RecipeMaker; or, The Quest for Spendy Glop

Recently I sent Claire (my sister) the following message:

I'm trying to decide what to have for supper tonight. My search for the proper recipe took me most of the day. At last I found it. Enjoy. Actually, I am about to go to Safeway (finally). Then maybe I'll prepare something simple. These recipes were just a bit much, or something, for the occasion. ;-) Cheers, Matt

I attached the following pictures (click for larger version):









For those who have been fortunately unacquainted with RecipeMaker (and Spendy Glop), I offer the following explanation. About ten years ago (let’s see, that would be 1996), I made a very simple piece of software called RecipeMaker. Like much of the software that I made at that time, I probably created the splash screen, with its bizarre “Helix Development” logo, before the rest of the program. This was a very easy project, because I did it in HyperCard (anyone remember that development tool?). Claire and I wrote two recipes as samples and then abandoned RecipeMaker. By the way, spendy has the same meaning as pricey, and we hadn’t heard either word before we moved to Oregon from California in 1993. Spendy still sounded funny to us in ’96 (and still does), so it was clear that it should grace the title of our most ambitious recipe. Well, maybe “Boy’s Lunch” is even more ambitious, in that it leaves out the most important ingredient: divine intervention.

After Claire replied to the above quoted message, I wrote a long description of how I found, and opened, RecipeMaker for the first time in eight years. Following is that description, only slightly edited. Unfortunately, it will probably make very little sense if you aren’t well acquainted with old Mac software and hardware. I hereby permit you to stop reading at this point. : )

About finding the Spendy Glop recipe...sometimes I just get too determined:

First I had to find the EZ135 Drive. I looked in most of the drawers in the office, in several boxes buried under a bunch of junk in the right closet in the office, in boxes, drawers, and cupboards in my bedroom, in a sprawling heap of Apple II and Mac stuff in the front of the barn, in piles of junk in the front shop, and on shelves in the back shop. I found some neat stuff in the Apple II piles. I guess we never really looked to see what’s there. [Hmm, maybe it's worth a few grand.] I wonder if we have Gertrude's Secrets and the Haunted House (or whatever it's called)? I spent a lot of time playing those in first grade, in Mrs. Slattery's room.

I finally found the power adapter in the first shop and the drive in a bag of computer cables in the section with the stereo.

I hooked up the drive to the Quadra 900 [a 15-year-old high-end Mac] in the office and found RecipeMaker (and some other stuff that hasn't been seen in 8 years--including a really early version of Trail Game [our spoof on Oregon Trail] ("You and your grandfather contracted a 31° fever")) on the first EZ135 cartridge that I tried. But I couldn't transfer it to my iBook, because the version of the AppleShare client on the Q900 was too old. So I hooked the EZ135 and the monitor and keyboard to the G3 instead, but it didn't like the driver on the cartridge (it kept hanging the computer), and I was also testing a lousy hard drive at the same time, which was causing other problems.

The AppleShare Client installer that I downloaded was too big to fit on a floppy disk to transfer it to the Quadra, so I copied just the AppleShare extension onto one, and then reconnected everything to the Q900. I got AppleShare installed, but it wouldn't work because I needed a new version of Open Transport. So then I dug out the tangerine iBook and hooked it up to the Internet to get the AppleShare installer. Mozilla hung because of some problem with the network settings, so I rebooted and then got AppleShare Client, and then connected the Ethernet cable to the Quadra instead (Dad took the Ethernet switch, so we can't connect more than one thing at a time to the DSL router), but realized that I also needed the Open Transport installer, so I connected the cable back, but in the meantime the TCP/IP settings on the tangerine were messed up, and I had trouble getting them right, but it finally worked, and then I got Open Transport and connected the cable back to the Quadra and copied it. I installed Open Transport and AppleShare Client, and then it worked, and I copied RecipeMaker and the other fun stuff onto the iBook G4.
In the meantime, I also discovered a lot of other stuff that needs to be sold on eBay or somewhere, and I got a new version of Pythagoras (a really neat After Dark [old screensaver] module that a relative said must be possessed), and found After Dark and all the weird modules I downloaded many years ago on another EZ135 cartridge, and put them on the Quadra. Needless to say, it wasn’t really a very profitable day, but I did find Spendy Glop. Like I said, sometimes I just get too determined....

Here’s a picture of some of the equipment used in recovering RecipeMaker to my iBook G4 (click image to view larger).


The gray laptop at left is the PowerBook 180. Then come the Tangerine iBook on top of a Server G3, and the iBook G4 and Power Mac G3 on the desk. In the right foreground is the Quadra 900, with the SyQuest EZ135 (dark gray) and one cartridge in its protective case on top of it.