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 320×240]

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.