Memory Lane time! Say, do you remember when a color Mac was one that had been spraypainted a hue other than beige? Do you recall that magical era when running more than one application at once seemed like some form of dark sorcery that was surely conjured forth from the very depths of hades itself? Remember when screens measured nine inches diagonally, had a 512x384 resolution, and we liked it-- no, we loved it?

You don't?

Oh.

Okay, so you're either really young, really forgetful, or really new to the Mac platform; no worries, because now's your chance to bone up on a little Mac history. Faithful viewer mrmgraphics pointed out a WIRED article about "an act of selfless cyber preservation" called the Web SE, which is a painstakingly accurate reenactment of the sobering experience of using System 7 on a 1987-era Macintosh SE. It's done entirely in Flash, so all you need to check it out is a reasonably modern web browser with a reasonably modern Flash plug-in enabled.

Now, it just so happens that we have a real Mac SE running System 7 down here at the AtAT compound; we rescued it from a neighbor's trash heap a few years ago, cleaned off the crayon marks, fished out the loose change rattling around on its motherboard (woo-hoo!), and blew $60 to replace its blown CRT, hard drive, floppy drive, and RAM. Sure, it would have been easier and cheaper to pick up a working model at the flea market for five bucks (at the time there were always half a dozen available on any given day), but how could we possibly have left that poor thing for a date with a trash compactor?

Anyway, as we were saying, we have the Real Deal here in the compound, so we're eminently qualified to state that Web SE does a pretty stunning job of reproducing the whole SE experience. You can dig through the hard drive, muck about in MacWrite and MacDraw (albeit with a little less flexibility and no saving or printing), and even play a few games, like Space Invaders and Tetris. Even the then-ubiquitous After Dark screensaver works. Sure, System 7 required click-drag-release to choose menu items and Web SE uses the more modern click-release-click-release paradigm we're all used to now, but really, about the only things missing are the grinding noises of the floppy drive, the soul-crushing delays when launching applications, and the flat, level top that was just so darn convenient as a place to set one's beverage.

Oh, and there's also the little matter of Web SE showing all the menu items in German. Ours doesn't do that. Funny how the developers made such a basic mistake.

(Yes, that was a joke. Please don't explode our inbox.)

Anyway, we point this out in part because Katie, our newly-moonlighting resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, is now chained to a Steveforsaken Dell for eight hours each day, so we figured she (and the other reluctant Wintel-using worker ants out there) might appreciate a little bit of business-hours Macdom, albeit Macdom from a decade and a half ago. Still, does the heart good, doesn't it?