Ah, the good ol' days of the mid-'90s Mac... Don't get us wrong, here-- we love Mac OS X and the Power Mac G5 and all the other great new stuff flying around these days, but sometimes we just get a little nostalgic for the way things used to be. Smiley Macs. Icon Gardens. A Finder that could move a couple thousand files to the Trash in less than a week and a half. The bumbling, Shemp-like charm of Gil Amelio. And system extensions.

C'mon, you remember extensions, right? They were those great little files you dropped into the System Folder that patched the operating system itself, leading to great new productivity-enhancing features like Oscar the Grouch singing in your Trash can and about a zillion more opportunities for system crashes. Wheeeeeee! Seriously, it was great-- flying by the seat of our pants, blithely loading extensions left and right without checking for updated versions or known conflicts or anything. Just dropping in thirty new third-party extensions at once, rebooting, and hoping against hope that everything would be just fine.

Of course, nothing was ever fine, which brings us somewhere within the general vicinity of The Point: do you remember Conflict Catcher? Version 2 (or, actually, II) was one of the first commercial Mac software titles we, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, ran out and purchased after getting our first Mac, in large part due to our propensity for trying to load a beta copy of Kaleidoscope, a five-year-old version of After Dark, and an entire CD-ROM's worth of "fun Mac extensions by a bunch of people you've never heard of and will never, ever find" simultaneously.

We mention this because Casady & Greene, the company who brought us Conflict Catcher (and Glider Pro and Spellcatcher and Grammarian and a whole slew of other neat software) is calling it quits as of this Thursday, and it just sort of got us to thinking about the eight or nine hundred thousand conflict tests we performed with their software, discovering that this extension was incompatible with that application, that extension crashed if loaded before that other extension but only when this control panel was installed, and After Dark conflicted with... well, with software, as best as we could tell. C&G's software saved us untold hours of tracking down conflicting INITs, thus freeing up our precious time to do all that Oscar-singing Trash-tossing in our busy schedules.

So long, C&G; sorry to see you go. Considering that Mac OS X largely made Conflict Catcher obsolete, we can't say we're all that surprised, but it's still a little sad just the same. Maybe we'll try to fire up the ol' LC 575 and run a conflict test just for old time's sake. And then we can load the "Games" extension set for a round of Marathon...