Going through my old software receipts has reminded me of the incredible number of stupid and expensive software purchases that I’ve made over my life. All I can say is what was I thinking? #1 on that list is Aldus Persuasion, which I must have thought was pretty cool back in 92 since I forked over $325.00 plus shipping to MacConnection.

Other now-questionable purchases include:

DiscDoubler (Salient Software) $45.00 [So I could get like an additional 100 mb out of my drive? Sheesh!]

Now Utilities $83.00 [Guess I really liked "SuperBoomerang"]. Try explaining to kids today that we paid $83.00 to have a “recent documents” option added to our Apple menu.

Touchbase $74.00 [This was a pretty cool, though simple contact database, but $74.00?]

Adobe Premiere upgrade to v2.0 $149. [Premiere was a great program but in those days even basic transitions would take all night to render a few seconds for blotchy 320x240]

Replicas Vol 1, 2 and 3 $95.00 [These were part of the Infinidi program that I was so taken with that I purchased every one of these packs and then never really used them. You could pay almost $100 just for some surfaces and I was one of the idiots who did.]

Snooper Kit $149.00 [According to the sales hype Snooper helps you determine hidden problems in your Mac. I remember a bunch of pretty, though useless, pictures telling me my SIMMs were working properly.]

Gallery Effects $99 [Photoshop add-ons. Much like the Replicas above I bought them all since how else could you get that "ink stamp" effect?]

Iron Helix CD-ROM game $63 [There has never been a game that is as slow or boring as this game so I guess it is a classic.]

HyperCard Tutorial $49 [As if Hypercard was so hard it need a tutorial?]

Great Works $249.00 [Listen to these features...Balloon Help, TrueType support, 32-bit addressing, Apple Events, Publish and Subscribe, and more. This was back in the day that we all thought integrated software was the way to go...Microsoft Works, Claris Works, HandWorks, ...]

Macromedia Action $? [I couldn't read what I paid for this turd but since it was from Macromedia it probably wasn't cheap.] Here is what was said about Action in its day…

As opposed to other categories of software, where most any Mac with a couple megabytes of memory and a hard disk will do nicely, the world of multimedia has stiff hardware requirements before you can truly get the
kind of results that make people go ”wow!”. Entrance requirements; Macromedia Action requires 4 to 6 megabytes of RAM (is you run System 7), a hard disk, and a Mac with a 68020 processor or better.

Peter Gabriel Xplora 1 $50 [Back when everyone thought multimedia was the next big thing]

All was not lost however as I did find one of my all time great purchases…

Game Bundle $49 with Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle and Apache Strike [They didn't get better than that and I'm probably not alone in hoping that someone creates an online version of Dark Castle]

The other great purchase would have been Airborne but I didn’t come across the receipt so it’s possible I just plaid that at the office and not at home. Productivity took a pretty big hit the day Skipper first brought that into the office.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 9:57 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.