Yours truly in The Daily Helmsman newsroom as a freshman in August 2004. Names and phone numbers have been redacted to protect people who probably don’t remember me at all.

Twenty years ago, I was halfway through my first sophomore year of college1 and loving it. Moving into the dorm in August 2004 marked the first time I had access to the real Internet (not just AOL or Juno), and I dove into being a Mac nerd. I spent time on the Apple Discussion Boards and OS X forums across the web to learn everything I could about the PowerBook on my desk and what it could do.

Reflecting on that time, here are some of the apps I was using:

Adium

One of the first things I did when I got to college was set up an AOL Instant Messenger account. I was the last of my friends to do so, but I quickly jumped in. I chatted with friends and classmates, and set some super emo away messages.

iChat had launched in 2002 with Mac OS X Jaguar, but it took until Leopard for Apple to add tabbed chats. This meant that every open chat you had spawned its own window. Even on a 15-inch PowerBook, that would quickly spiral out of control.

Chax was a third-party app that added a bunch of functionality to iChat — including tabs — but I had stability issues with it. So, instead, I turned to Adium.

If you used a Mac in the early 2000s, Adium probably holds a special place in your heart. It worked with AIM and a wide range of other chat services and offered tabbed chat windows.

Adium’s real strength was its customization options. Users could change the icons, emoticons, sounds, chat styles, buddy list layout, and much more. As you can see in this one terrible photo of my dorm desk, you can see that I had online buddies in green, away buddies in red, and offline buddies showing up in black:

Camino

Safari was a few years old by the time I was in school, but I wasn’t a huge fan. Instead, I used the beloved Camino, which was described by its creators like this:

Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine. Built and tested by thousands of volunteers, Mozilla’s Gecko brings cutting-edge innovations and capabilities to users in a standards-friendly and socially responsible form.

Sure, you can use a typical web browser, with typical features. Or you can use a browser that “also” supports the Mac. Or you can use a browser you have to pay for. What if there was one that offered everything, for free?

That browser is Camino. Camino makes your web experience more productive, more efficient, more secure, and more fun. It looks and feels like a Mac OS X application should, because it was designed exclusively for Mac OS X and the high standards set by Mac users. You’ll see the entire internet the way it was intended. Camino is the browser that gets out of your way, and that means Camino users need not worry about things they shouldn’t have to.

With an Aqua interface and the heart of Firefox under the hood, Camino was fashionable and fast. Here’s a screenshot of version 1.0.3 or so:

Chicken of the VNC

When I said that I used a PowerBook in my early college years, that is only part of the truth. I also had a Blue and White Power Mac G3 under my desk that I used as a “server.”

I put server in quotes because I really just used it as a backup target for my laptop; it didn’t run Mac OS X Server or provide any real services.

I ran it headless, so to access it, I used a VNC client called Chicken of the VNC. That is the best name any application has ever been given other than CalZones (RIP). It let me quickly access the Blue & White from anywhere on campus with just a few clicks.

Microsoft Entourage

Student email at the University of Memphis ran on Exchange, and connecting to the mail server via IMAP in Apple Mail was pretty janky. Since I refused to use webmail, I turned to a cracked version of Microsoft Entourage, the company’s email and personal information manager for the Mac.

This let me access my email in an actual application, like a gentleman. Later in college, I experimented with various hand-me-down Palm Pilots and even a PocketPC. I used various versions of Palm’s HotSync and The Missing Sync to get data in and out of Entourage.

Vienna

Being a young nerd in the early 2000s meant that I loved reading the web via RSS. To do so, I would have turned to NetNewsWire, but I couldn’t afford the commercial version, so instead, I used the freeware RSS client Vienna. It wasn’t nearly as nice as NetNewsWire, and as soon as I came across the free — and awesome — NewsFire in 2008, I jumped ship to that. That was the beauty of RSS, and while it’s still special today.

The More Things Change…

It was wild to think about this list and consider the fact that I still have solutions for all of these categories today. Now it’s Messages/Slack/Discord instead of Adium, Safari instead of Camino, and Apple’s built-in screen sharing features instead of Chicken of the VNC.

Entourage has been replaced by a set of apps including Mimestream, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders. Vienna is still around, but now I read RSS with ReadKit.

I even still have that old Blue and White G3. It’s sitting on a shelf in my office across from my desk.

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1. I was in college from August 2004 until May 2011, and I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in journalism to show for it. I changed majors from graphic design after two years, which meant basically starting over. After the fall semester of 2007, I went to school part-time until I finished, slowly chipping away at my degree. My official transcript from the University of Memphis is six pages long. ↩