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With the recent announcement that Microsoft is buying a stake in Apple, the MacUsers of the world seem to feel betrayed. There they were, standing bravely against billionaire Bill Gates with their computers for the rest of us, and suddenly, they became part of the empire.
Judging by their comments, I get the feeling that we're dealing with a religious cult here, one that substitutes faith for facts, and so one should tread delicately.
Alas, delicacy is beyond me, and besides, a computer is just a piece of machinery. But in the Kingdom of Woz, the Mac has become something more.
My own computer experience does not make me an old-timer. I never even saw a computer until about 1975, when I lived in Kremmling. An electronics nut in nearby Granby cornered me one day and said I should see his computer. Down in a cold basement was a genuine made-from-a-kit Altair, with no monitor or keyboard -- just toggle switches and blinking lights.
It looked perfectly useless, and so I wasn't nearly as excited as he was. Nor was I thrilled when the local newspaper bought an Ohio Scientific computer in the early 1980s for subscription processing and accounting.
It had the virtue of keeping the publisher on the phone with the computer company, trying to figure out how to make it work, and thus out of the newsroom and away from bothering me and my reporters, but I never touched its console.
In 1983, we bought a brand-new Texas Instruments 99/4A for only $49.95. The kids liked to play games, but I sure couldn't use it for word processing.
Then an old acquaintance from Grand County gave serious thought to running for the legislature, and figured he might need a writer of speeches and position papers. Part of the deal was a real computer for me -- an Osborne I, complete with two floppy disk drives, a tiny 5-inch monitor, and a full set of arcane CP/M commands.
I set aside a week for learning WordStar, which I've used ever since -- my fingers know it, it does what I need it to do, it runs at blazing speeds on newer machines, and why go to the trouble of learning a new program?
Getting WordStar to work with various printers in those
days meant inserting hexadecimal codes into the program,
and I was grateful for all that experimental new
math
we had in junior high school.
Right-thinkers then and later have denounced learning
about different number bases
as folderol, perhaps even
multi-cultural or worse, but knowing binary, octal and
hexadecimal empowered me and, I'm sure, millions of other
people.
Since then, all manner of PC clone hardware has passed through here -- I've got a shed full of obsolete CGA monitors, 30-mb hard-disk drives, 9-pin dot-matrix printers, 360-kb floppy drives and the like.
And along the way, I tried a Mac. The first one took so long to redraw its cute little screen that my typing ran well ahead of the display.
Obviously, this wasn't a good tool for anyone who cared about putting the right words in the right order, but in the appearance-conscious 80s, the Mac caught on anyway. Who cared if the text was gibberish if it appeared in elegant 14-point Palatino inside a spiffy border?
A couple of years later, I revised a manual for a friend who had ported his implementation of the SPITBOL programming language to the Macintosh.
Granted, I was something of a beta tester on this job, so it wasn't surprising that the Mac sometimes stalled. The bomb would pop up on the screen -- and then it could be a day-long struggle to get it running again, since Mac's meager documentation presumed that such things just didn't happen.
A clunky old DOS machine might not have been as pretty, but at least I could figure out what was happening -- it's as though DOS trusted me with intimate knowledge of the computer, while Mac hid its innards.
Along comes Windows, which MacUsers accuse MicroSoft of ripping off from Apple -- except Apple cribbed the WIMP (Window, Icon, Mouse, Pointer) interface from Xerox, which developed it but never took it to market.
MacUsers often claim that their machine is absolutely necessary to publishing. Well, we've published a small magazine here for 3 1/2 years without ever touching a Mac, and the newspaper in Westcliffe somehow appears weekly from a Mac-free environment.
Basically, anything you can do with a Mac, you can do with a Windows machine -- and probably do it faster and cheaper, at that.
Now, if Apple wants to manufacture slow and expensive machines full of proprietary software and components, that's its business. But I don't think anybody should be surprised that the company has been losing market share -- isn't that how free enterprise is supposed to work?
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