When Apple first shipped the Macintosh, it included a two-disk introduction called the Guided Tour. Guided Tour disks have become a Mac staple, and many major products still ship with Guided Tour disks of their own. The technology and techniques for creating a Guided Tour were (and still are) complex, however, and not accessible to average users.
ScreenRecorder changes all that. It records all activity on a Mac screen, creating “tapes” that you can play back as often as you like. You can send them to other locations via E-mail, modem, or disk, since ScreenRecorder and a tape several minutes long can easily fit on a Floppy You can also have tapes loop continuously until you stop them, which makes them ideal for demos, and incorporate them into and play them hack from within a HyperCard stack. ScreenRecorder makes it possible to produce desktop presentations and interactive training materials (such as Guided Tours) easily.
Installing ScreenRecorder is simply a matter of dragging two files into your System Folder (you can omit the 30K help (lie if you wish) and restarting your Mac. ScreenRecorder automatically installs its driver and DA.
Using ScreenRecorder to record your activities is just about as easy. Open the desk accessory and click on the Rec (Record) button. When you’re taping, a liny moving tape icon is visible in the lower-left corner of your screen. You can pause and restart tapes at any point in the recording process. Click on the tape icon to stop.
If the System RAM cache is turned on, ScreenRecorder waits until a specified amount of new data is generated before saving it automatically to disk. The pauses that occur when the program saves the new material to disk can become annoying. The default setting of 16K is good; larger settings (3,20OK is the upper limit!) cause longer pauses with longer intervals between them; and smaller settings (down to 1K) can be infuriating, as the program seems to be constantly writing to disk.
Tapes come in two types: ordinary and looping. Looping tapes act much like the black boxes on airliners, recording a certain amount of information and then recording over the previously recorded information. The default length of a looping tape is 370K, a healthy amount, but you can set it to any value you want, as long as you remember to leave enough floppy or hard-disk storage space for it. Looping tapes rely on disk storage, not RAM. Unless you’re creating a looping tape, you have to keep in mind the amount of disk space you have available. Tapes can rapidly get pretty big.
Tapes are not, unfortunately, self-running applications, but by incorporating a tape into a HyperCard stack (using PlayScreen technology), you can send tapes that require only HyperCard for playback. Most Mac owners have HyperCard or have access to it, so placing tapes into stacks is generally the best way to distribute them to a wide audience: unfortunately, you’ll probably need 2 megabytes of RAM to run them in HyperCard.
A special Installer stack installs the PlayScreen XCMD into any other stack. Farallon allows anyone to distribute tapes and the stacks that can play them without paying additional fees or requesting special licenses.
PlayScreen can play, but not create, a ScreenRecorder tape. Tapes played through HyperCard can be augmented by sound files (such as those created with Farallon’s MacRecorder) to produce multimedia presentations and training programs.
Installing a PlayScreen button can be as simple as running the Installer stack. You can install it into your Home stack or any other stack you want. Advanced HyperCard programmers can program direct calls to the XCMD into their stacks. All the necessary details are in the manual.
Playback, both normal and from within HyperCard, is usually a bit jerky. I found that most tapes ran a bit too slowly; speeding up playback a notch or two made them more effective.
ScreenRecorder comes with an impressive Tour disk, made with ScreenRecorder, MacRecorder, and HyperCard. There’s also an excellent manual, whose troubleshooting sections are a model of good manual writing.
If ScreenRecorder tapes could be edited, this would be a five-mouse program and an absolute necessity in every presenter’s and trainer’s tool kit. As is, it's merely excellent.
Paden, Jake. (June 1989). ScreenRecorder. MacUser. (pg. 62).
Farallon Computing, Inc.
Applications
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ScreenRecorder.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
