Insane, or insanely great?
by Jon Worley

I'm one of the oldest members of the computer generation. Get much older than me, and the only computers in schools were TRS-80s and Commodore 64s. Competent machines, but nothing to inspire a kid to a career in the information revolution. Back in 1983 (when I was 13), my family ponied up the cash for an Apple IIe, and that was nice for a while. Then came 1984. The year computers broke.

Man, oh man. If we'd only waited, we coulda had a Macintosh. Okay, so a first-run Mac cost $2500, and it had 64k of RAM just like the IIe. But man! The cool stuff that even an artistic hack like me could do.

I remember one particular Saturday in May 1984. My dad had to go to Lubbock for something or other, and he took me to a computer store. I got to play with MacPaint for a whole half-hour. Drawing lines and shapes and filling in the shapes with those cool textures. That day I learned what a font was. And my font, like so many other kids, was San Francisco.

Perhaps the most notorious typeface of all time, certainly the bane of English teachers everywhere. If you don't remember (where were you?), San Francisco was the typeface where every letter had a completely different style, like the cut-out letters in a kidnapping note (Patty Hearst, San Francisco, get it?). Many stodgy folks reacted badly to this new and exciting tool. The creative possibilities presented by the Mac (egregious use of underlining, italics and pictures) enraged enough educators that a good number of folks got grants to do studies on the problem. The conclusion? Macs caused laziness. Papers written on Macs were more likely to be riddled with grammatical errors, and they simply didn't look academic. All this complaining simply convinced me further that Macs were the wave of the future, a 21st century computer available in the here and now.

And indeed, the dominant operating system for PCs today (with 90 percent or more of the market), Windows, is based on the Mac look. WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. Hey, I did my time on amber and green screened computers. I learned how to code so that my typing would look as cool as a Mac. But all that work kinda dried up the creative juices a bit. I wanted a Mac.

And in 1991, I got my first. A Mac LC. Already obsolete when I bought it, I kept souping the puppy up, adding on a bigger hard drive, more RAM, a modem and other accouterments. Eventually I had to get something better. Another Mac. A PowerMac, to be specific.

But Macs (or even PowerMacs) are not where it's at these days. Other than weirdos like me (we're often lumped into the "artistic-hippie-not in the box" category), very few folks are buying Apple computers these days. So Steve Jobs, the prodigal son back at home after scoring millions with Pixar, announced a new Macintosh last week. The iMac. Back to the future. A computer with all the power of the top-of-the-line personal computers at the low end of the price spectrum.

For $1299, you get a 233Mhz G3 processor (faster than the Pentium II, even the 300Mhz version), 32 megs of RAM, a 24x CD-ROM drive, a 15" monitor and a few more bells and whistles. In fact, the monitor is fused to the computer, just like the classic Macs. Actually, the computer is pretty much inside the casing of the monitor, so the machine looks kinda like one of them '50 TVs, color scheme of teal and translucent plastic. From the front it appears as if the picture is floating in space. As the 13-year-old in me might say, "Cool." If you want to see it, go to www.apple.com. You won't be disappointed.

There is one actual futuristic touch: no floppy drive. There are expansion ports where you can connect a Zip drive or a Jaz drive or a Syquest or whatever, but no more of the dread floppy dance that early Mac users remember (memory was so expensive back then, the first Macs did not have a hard drive). The theory is that all programs these days are issued on CD-ROM, and anyway, 1.4M of memory is insignificant. I agree. It would take a phalanx of floppies to back up my system. Hell, it would take seven or eight floppies just to hold the contents of my web page. Good riddance, I say.

Jobs (and even some folks who don't like Apple) thinks this computer just might become the computer of choice for students and folks at the low end of the computer market. Kinda like the Chrysler-Mercedes Benz deal. You can get yer K-Car and yer monster luxury car from the same company.

I hope they're right. The more iMacs that get sold, the more folks will write software for my Mac. Oh, sure, I have no problem getting my important graphic tools (Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) for Mac. But I can't get a decent baseball game to save my life. And when the biggest games (Doom, Civilization II, whatever) do come out for Mac, it's a year after PC owners have had the games.

And thus the final irony. While there is plenty of productivity software for Macs, the "toy" computer is the one that game companies have avoided. For the past five years at least, PCs are the real toy machines.

So go out and buy an iMac. Buy two. It may not be the next great advance in computers (there will never be a machine as revolutionary as the original Mac, for lots of reasons), but it's still pretty damned cool. And it's good to see Apple getting back in the game.

Jon Worley operates the Aiding & Abetting website. He codes up the pages using a variety of programs that reside on his PowerMac 7600 (132 Mhz, 48M RAM, 1.2G hard drive, 8x CD-ROM). While already far behind today's machines, his current computer is still about 300 times faster and 5,000 times as powerful as the original Mac.

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