William Shakespeare's Macbeth
Edited by A.R. Braunmuller
Sealed Collectible CD-Rom Rare OOP from original
Voyager Production Release
Multi Media CD-Rom Software
Produced in the Mid-1990s by the Original Voyager Company
Voyager's Macbeth
Format:
Macintosh/Windows CD-ROM
SRP: $39.95
Curriculum:
Literature; Performing Arts
This CD-ROM really has
a lot to offer. It is of an equally high standard as an academic edition of the
play, and combines text and multimedia options (audio and video) to good
effect.
Voyager's Macbeth is a
CD-ROM edition of the play; based on the recently published Cambridge edition
(edited by one of the CD-ROM's co-authors, Professor A. R. Braunmuller)
with a complete audio performance of the entire play by the Royal Shakespeare
Company, directed by Trevor Nunn, and starring Ian McKellan as
Macbeth, and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth. Readers can simply read the play, or
just listen, or listen and read; the pages will turn automatically! And
clicking on any line of the play takes the reader to that place in the audio
performance. There are notes and glosses (1,500 of them), explanatory essays
(over 25,000 words worth), video clips from other performances of key scences
so you can compare different performances of the same scene, maps, charts,
images -- just about everything anyone could want. Readers can make all sorts
of notes of their own, and export them with the parts of the play and
commentary that they go with, to use in a word processor.
FEATURES
Technical requirements for Voyager's CD-Roms
Windows: 486SX-33 or higher processor; 640 x 480, 256 color display; 8 MB RAM MPC2-compatible CD-ROM drive and sound card with speakers or headphones; Microsoft Windows 3.1 (TM); MS-DOS 5.0 or higher.
Macintosh: Any Macintosh (25-MHz 68030 processor or better); System 7 or higher; 5,000K of available RAM; 13" color monitor; double-speed CD-ROM drive.
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The Voyager collection of CD-ROMs represents an era that is fading into oblivion. Due to a lack of computer systems still capable of executing this software, Voyager products that are still available in the original sealed packaging have significant historical value for collectors only.
The following discussion of CD-ROM technology and its preservation is found in The International Journal of Digital Curation; Volume 7, Issue 2 | 2012:
Virtual CD-ROM Collections
Although the Voyager CD-ROMs have substantial historical significance, they, and most other published CD-ROMs, are destined to have a dwindling user base whose expertise in the systems required to use them is in sharp decline. The physical machines required to execute them have already disappeared from most educational institutions and even the operating systems are increasingly hard to find; at Indiana University, which once had many hundreds of “classic macs”, only one person within our University IT Services had distribution disks of the corresponding operating system software. The physical copies of these CD-ROMs are disappearing from library shelves. In seeking examples for this paper we made extensive use of interlibrary loan and we found that many cataloged copies of Voyager CD-ROMs are either missing or damaged.
The long-term probability for individual libraries providing physical access to the Voyager and other published CD-ROMs is nearly nil. The user base is dwindling, the existing hardware and software support disappearing, and the physical media degrading. While we believe these materials have substantial historical significance, their ultimate survival depends upon spreading the preservation burden across many institutions through a virtual collection that enables networked access for a sparsely distributed base of patrons using modern work-stations.