
Electronic Whole Earth Catalog - longdefeat
https://archive.org/details/the-electronic-whole-earth-catalog
======
nanna
The current state of the Whole Earth Catalog's online presence is a very sad
state of affairs. [http://www.wholeearth.com](http://www.wholeearth.com) has
been posting php errors for years, it has no support for ssl, it relies on
Flash for core functionality, it makes no attempt for mobile support, and
worst of all the archive is completely inaccessible. I find it hard to imagine
that there's not enough good will in California to give Whole Earth the kind
of website that it deserves. The fact that this hasn't happened makes me
speculate that either there's some kind of interpersonal issue with the
project, or that companies like Apple have no concern for their own origins
and history.

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carrolldunham
As a young person I was given "The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog" and,
leaving aside the pornographic pages and creepy through-running comic that
upset me, I didn't and to this day - despite just reading the Wikipedia page
for Whole Earth Catalog - don't understand what it's FOR and what you're
supposed to DO with it. "It's, you know, ecology mannn". Am I supposed to
order products from it? Hippy solipsism.

~~~
flyinghamster
I always thought it was more of a directory than a catalog.

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jandrese
A 450MB file in 1988!! CD-ROM drives were extremely new at the time. It was
larger than most people's hard drives.

~~~
jhbadger
That exactly was the attraction of CD-ROMs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It was (to the era) practically infinite storage compared to what they were
used to. Before the dawn of the Web in the mid/late 1990s, CD-ROMs were a
major industry with the first electronic encyclopedias and many other
reference works later made obsolete by the Web.

~~~
wrkronmiller
I remember in the early 00's having access to a copy of Microsoft Encarta in
elementary school.

We would have research-based projects (e.g. look up history of $topic and
write 2-page "report" while citing sources).

Students were trained by school librarians how to use the Dewey Decimal
system, and take out/return books.

The teachers/librarians reacted with intense hostility to my getting the
required information within a few seconds, rather than needing to slog through
hundreds of pages of paper reference material.

The librarians, in particular, gave stern lectures about how digital
information was untrustworthy, and the ability to do research using physical
books would always be a critical life skill.

~~~
ethbro
I just posted the other day about how my family bought a full set of
Encyclopedia Britannica, then a couple years later a CD-ROM copy of Encarta
(~500x the capacity of typical 3.5" floppies?), then four or five years later
it was all online. Heady times!

Also, younger folks these days haven't lived through a physical media
migration.

The weirdest thing I remember about the early CD-ROM days was that everything
was parallel distributed: there was a floppy version (10 disks!) that would be
substantially media-cut-down, then a CD-ROM version. Because install bases
don't grow overnight.

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Jerry2
If you wish to run it locally, I found this method that works with modern Macs
[1]. You'll have to fiddle with the .img file however (I extracted it and
access it from SheepShaver as a folder).

[1] [https://jamesfriend.com.au/running-hypercard-
stack-2014](https://jamesfriend.com.au/running-hypercard-stack-2014)

~~~
lioeters
Also, for those who'd like to go down the rabbit hole of emulating classic
Macintosh software, including HyperCard, I'd recommend Mini vMac.

[https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/](https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/)

And the Macintosh Repository:
[https://www.macintoshrepository.org/](https://www.macintoshrepository.org/)

I think I followed this article to get started:
[http://www.toughdev.com/content/2008/06/system-7-5-5-on-
mini...](http://www.toughdev.com/content/2008/06/system-7-5-5-on-mini-vmac/)

By building Mini vMac from source, and gathering ancient pieces of software
over a few months, I was able to put together a fully working and practical
Macintosh 7 running - on macOS, but possible to run on Windows and Linux as
well.

HyperCard, SimCity Classic, Civilization, Lemmings, Berkeley Logo.. Such a
joy.

Just now, I downloaded the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog from the Internet
Archive, and imported into vMac. Ooh, too bad, I get a message:

> To access your files, you must mount this hard disk on a computer that has
> Mac OS 8.1 or later."

My vMac is running 7.5.5. Well, I'll try to extract it on host OS then import.

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ethbro
Brøderbund (and later purchased by The Learning Company) are developer names I
haven't heard in a while. Good memories.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broderbund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broderbund)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Learning_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Learning_Company)

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lgats
What would be the copyright status on something like this?

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pl0x
I enjoyed going through these as a kid in the 60s.

~~~
awkim
Same here - in the 80s. As a kid growing up on the east coast in a
conservative culture, it really shaped my perspective of my worldview on the
"internet", computing, permaculture, sustainability, and counter culture.

Thank you Stewart Brand.

~~~
achn
Same here, in the 90s!

