Apple Artifact from a Forgotten World: It Shipped!

Found in my closet. (Click thumbnail for full version.)

Here’s the explanation:

In 1995 I went indie. My company was called World Wide Power & Light. (Another company already had a similar name, so we renamed the company to Ranchero Software later in 1996. In those days all the cool domain names ended with a vowel: Tango, Marimba, etc.)

Our first main product was a search engine CGI for Macs running WebSTAR (originally MacHTTP). It glued together Frontier and Filemaker Pro to index files on the hard drive and make them searchable.

The price was $99 and we sold 9 copies.

The plaque is from Apple and signed by Heidi Roizen (formerly of T/Maker; then VP of Apple Developer Relations). I’ve never seen any other plaques like this, so I don’t know how many they gave out.

But I was brand-new to all this, and I loved it.

(It looks like our product page is still on the Wayback Machine.)

Update 4:05 pm: Yes, our search engine was called Spotlight. This was long before there was a Spotlight feature on Macs.