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For the uninitiated, System 6-9 had "extensions" and "control panels," each of which could change OS-level behavior. Color display management, screen savers, fo

For the uninitiated, System 6-9 had "extensions" and "control panels," each of which could change OS-level behavior. Color display management, screen savers, font managers, TrueType support, Adobe's font support, or a trash can that, when emptied, played Oscar the Grouch's "I love trash" song. You name it, there was an extension for it. And they frequently stepped on each other's toes, causing the machine to crash. People had mythologies around which bits would play safely together. Legends that a stable set of extensions existed, never actually discovered. Losing unsaved work was commonplace.

krallja 4y ago
Casady & Greene published "Conflict Catcher", which would help you figure out working stable sets of extensions, and quickly enable/disable big groups of them. I remember I had a group of extensions that I would reboot into in order to play a particular game (though I don't remember which one) that had high memory requirements, but needed a couple extensions to be able to do network play…
chongli 4y ago
I remember using a 3rd party control panel that used a kind of bisection method to diagnose bad extensions. It would disable one half of your extensions, reboot, and ask if you could reproduce the problem, you answered yes or no, then (depending on your answer) it would disable the other half (or one quarter) and re-enable the first half and so on, narrowing down until the problematic extension was located. I don't remember what it was called! Funny that such a bizarre problem could get so bad people developed sophisticated tools to deal with it. Edit: Ahhh, I think it was Conflict Catcher! Thanks sibling comment!