Happy #Marchintosh to those who celebrate.

[timothyroes@mastodon.social]

@isocat @csilverman same. Will you tell us about the story of Mr Macintosh grandpa?

[_the_cloud@mastodon.social]

@csilverman Never heard of this being implemented as a Mac extension, but there is now a JS version for the browser: https://github.com/corrinely/mr-macintosh

[csilverman@mastodon.social]

@nygl I've heard of NetBunny! The guy who wrote it, Dean Yu, was one of the core System 7 "Blue Meanies" team, if I remember.

[csilverman@mastodon.social]

@_the_cloud ha! Of course someone did a browser extension for this—nice. I didn't even think to check.

[csilverman@mastodon.social]

@nygl I don't know enough about GlobalTalk's inner workings to responsibly encourage this, but I'll admit I'm curious to know if it would work. A shared global map, with people adding pins every time the bunny shows up on their machine, would be kind of neat.

You remember if it was restricted to a specific zone, or did it have access to the full AppleTalk network?

[_the_cloud@mastodon.social]

@csilverman @nygl NetBunny was released at MacHack and there are two versions on the MacHack CDs. The MacHack '90 version did not appear to use zones, but the updated version for MacHack '91 says "choose a zone from the left list, then choose a machine name from the right list" to start it going, so I suspect it probably would work. Search on archive.org for "machack cd" to find many CD images (note: each year included all the hacks from the previous years.)

[yildo@cosocial.ca]

@csilverman Could it have been a Microsoft Office Assistant?

[su_liam@mas.to]

@csilverman I love my Mac. I mostly like my iPhone. I hate Apple.

[andrewharvey@hachyderm.io]

@csilverman It wasn't the guy from Macintosh Basics was it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ScS4OYDfHE

Gosh this takes me back to 1994, on our family's LCII, potentially before I could read.

[alecska@mastodon.social]

@gedeonm @csilverman the author is Dave Krugman on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/DVTfVNKDksv/
Please credit or link to the original.

[gedeonm@mastodon.social]

@alecska @csilverman Updated, thanks!

[csilverman@mastodon.social]

@andrewharvey heh yeah, I think I binged the entire thing in an hour or two hours or whatever it was. That's a face I'll never forget.

But no, it wouldn't have been Mac Basics Guy. The way the lab assistant described it, the appearance of this character was completely unexpected, and it disappeared very quickly; it wasn't obviously related to anything he was doing at the time.

[csilverman@mastodon.social]

@yildo I'm pretty sure he would have recognized those. But you reminded me of a new possibility—that he accidentally invoked PlainTalk and brought up one of the PlainTalk avatars: https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/1514st0/anyone_else_remember_the_classic_plaintalk/

I don't remember where on the screen this appeared. I thought it was in one of the menus, like Mr Macintosh was supposed to do, but maybe it was a window…?

Also, did the PlainTalk characters vanish if you didn't interact with them? It's been 30 years, so I don't recall exactly how they worked.

[geekman@mastodon.social]

@csilverman But where's his little dog(cow)?