I spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff from the past

Our first PC was a DEC Station 917 - which I've mentioned in a previous post and it came with plenty of software to keep the younger me entertained. Remember - the Internet wasn't really a thing at this point...Anyway last night I thought it might be fun to find a wallpaper that I used to have. It was of a parrot and that's all I could remember. I had no idea where I got it from other than we had a very limited selection of software back in the day - so it had to have been from one of those. 

One of the CDs was a CD Sampler that had demos of Microsoft Home software and hardware products. I used to browse this CD a lot - wishing I we had the cool looking Microsoft Home Mouse or the Natural Keyboard. 

Turns out, someone archived it and put it on archive.org - so I downloaded it and created a Windows 98 VM to explore. I fired it up and was immediately transported back to 1995. 



The Microsoft Home Mouse is awful. Ergonomically it's terrible but I loved the look of it back in the day. If you hold it up, it looks like a house with a garage and where the cable connects looks like a chimney. It looked sooo cool. I mean it has a left and a right mouse button but no scroll wheel that we're accustomed today. 

One of the things I love about being an adult now is being able to afford to buy things I never could as a kid. I now own two of them! They're serial so not much use these days but I'm pleased to have them in my collection. 

Here's a pic of one of them that I put on Instagram: Link

The second piece of hardware I wanted was the Natural keyboard - which I found unused New-Old-Stock on eBay. I took a pic of it and posted it on Instagram too: Link

ANYWAY, on the CD sampler were some demos of some software called Microsoft Scenes. Microsoft Scenes were screen savers that displays a slide show of photographs. It was packaged in several varieties with different themed galleries. They're available on winworldpc.com's website. They need Windows 3.1 but work on Windows 95/98. 

I downloaded the Nature Club and Wildlife packages and installed them. Finally - after all these years I found my parrot friend. It's nothing special, it's low quality and low resolution but it's what I used back in the day. 


So about there hours of work to get a 640x480 image. I feel like that's time well spent and when the Starion arrives, I'll be sure to transfer this pic over to it just for that authentic experience. 

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