Elementary school computer day nostalgia

June 6, 2020 1:27 AM

What is this MacOS "Easter egg" I remember fondly - but vaguely - from my elementary school computer lab days?

In my American elementary school in the mid-1990s, my friends and I liked to show off to our classmates and irritate our teachers by making the computers play an instrumental version of "Blue Monday" by New Order. I seem to recall that the file or program was "hidden" somehow, so it made us feel extremely cool and savvy to know how to play it. I don't know if this was a specific program, a feature of the MacOS, a weird thing at my school, or if I'm imagining things. I think there were multiple available tracks, but "Blue Monday" was the one that appealed to us. We would have probably been using the early Power Macintosh models.

I've asked peers who were in school in various parts of the United States during the same period, and nobody remembers anything like this. It's been plaguing me for years.

posted by easy, lucky, free to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Best answer: I've been using Macs since almost forever, and I can't recall any Easter Egg that played Blue Monday. My guess is it was some kind of system extension that could be remotely triggered from a networked Mac.

There was an extension I recall that you had to surreptitiously install on an unguarded Mac that allowed another Mac on the network to trigger bogus warning popups on the target Mac. Things like "Radiation leak detected. Please move back 10 feet." or "You have used all available pixels." An extension that could trigger Blue Monday in that manner sounds plausible.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:25 AM on June 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

I don't have a specific answer, unfortunately, but I used macs at home when I was a teen, and something that was a major feature of the MacOS-using community was shareware collected and distributed on magazine cover CDs. This included a lot of games and also "desktop toys" and other joke programs. A hidden program that plays music sounds like exactly this kind of thing. So it's possible that you can't find anything because it's a relatively niche item.
posted by confluency at 2:38 AM on June 6, 2020

Could it have been an After Dark screensaver?
posted by Kitchen Witch at 3:13 AM on June 6, 2020

Seconding that it was most likely a joke system extension or something similar; there were a bunch of them that'd do weird and quirky things on MacOS. At my school I remember there was one installed on a bunch of computers where it'd play an animation of Oscar the Grouch popping out of the trash can icon and singing "I Love Trash" when you emptied the trash. You might poke around the Old Mac Software Archive and see if anything pops out.
posted by Aleyn at 12:58 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Was it this music file? I wonder if it was some kind of hidden MOD player.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:57 PM on June 6, 2020

You could (still can in OSX?) drop a sound file into your Startup Items and it would play when your Mac booted up.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:47 PM on June 6, 2020

You could also nest things into the Apple Menu Items folder, so that they could be launched by picking them from a pull-down menu. A 'snd' (sound) file "hidden" there would be quite possible.
posted by Wild_Eep at 8:34 PM on June 6, 2020

I think it might have been "Funky Mac", which was a startup sound published in the December 1996 edition of MacAddict. It was the grand prize winner in a contest.

Here's the description (taken from page 52):

“Funky Mac” by Ty Cashen

By taking a snippet from New Order’s “Blue Monday” and adding classic Mac sounds (mouse clicks and system beeps, for example), Cashen created a startup sound that had us all tapping our feet and bopping our heads. What is Cashen going to do with his new Mac? “I think I’ll go to DisneyWorld online.” But then he backed out, saying he’d more likely be busy cranking out more phat tunes than he could play while finishing his evil college essays (at Colorado University in Boulder, Colorado), surfing the Net, blasting aliens in Marathon, and, of course, spinning those MacAddict CDs, all within his Mac’s "totally cool custom-painted case.”

The Internet Archive has a copy of the CD-ROM that came with that issue (MacAddict #004 Coverdisc). I downloaded the ISO image and it still mounts on a modern Mac (though I'm still on Mojave and haven't upgraded to Catalina).

I followed the instructions in this Ask Different answer to extract the audio from the startup sound as a WAV file, which you can download here: FunkyMac.wav.

Please let us know if this corresponds with your memory of what it sounded like!
posted by dweingart at 10:14 AM on June 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think it might have been "Funky Mac", which was a startup sound published in the December 1996 edition of MacAddict.

Yeah, I asked the boys and girls back at the office (who would have worked with the person who would have put in this Easter egg, or would have been themselves the person to built it in) about it, and this is what came back as well. IT was too hard at the time to sneak in a music file since space constraints of the install media were so tight, someone would have likely noticed.
posted by sideshow at 9:34 AM on June 8, 2020