Assimilator is designed for situations where you wish to make a large number of Classic Macintoshes look virtually identical. Typically this is in an educational laboratory situation but Assimilator has other uses, such as testing software or setting up demo machines.
Assimilator requires Mac OS 7.x, 8.x or 9.x. We have no plans to update it to work on Mac OS X.
Assimilator was originally shareware, but we are now releasing it for free.
When Assimilator runs on a laboratory Macintosh it will mount an AppleShare file server and then make the hard disk look virtually identical to a pre-specified source folder on the server. It does this by comparing each file in the source folder to the corresponding file on the destination hard disk. If the file on the destination is missing, or has been changed, then it is thrown away (into the Trash) and a new copy of the file is copied down from the source. Any extraneous items on the destination are also thrown away. Finally aliases, icon positions, folder views, Finder flags and so forth are all set to match those in the source folder. This entire process is known as assimilation.
For more information about how Assimilator works refer to the PDF manual.
You can download Assimilator or the manual.