A strange little side quest
Zoom out from Baby Cathy Ep18: Play Date for a moment and the timeline gets surprisingly deep. Barbie Fashion Designer became a major software hit in 1996, selling more than 500,000 copies in two months and proving there was a large audience for fashion-focused computer play. The broader history adds one more wrinkle. Reader Rabbit's 1986 arrival was part of a major expansion of educational computer software before the CD-ROM boom of the 1990s. That history is one reason familiar mechanics can still feel new when they are recombined well.
