So, it’s back to the Apple ///. Hey, it’s been calling – what can I do? I just can’t leave a problem unresolved. Anyway, I’d like to thank Dave Ottalini from Washington Apple Pi for providing me with working Quark Catalyst disks so I could try to get to the data on the ProFile drive.
My concern here, though, is (if I understand the manual) once you load a program onto the ProFile with Catalyst, it’s “branded” with the Catalyst’s serial number, so that files loaded with one serial number can’t be accessed with a copy of Catalyst that has a different serial. Which would have been a major inconvenience 20 years ago, if your Catalyst disk went bad and you didn’t have a backup. And since the Catalyst disk is apparently so heavily protected, that scenario probably isn’t so uncommon, especially these days with more and more floppy disks lost to the ravages of time. True, Quark included a complementary back up floppy with the package, but if you’ve lost it or it’s dead, you could be out of luck.
WAP has a disk image for a program that apparently deserializes Catalyst, and another to make a back up of your existing disk, but I don’t know if that allows you to access programs that have already been installed by another Catalyst that hasn’t already been deserialized.
Stay tuned!
A bit of personal trivia. The Quark headquarters building, which Google maps tells me is about 10 miles from my house, is located at 1800 Grant Street in Denver. In the mid-1990s, I worked for Kaiser-Permanente, building databases to help them index their extensive library of medical publications and articles. The Kaiser offices were located in this building, several floors below Quark. On my lunch breaks, I used to ride the elevator up and talk tech with whomever happened to be around that would listen to me. I wonder what they’d say if I walked in with a copy of Catalyst, asking for technical support
Actually, I know what they’d say: “Security!”