this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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I've seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the "Empty Trash" command before I stepped in.
It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I'm not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn't be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn't cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.
Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)
I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.
Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.
Maybe you had ones with built-in hard drives which, if ejected unexpectedly, may have caused problems on early Macs.
But there was and still is no "computer" icon on the Mac OS desktop, and dragging a disk to the trash just ejects it.