This reminds me of using a hex editor on the version of explorer.exe that shipped with Windows 95 to change the infamous "Start" menu text to something else. I think the only requirement was that its replacement also needed to be five characters. That's nowhere near as convoluted as changing the startup chime, but amusing nonetheless.
Oh yeah, I did that too! I also spent a ton of time adding/making custom boot screens for various versions of Windows (up through XP, at least). Was a lot more interesting than it would be today because those boot splash screens were often up for several minutes (!) while the OS started.
Oh man, I definitely remember doing that with Windows 95 and 98— there was one that had the caption "this is Windows on drugs" with the palette rotation used to animate a bunch of psychedelic paisley.
Thanks to ResEdit my OS 8/9 setups and several of the apps on them were heavily modded. One of the most extensively changed was a copy of Netscape Communicator 4.x that had just about every icon and instance of branding text swapped out for something custom.
Did those mods serve any practical purpose? Not really, but it was fun.
Kaleidoscope. In the old days, we could change every single icon on our Mac. You kids, you’ll never know the freedom of putting Star Wars icon packs on your computer and then having intractable crashes that took down the entire machine because it didn’t have memory protection…
To this day it’s the best implementation of desktop theming I’ve come across. It had few limits on what scheme artists could do, being capable of crazy things like round windows and vertical titlebars, and a single file included theming for window chrome, controls, icons, cursors, and fonts. It had almost no impact on performance.
And schemes had no installation step… no obscure magic directory to copy them into, just organize your scheme files as you saw fit, and double-click one of them when you wanted to switch schemes. You didn’t even need to open the Kaleidoscope control panel if you didn’t want to.
Just excellent all around. The closest modern equivalent is desktop Linux themes, which have UX that’s nowhere near as good and are maybe 60% as capable as Kaleidoscope in what they can do, not to mention how often they break between GTK/Qt/Mutter/Kwin/blah/blah versions.
As a kid I used to change the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" message. From memory it was just an image file so you could put all sorts of funny messages there.
I had an NT4 workstation, a hex editor, and no internet connection at my first job. I spent a lot of time modifying the text in explorer.exe, calc.exe, and other apps. It was a lot of fun and definitely helped me understand the tip of the iceberg regarding how hex editors work.
Thanks for the memory.