nobody paid for the full version of Quake or any of id's older software who knew about it.

[RetroPC]

This would have blown my mind as a kid to be able to purchase software from a CD-ROM. Great video!

[brendanhoffmann]

My Dad used to go to Mac User Groups back in the 80s and 90s and bring home floppy disks with new software and games. It was always so exciting!