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Comment by gr33nq | Hacker News Reader

This took me on a trip down memory lane back to my days in elementary school. I recall our class going to the computer lab once a week and having an hour to spend on an iMac G3, of which some were on OS8 and others OS9. Going back even further to kindergarten, our logins on those Macs were forced to use a simplified UI that displayed only icons/tiles of applications -- no browsing files or anything sophisticated from what I remember (edit: looks like they were called "Panels") [0]. The Incredible Machine [1] was what I personally looked forward to playing most. I'm sure nostalgia plays a big role in the feeling I get when toying around with emulators like this, but I'm also convinced that the simplicity, curiosity, and novelty of computing in the late 90s/early 2000s is something that I may never be able to replicate again in my lifetime.

[0] http://toastytech.com/guis/macos9users.png

[1] https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-incredible-machine-3

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I believe you're remembering "At Ease"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

This is exactly what I'm remembering. Thank you for sharing.

We had one staff member in charge of both the library and computer lab at my school, and I always admired her know-how when we'd watch her demonstrate something or troubleshoot a problem. Looking back now at the selection of software she curated for us, the uniformity of the look-and-feel across all Macs on campus, having a networked file share accessible from the 2-3 iMacs/Macintosh LCs we had in each classroom and in the lab, I appreciate how she really went above and beyond for that period of time and fostered so much intrigue in me. I really have to attribute a lot of my interest in tech to her during those formative years.

I don't have any specific memory of using At Ease on a school computer, but we had a couple of them in the children's section of the local library.

My middle school is where they got really into computers, a bunch of early G3 iMacs in each classroom and each student had a networked home folder with a schoolname.org/~user website, back in the early 2000s.

I ended up not going into computers as a profession (so far), but I poke around with hobby projects and really appreciate how powerful the modern web tooling has gotten, though it's also vastly more complicated.

I got in so much trouble due to a gaping security hole in At Ease back in 7th grade. You could put a floppy disk in and it would present the documents and folders, but no applications. However, it would allow you to open Desk Accessories (a System <6 era type of special app which could multitask before multi-finder).

So being the nerdy troublemaker that I was, I used a DA to launch other programs such as ResEdit and bob's your uncle. I had installed all the cool After Dark screen savers on each machine including the little space game one.

They never figured out how I did it, but they did put two and two together that I was the one who had done it. They tried to suspend me for 2 days for it, but my Dad argued that they weren't providing interesting classes using the technology. Not only did I not get suspended, next year they ended up making Sim Earth into a class and using it as a teaching aid.

Thanks Dad, I miss you.

Security at the time was an afterthought, when I was in high school on OS 9 they whitelisted what programs could open on student accounts, but if you created a custom "Open X" button in the AppleWorks toolbar it would first show you an error that you weren't allowed to open it, and then open it anyway.

The check for whether a program was on the whitelist used the executable's 4-character "creator code", so you could also change that to an allowed code in ResEdit and make anything you want open without argument straight from Finder.

I used to use "RASM" which was the remote access status monitor, and was enabled for all counts by default.

Now if only someone could replicate the fan noise and that old computer smell.

Don't forget the grinding/croaking of those old hard drives!

The wurr chhkchkchk of floppies is what does it for me

Chk chk.... chk chk.... chk chk..... chk chk.... dkdkdk.

    Not ready reading drive A. Abort/Retry/Fail?_

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