You can't email Melsor.

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Macintosh SE/30
Apple Computer, Inc.
MSRP (1989): $4,369

Hypercard
Apple Computer, Inc.
MSRP : $99

As stylish as it is small, the classic lines of the Macintosh SE/30 are instantly recognizable to anyone who’s been using a computer longer than 10 years. You can say what you want about its cramped, nine-inch, black-and-white monitor and its snail’s-pace 16MHz Motorola 68030 processor, but it’s impossible to keep yourself from grinning once you start monkeying around in Hypercard, an easy-to-use program that inspired Macromedia Director, Flash and the World Wide Web.

In one of my previous lives, the company I worked for had a “server farm” of six SE/30s that were made redundant two times over by a single PowerMac G4, so I took the opportunity to liberate one of them from the computer morgue in the supply closet. As décor, it was an excellent compliment to my Jersey City apartment—small and kind of grungy. But the truth is that, even in 2002, I was actually using the thing, for actual work.

Along came my girlfriend with her BA in English and her concentration in hypertext. She was convinced that somewhere there lurked a dream job that would use these qualifications. In retrospect—there wasn’t. She felt that she had this theoretical job in the bag, if only she had the killer resumé. But how do you put together a good hypertext resumé?

“Everybody and his brother knows HTML,” I said. “If you really are a ’leet old-skool hypertext hax0r, why not do it up in Hypercard and mail out the floppy?” Several glasses of sherry later, long after any kind of meaningful human/computer interaction had ceased to be possible, we were huddled around the SE/30 doing up a Hyperresumé, 1994-style. (Indeed, we were wild people living wild lives.)

“So, you’re from Melrose, right?” I said, typing in the requisite contact information. But something terrible had happened between brain and keyboard. The screen said: “Melsor.” “Yeah, Melsor. It’s, like, your pseudonym, right? Melsor the Barbarian.” Type type type—the screen said: “Melsor teh Barbatuan.” Within half an hour, this Melsor person had quite an impressive CV, what with all the pillaging and burninating. Unlike most resumés, there was also an Easter egg that played burping and farting noises. Then someone found the flood fill tool and the weird pattern that looks like roofing tiles and the whole thing just went straight to hell.

Pros: Getting drunk and writing stacks is crazy fun—if you’re a total nerd.

Cons: Flood fill tool and the weird pattern that looks like roofing tiles.

Dave tried selling the publisher on redoing the Artvoice Web site in Hypercard, but it didn’t fly. His girlfriend is still looking for a job in the burgeoning hypertext creative writing industry and Dave is accepting job offers for her at webmaster@artvoice.com.