At Ease

At Ease is an application program from Apple Inc., that was bundled with the Macintosh Performas at an early stage, and was also available for individual sale to enable a kiosk-style interface for Classic Macs. It was replaced by the Multiple Users feature of Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

By activating At Ease, users were granted limited access to the Macintosh, thereby safeguarding the system and system data.

At Ease was introduced in August of 1992, which was shipped with System Software 7.1.

If you enable the At Ease Startup checkbox in the Extensions Manager, starting with System 7.5, you will see the At Ease icon in the lower left of the screen on startup. For older versions of System 7, you always see it at startup in the lower left of the screen.

At Ease was unique in that it actually modified the driver partition of the boot disk on install, so that it could not be disabled to circumvent the limited access. At Ease had to be properly disabled prior to uninstallation or the disk would be rendered unbootable.