Re: Catalyst for Apple II

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Chris M wrote:

>On Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:51:29 -0500, "John" <applemann2@hotmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>Does anyone have a copy of this software?  I understand it was used as a
>>menu type program for the Profile hard drives.  I would like to try it on
>>the CFFA card.
>
>I just recently got a CFFA card (they're cool!) and I was always
>booting into the ProDOS 8 System Utilities 3.1 program.  Just
>yesterday I installed ProSEL 8 - it's a great startup and program
>launcher.  There's plenty of documentation and you can customize its
>appearance quite a bit.
>
>It also comes with a bunch of great utility programs- backup/restore,
>disk defragger, block/sector editor, file finder, and more.  Last
>night I backed up the contents of my CFFA card onto five 3.5" floppies
>using the "backup" program.. Worked great..

ProSel is a _great_ suite of programs, united by a very good
program selector.  IMHO, it is the 8-bit selector "suite" of
choice.  I haven't used the 16-bit flavor, so I can't comment
on it, but I would expect similar quality.

Catalyst is from an earlier, harsher time, when much productivity
software was copy-protected and therefore not easily hard disk
installable.  Catalyst provided a way to install such software,
apparently by agreement with the makers, that "locked" the
hard disk version of the programs to the Catalyst "key" disk,
and modified the original floppies so that they were no longer
bootable or installable.

As copy protection became known as the "great disabler" of
the software world and was discontinued, Catalyst became
functionally obsolete.  The only place for Catalyst since then
has been the Apple ///, whose software bloom failed to outlast
the era of copy protection.

-michael

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