System6
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Star Wars Stormtroopers use Mac System 6
The evil Galactic Empire is well-known for cutting corners in its engineering, with gaping chasms scattered seemingly at random throughout the Death Star without a single guardrail in sight. It turns out the Empire's computer systems are also woefully out of date; as designer Matt Chase demonstrates, it seems Imperial Stormtroopers, like TK-421, are still using System 6 on their Macs. From the contents of TK-421's email inbox, it appears a Stormtrooper's work is never done. Not only is there some mandatory target practice scheduled, Darth Vader keeps sending increasingly frantic messages concerning a pair of missing droids. The final email, pictured above, is a rather ominous message from rebels@rebelalliance.org threatening to blow up the Death Star. Not to worry, TK-421; any attack against the station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they've obtained. Check out the full graphic of this decidedly old-school Mac desktop here. Note that one or two items in the graphic may be NSFW depending on your locale, especially if your boss is anything like Darth Vader. [via Neatorama]
Grackle68k: a Classic Mac OS Twitter app
It's always nice to own the latest and greatest Apple hardware, but some of us still use vintage machines. I've got a G3 All-In-One on my workbench that displays iFixIt PDFs while I work. I'll admit that I've wanted to tweet from that machine from a dedicated app, and now I can. Grackle68k is a Twitter application for OS 9 through System 6. Yes, System 6! It's quite bare bones and low on bells and whistles, but it works. You'll have to enter your credentials every time you launch Grackle68k unless you're comfortable using ResEdit (if you're using this app, you likely are). I played with this briefly on ny G3 and had fun. If you've also got a basement full of legacy Macs, give this a try. If only I still had that Powerbook 150...
Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme
We don't usually cover Wordpress theme on TUAW, but I think we can make an exception for the Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme. Wordpress, in case you aren't familiar with it, is a very successful blogging engine which allows users to apply various themes to change the look of their blogs. Stuart Brown decided to try his hand at creating one, and he used System 6 as his inspiration. The result is a Wordpress theme that'll bring a smile to any Mac user's Finder (Ha! See what I did there?).You can see the theme in action here.
