This is not an In Memoriam tribute, but it’s damn close. The Info-Mac Digest is moribund (they are trying to back-trace the workings of an ancient Python script and the Digests aren’t coming out any more), the repository of Mac shareware and freeware is neither current nor comprehensive any more, and I daresay an entire generation of Mac users, even Mac enthusiasts, have come of age without so much as having heard of it.
Info-Mac was the tapestry that knitted together Mac users internationallly long before there was a world wide web. You could join for free and post questions like “I just bought a replacement SCSI hard drive. How do I put the jumpers on the pins to make it be SCSI ID 0?” or “I have an '030 accelerator in my Mac SE but the installer that Aldus uses checks the machine ID and my Mac bravely identifies itself as a Mac SE and the installer refuses to go forward saying I need at least an '020 with an FPU to use their product, is there some way to fool it or get it to understand that I have an accelerator?”
Info-Mac was also where you read the little blurbs about the latest shareware and freeware. After one or two “stupid newbie questions” you learned how to download Fetch and point it to ftp://sumex-aim.stanford.edu/info-mac/ and later on to the mirror sites like ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu and you’d wait while your 2400 modem pulled down the file, which would be in BinHex format, and you’d de-BinHex it and decompress it (which might require Compact Pro or it might require Stuffit or less often might require you to use Packit or DDExpand to turn the file into something useful). And you’d read the instructions and try out the software. My first download was a winner – SFVol, an “INIT” (later called an “Extension”) that let me create a new folder from within a Save or a Save As dialog box under System 6 in 1998 or 1999.
And Info-Mac, ultimately, was the Mac University. You’d subscribe and read and try out the shareware and freeware and ask some questions, and you’d read other folks’ questions and realize you wanted to know that too and you’d happily read the answers. And you’d get curious about things that kept popping up in the Digest and you’d either ask or figure it out from context and maybe explore further by doing some more downloads. And then one day some newbie would ask a question and you’d realize you’d faced that and knew the answer and you’d post and feel like a Mac maven momentarily.
And months would roll by and the process would continue and one day someone would see your extremely-customized & massively-extended Mac and watch while you did something exotic like printed a Mac file to PDF and encoded it and sent it as an email attachment to a PC user and put a second copy on a PC disk which you could access on your Mac thanks to DOSMounter or the much-klunkier Apple File Exchange and they’d say “How did you DO that? Where did you LEARN all this stuff?” And you’d realize you really did know how to do lots of things that other computer users did not know.
Raise your hand if you are or were an Info-Mac subscriber. Describe the software you downloaded (or uploaded for other folk’s benefit), the problems you got help with (or helped others with), and tell them what Info-Mac was like back when.