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That's a very funny anecdote about Apple that I can find no evidence of ever actually happening. Leaving aside the fact that Xerox had GUI, including the modern WIMP GUI we're all familiar with today, in 1974. The Apple Lisa was released at least a year before the Macintosh 128K came out in 1984. As much as I love the idea of Apple making such an amateur mistake, I'm going to need a reputable source before I believe that story actually happened.
Edit: I'm seeing a lot of "it's technically possible" but still no sources to confirm that it actually occurred. Until a a verifiable source emerges, I'm still going to assume this story never actually happened. Anyone have Woz's contact info? We could always just ask him.
I've seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the "Empty Trash" command before I stepped in.
It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I'm not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn't be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn't cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.
Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)
I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.
Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.
Maybe you had ones with built-in hard drives which, if ejected unexpectedly, may have caused problems on early Macs.
But there was and still is no "computer" icon on the Mac OS desktop, and dragging a disk to the trash just ejects it.
Seconded.
I've read most of folklore.org and do not recall any such story. In fact, how do you even "drag the computer to the waste basket" as the first/only icon would be the System floppy and afaik they've never had / still don't have a "computer icon". 🤔
First image I could find of the desktop and there is computer icons right there.
If dragging one of those to wastebasket at the bottom right crashed the computer, it would fit the description of the event.
I wonder if the first attempt was simply dragging that Mac System Software to the trash. Not "the computer icon", but it's possible the anecdote was/is slightly misremembered by John
Seems like a simple folley, the person I responded to said it was a floppy (it’s two layers of “mesh”?) and couldn’t remember the computer icons. Details get fuzzy, I had no idea and was curious so I just looked it up. I’ve got no horse here.
Dragging a floppy to the bin would simply eject it... 🤷 Well all right, maybe the story is from before the intro of the "Insert disk Foo".
Ngl that'd be hilarious if that was basically a GUI for "rm -rf /" LOL
The point of the trash was that nothing happened until you emptied it. And the OS was loaded into memory so you could eject the OS disk so it wasn't actively using those files. I don't think even dragging System to the trash and emptying it would have done anything except prevent you from booting with that System disk.
I'm not even an Apple fan but folklore.org sounds fascinating. I love retro computing history! :D Thanks for sharing that!
You honestly couldn't pay me enough to use MacOS so I didn't know there wasn't a "computer icon" but I love that detail. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that whole anecdote is fictitious.
Hating an operating system such that someone wouldn't use it in exchange for a million dollars is quite the flex.
I'm an IT person professionally, and I use Fedora as my daily driver. MacOS just grinds on me in ways I can't properly articulate.
Edit: oh wait, maybe I can!
And you're obsessed with giant cocks. This is very interesting. A therapist could write a book on you.
"Cock," singular. It wouldn't be a very interesting book. I don't have any hard to pronounce problems, I'm just a jerk.
I'm an IT person professionally, and I use Fedora as my daily driver.
Ah, Fedora, that brings back memories. We used to call it RootHat back in the day when it was still RedHat. It was what all the first-time Linux users used before they graduated to Debian or Slackware. They would use root as they day to day account, hence the name.
Havent used it in forever. Is it still as big a pile of shit as it was in the 90’s ?
I've been using it since Fedora Core 7 back in like 05 or something. It's pretty solid. I use mate rather than gnome, but otherwise it's an excellent, very FOSS, choice.
I'm so used to Windows getting dunked on here that I forget MacOS must be more hated, being even more locked down than Windows.
The original Macintosh had the OS on a floppy disk. So there wasn't a "Computer" on the desktop. And if you dragged the Macintosh OS disk to the trash it would just eject it so you could put in another disk. (Unless you were lucky enough to have an external floppy drive.)