I was given a trove of vintage Mac and BMUG materials

[Huxley]

A local friend messaged me a couple days ago to point out a post on a local community app I'd never heard of (think NextDoor, but hopefully less awful). The poster was offering to give away some vaguely-defined Mac stuff - old magazines, CD-ROM's, books, etc., along with some Berkeley Mac User Group ("BMUG") materials. I reached out and arranged a meetup, and went over to his place yesterday. It turns out that the person had been an active BMUG member for most of the late 80's through the early 2000's, and had held on to a variety of interesting items.

He ultimately gave me three boxes of stuff, a sort of "Old Mac Variety Pack." I haven't had any time to dig in and really investigate and catalog everything yet, but at first glance I've seen:

• A bunch of random issues of MacAddict Magazine
• A couple dozen MacAddict CD-ROM's
• Several VHS tapes, which based on the labels, likely contain 1990's-era software demos presented at BMUG meetings and possibly a show-floor walkthrough of MacWorld Expo '92
• Lots of BMUG Newsletter CD-ROM's
• Several phone-book-sized BMUG print books
• Several 1990's-era Mac books
• A variety of 1990's-era Mac games on CD-ROM
• A still-sealed copy of HyperCard 2.3, complete with its original $20 clearance price-tag(!)

I've got some work travel coming up soon so it might not happen until later this Fall, but I'm excited to catalog these materials and upload anything that's not already present onto the Internet Archive!

Huxley

 

[olePigeon]

Very cool. Any of the BMUG CD-ROMs have software? Their old floppy disks and CD-ROMs are a treasure trove for lost freeware and shareware titles. I have a huge stack of BMUG disks from the 80s, but they all had mold on them and were unreadable. It was a huge disappointment.

 

[joshc]

Pretty cool. The sort of stuff I would collect if I had more space...

 

[ArmorAlley]

Lucky you!
That HyperCard 2.3 package is really nice. I couldn't care less about shrinkwrap (although the little application is super) but there are some collectors of HyperCard who may very well be hyperventilating as I type.

 

[joshc]

but there are some collectors of HyperCard who may very well be hyperventilating as I type.

I see what you did there.