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Comment by coward123 | Hacker News Reader

You know what I miss from that era? The extension that would allow Oscar the Grouch to pop out of the trash can. What I mean is - Macintosh really had this different vibe back then. You could easily customize everything about your experience in a way that was very exploratory. How many hours of my youth were wasted screwing around in RezEdit or in making cool icons? Yes, it's super cool there are things like Swift Playground these days - I'm glad we live in an era where I don't have to pirate Symantec Pascal like I did when I was 13 and wanted to learn how to code. But, I wish the overall user experience were more the fun and creative feel we once had rather than a very slick but overly corporate one.

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Thanks for this. I had more fun writing The Grouch and another goofy app named VideoBeep than I did with 35 years of more serious software. -Eric Shapiro

So cool that you're here and responding! Thank you! I'm going to find this app and get it on my SE/30 pronto.

Thank you for making it! “Oh I love trash! I love it because it’s trash!”

Yeah, besides the fun of personalization and just pure joy of poking around, I worry that some true innovation might be stifled by all this protections.

There should be several levels of security toggles, from being able to install software from anywhere on the internet, all the way to disabling memory protection altogether. As long as the user completely understands each, I think we would be in a much better situation.

You mean like installing automatic updates ? Or running untrusted code in the browser ?

I didn't understand your question

haha, didn't he sing a little song as well? one of my other favorites from those times was the Eyeballs INIT... useless but still completely awesome. A buddy of mine reimplemented it in JS so you can have Eyeballs on your website hahah http://jouire.com/eyeballs/

Ah, I could go on and on about cool stuff like that. Indeed, ResEdit was super awesome, and I learned soo much about how computers work because of it (also having been a young kid who wanted to learn). Great memories :)

There is actually a modern version of Eyeballs available, updated for Apple Silicon http://www.sticksoftware.com/software/Eyeballs.html

Oohh, awesome, thanks. Ah, the original developer of Eyeballs, Stick Software / Ben Haller! He also made Solarian II, an old favorite of mine.. nice! Very cool to see all the historical stuff on the website too: http://www.sticksoftware.com/about.html

Yes - "Oh I love trash!" and "I love it because it's trash!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyNDUboVsL8

Thanks for posting this. What a fun memory. Now I’m wondering how the heck I ended up with it on my families SE/30. We weren’t part of a local MUG and obviously no internet… random shareware I guess?

> I'm glad we live in an era where I don't have to pirate Symantec Pascal like I did when I was 13 and wanted to learn how to code.

I pirated a copy of REALBasic to make my first Mac program. I did, ironically pay for a book on how to program with it though.

I understand why compilers and IDEs cost money, but it seems obvious to me that they should be free and easy for everyone. I’m glad we live in this era.

Chiming in with my experience growing up in late 00 early 10s, I spent a lot of similar time doing such things with Linux :) .

> The extension that would allow Oscar the Grouch to pop out of the trash can

I miss the Itchy and Scratchy screen saver for After Dark.

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