Booting up the old Mac

Normally, Monday night is game night for me. But work managed to invade and I ended up working through 8pm. To reward myself afterwards, I let myself indulge in some nostalgia:

An Apple Macintosh Performa 575

Yup, this is my first computer (well, it was the family computer at the time). I brought it up stairs and explored a bit. It's got dial-up AOL, old Shareware games, and lots of 5th grade projects contained in this bad boy. Here's what AOL looked like (as seen through some screen-captures):

I found pictures of Mortal Kombat (I was huge into MK at the time) from fan websites (after all, what else was there to do on the internet other than share pictures of games?). What was really thought-provoking were the programs and games written by people who don't even have websites anymore. Some apparently end up getting archived on sites such as macintoshgarden.com (such as an old favorite called Factory); others end up being recreated for play in a browser (such as Glider). 

Ahhh... Nostalgia. It's more and more fun as I get older. Nostalgia back in college was silly - I was thinking back to just a few years ago. Now when I think back to 1996, it's nearly two decades ago.