Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you're remembering "At Ease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease
I got in so much trouble due to a gaping security hole in At Ease back in 7th grade. You could put a floppy disk in and it would present the documents and folders, but no applications. However, it would allow you to open Desk Accessories (a System So being the nerdy troublemaker that I was, I used a DA to launch other programs such as ResEdit and bob's your uncle. I had installed all the cool After Dark screen savers…
The check for whether a program was on the whitelist used the executable's 4-character "creator code", so you could also change that to an allowed code in ResEdit and make anything you want open without argument straight from Finder.
I used to use "RASM" which was the remote access status monitor, and was enabled for all counts by default.