Chemventory is a Hypercard stack written by Rob Toreki to keep track of the chemical inventory in his research labs. Various kinds of information can be entered for each chemical and the inventory cards may be sorted and searched with ease.

Chemventory can run on any Mac running Hypercard 2.2 or greater. Which means that you need to be running Mac OS 9 to run it. Which means that you are old as the hills or dirt poor, possibly both. But if you do have an old Mac lying around, please give the program a try as it does its job really well and doesn't cost anything.

You can download:

• The Chemventory Manual which includes full information and screen shots.

• Chemventory HyperCard Stack which is an uncompiled HyperCard stack that gives you the freedom/ability to customize the programming. But a copy of HyperCard 2.2 is required to use it, a program that was last updated in 1992. Again, Mac OS 9 is required.

• Chemventory HyperCard Application contains an embedded HyperCard runtime engine so you can run it without owning a copy of HyperCard. But you won't be able to tinker with the programming. Again, Mac OS 9 is required.

Happy days! We have recently become aware of an open-source Mac OS 9 emulator called Sheep Shaver. It requires a particular set of OS 8 or 9 installation discs, but provided you have those, the setup instructions are fairly straightforward. In our experience it's a little unstable under Leopard on PowerPC, but works just fine under Snow Leopard on Intel.