Finding a home for Mac OS 9-era software?

I’m doing some office-cleaning, and found a bunch of old (OS 9-era) software gathering dust. It’s all full legal copies (complete with boxes and—gasp!—printed user manuals. Some of it’s pretty good stuff (Framemaker, Dreamweaver, PageMaker, WordPerfect, Toast, Norton Utilities, etc.) and some not so much. All too old to upgrade to current versions unless you’ve got a silver tongue and can persuade the sales staff at these companies to smile upon you.

Rather than dumping the boxes into recycling or the waste stream, I’d rather give it to a good home. I’m in Montreal, Canada, so local folk or organizations get priority; cross-border shipping is pricey and might be tricky in terms of customs declarations. But if you’re willing to pay shipping costs and possibly import duties, it’s all free to a good home!

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Forgot to mention: please cc your reply to geoff@geoff-hart.com. Work’s pretty crazy these days, so I might forget to check the forum here.

Something to think about if you don’t have any takers…CDs and DVDs make very effective coasters for cold and hot beverages. And they are often interesting and fun conversation starters with guests.

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Take them to your local thrift store. There are more than a few people who keep old computers going and they’ll usually grab software to play with too. I don’t haunt the thrift stores myself, because I have a friend who does that to excess and brings some of the precious gleanings to me.

Also, OS 9 software is now easy to run even on new Macs, via the Mac OS 9.app, based on sheepshaver:

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That’s awesome. If only something that simple existed to do say High Sierra and apps compatible with that on an M1 system running Ventura. :slight_smile:

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Another idea if you’ve got software disks that are related to professional printing, typography or digital artwork is to donate it to the Museum Of Printing in Haverhill, Mass. Just contact them in advance to see if you’ve got something printing related that they don’t already have:

Sorry for the delayed reply… work’s a bit crazy these days. Thanks for all the excellent suggestions. I’ve bookmarked the emulation software (need to see whether it will run on my M1 under Rosetta) and will shortly contact the museum. The thrift shop is an interesting idea; the local one is too small to have a computer section, but there are bigger ones that might have a use for the software.

“I’ve bookmarked the emulation software (need to see whether it will run on my M1 under Rosetta)”

No need for Rosetta: “This is a universal application, native to both Intel and Apple Silicon machines.” The sheepshaver base system is doing the 68nnn emulation. I don’t have a way to test it though.

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Thanks. Way too much to do, but it’s on the calendar to test at some point.

Thanks also to MMTalker. I contacted the Museum of Printing and they were quite happy to receive the donation, so I’ve boxed it all up and Madame will bring it with her next time she drives down to Boston (probably in a couple months).

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I think he has mostly floppies. Not many CD-ROM drives back then.

Floppies would most definitely be appreciated, as well as anything preceding floppies. They are a history focused museum, they have a lot of stuff from the 1800s, way before Apple became an apple in Steve Jobs’ eye.

Check out their website:

They are very aware of how Macs “changed the world.”