Al Morale Demo

Al Morale Demo is the sample release of Al Morale, a tongue-in-cheek desktop companion that places a tiny virtual yes-man in a cube on your screen. Contributed to Info-Mac by tbodine@primenet.com, the program showers you with flattery, addresses you by glorified titles and laughs at your jokes while you work.

What Al Does

Al Morale is pitched as comic relief from office politics and work woes. From his small cubicle on the Mac desktop, Al delivers funny flattery and over-the-top kudos: he praises your ideas, raves about your work, laughs at your jokes and refers to you by whichever grandiose title (boss, chief, maestro and so on) you select in his preferences.

The Demo Cut

This release is the demo build, which exposes a sampler of Al's roughly one hundred lines of flattery and fun. The full commercial version unlocks the complete library of lines and is also marketed as a comic-relief gadget for use during meetings and presentations, not just for solo desktop use.

Tone and Purpose

Al Morale belongs to the late-1990s wave of small humor utilities for the Mac, in the same comedic tradition as desktop pets and "talking" assistants. There are no game mechanics: the application is closer to an interactive office novelty than software in any productive sense, and the author explicitly lists "a sense of humor" as part of the system requirements.

System Requirements

The demo requires a PowerPC Macintosh and the aforementioned sense of humor. There are no specified RAM or display floors beyond what running a small PowerPC application of the era already implies.