One Easter a couple of years ago, I saw a notice on a notice board about computer courses by a person who ran them from her home. One of my friends at that time went to the courses, and as I wanted to learn how to touch-type I signed up for a course. I also decided to do a "Multimedia Programming" course in HyperCard, as I was into multimedia and it sounded interesting.
During the school Easter holidays, I went to the HyperCard course. At that time I was already a Mac addict and had owned a trusty Performa 400 for a couple of years, which I had used and disassembled and just about everything else. There was another person about my age, but slightly older, who also owned a Mac and was a Mac enthusiast. We got on quite well and we did our first ever HyperCard stack together. It was called Bulldog, and involved a bulldog coming along and jumping on a house, crushing it. Simple, you may think, but it was the first ever app we produced together.
After the course finished, I didn't see Dan for another year or so. In between, I had started helping out on the computer courses and the person who ran them (called Alison) knew I was interested in Macs, so I did the odd bit of troubleshooting etc for her. I was helping out on a course when I bumped into Dan again, and we had both expanded our knowledge of Macs, and we both did a course in HyperStudio.
For this course, we worked together for the duration, and produced a stack called "21 Years Of Apple" which we compiled, celebrating Apple and dishing dirt on Bill Gates. We decided that it would be a good idea to stay in touch, and we often went round to each others' houses to play about with computers and talk about Apple Computer, Inc.
I came across the "AppleTalk Radio Show" on the net, and thought, "Hey, why don't we do that for Europe", as the Appletalk Radio Show was based in Canada and sported mainly US developments. I asked Dan what he thought of this, and we agreed to give it a go.
This turned out to be a hopeless idea, and eventually we gave up on it. We had already come up with the name MacChat, so we thought we'd do a web site about Macs and discussing them where users could contribute etc. Hours and hours of work went into MacChat, RhapChat and ChatCentral. Dan's computer broke several times, his Zip drive suffered from the Click Of Death, and he had several problems with his hard disk. Dan was developing the actual site, and I was doing the content. We started from scratch about 5 times.
By this time MacChat was used a lot as a name, and the domain name www.macchat.com got taken by a new company which was planning on doing the same stuff as us. We came up with the idea of Macoroni, which would be the company that produced MacChat. Macoroni was a twist on Macaroni, and was deliberately mis-spelled, as you can hardly use the name of a type of pasta for a company, can you? Anyway, it had Mac in the name, and we decided to highlight the word Mac in it by using a different colour for it.
Dan's dad bought the www.macoroni.com domain name for us, and we decided to change MacChat to Macoroni, as we already had the domain name for it. I posted on the EvangeList that we were looking for staff, and 80 applications later, we had our contributors sorted out.
In the last couple of months (as of December 1998), we have progressed much faster than I could ever have thought. We are up and running, with regular contributers writing for us and well-designed logos. Therefore I would like to thank all the contributors mentioned on the info page for their ongoing support.
This is the Macoroni team's mark on the Internet, and we hope that our site will be enjoyed by many people. It is our contribution to the Mac community. Our mission is to evangelise the mac, and we sure hope this helps us do it. Every Mac user knows that Windows is worse than the Mac OS, but the rest of the world don't. I want to support Apple and help them through. I, as a Mac enthusiast, know that our goal shall one day be fulfilled, and that never will Apple give up hope.
Finlay Dobbie, Co-Founder and Contributing Editor
of Macoroni
finlay@dobbie.prestel.co.uk