Take my current situation as an example. In order to be safe from Frank the Vandal, I have transferred this article onto my portable Mac (I know, I know, you hate me. Listen. We’ll all have one in the end. They’ll bring the price down, trust me. Or rather, don’t trust me, trust Apple. Well, yes, I see your point. Please can I get back to what I was saying anyway?) and I have taken the additional precaution of taking it round to a friend’s house which is entirely electrically isolated from anything that Frank may be up to.
When I get back home with the finished piece, I can either copy it onto a floppy disk, assuming I can find one under the debris of half-finished chapters on my desk, then put that into my main Mac and print it (again assuming that Frank hasn’t been near my AppleTalk network with his chainsaw). Or I can try to do battle with the monster in the cupboard till I find another AppleTalk connector somewhere in its innards. Or I can crawl around under my desk and disconnect AppleTalk from the IIx and connect it to the portable. Or ... you get the picture, this is ridiculous. Dickens didn’t have to crawl around under his desk trying to match plugs. You look at the sheer yardage of Dickens’s output on a shelf and you know he never had to match plugs.
All I want to do is print from my portable. (Poor baby.) That isn’t all I want, in fact. I want to be able regularly to transfer my address book and diary stacks backward and forward between my portable and my IIx. And all my current half-finished chapters. And anything else I’m tinkering with, which is the reason why my half-finished chapters are half-finished! In other words, I want my portable to appear on the desktop of my IIx. I don’t want to have to do battle with cupboard monsters and then mess about with TOPS every time I want that to happen. I’ll tell you all I want to have to do in order to ge my portable to appear on the Desktop of my IIx.
I just want to carry it into the same room.
Bang. There it is. It’s on the Desktop.
This is Infra-Red talk. Or maybe it’s microwave talk. I don’t really care any more than I want to care about PICTs and TIFFs and RTFs and SYLKs and all the other acronyms, which merely say, “We’ve got a complicated problem, so here’s a complicated answer to it.”
Let me make one thing clear. I adore my Macintosh, or rather my family of however many Macintoshes it is that I’ve recklessly accumulated over the years. I’ve adored it since I first saw one at Infocom’s offices in Boston in 1983. The thing that has kept me enthralled and hypnotised by it in all that time is the perception that lies at the heart of its design, which is this: “There is no problem so complicated that you can’t find a very simple answer to it if you look at it the right way.” Or, to put it another way, “The future of computer power is pure simplicity.” So my two major wishes for the 1990s are that the Macintosh systems designers get back to that future, and that Frank the Vandal gets out of my house.
Build It and We Will Come
I remember the first time I ever saw a personal computer. It was at Lasky’s, on the Tottenham Court Road, and it was called a Commodore PET. It was quite a large pyramid shape, with a screen at the top about the size of a chocolate bar. I prowled around it for a while, fascinated. But it was no good. I couldn’t for the life of me see any way in which a computer could be of any use in the life or work of a writer. However, I did feel the first tiniest inklings of a feeling that would go on to give a whole new meaning to the words “disposable income.”
The reason I couldn’t imagine what use it would be to me was that I had a very limited idea of what a computer actually was—as did we all. I thought it was a kind of elaborate adding machine. And that is exactly how “personal” computers (a misleading term as applied to almost any machine we’ve seen so far) were for a while developed—as super adding machines with a long feature list.
Then, as our ability to manipulate numbers with these machines became more sophisticated, we wondered what might happen if we made the numbers stand for something else, like for instance the letters of the alphabet.
Bingo! An extraordinary, world-changing breakthrough! We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. It was something far more exciting. It was a typewriter!
So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I’m talking about.
The next breakthrough came when we started to make these numbers, which were now flying round inside these machines at insane speeds, stand for the picture elements of a graphic display. Pixels.
Aha! we thought. This machine turns out to be much more exciting even than a typewriter. It’s a television! With a typewriter stuck in front of it!
And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form—www—takes three time longer to say than what it’s short for) and we have yet another exciting new model. It’s a brochure. A huge, all-singing, all-dancing, hopping, beeping, flash-ridden brochure.
Of course, the computer isn’t any of these things. These are all things we were previously familiar with from the real world which we have modelled in the computer so that we can use the damn thing.
Which should tell us something interesting.
The computer is actually a modelling device.
Once we see that, we ought to realise that we can model anything in it. Not just things we are used to doing in the real world, but the things the real world actually prevents us from doing.
What does a brochure prevent us from doing?
Well, first of all its job is to persuade people to buy what you have to sell, and do it by being as glossy and seductive as possible and only telling people what you want them to know. You can’t interrogate a brochure. Most corporate websites are like that. Take BMW, for instance. Its Web site is gorgeous and whizzy and it won’t answer your questions. It won’t let you find out what other people’s experience of owning BMWs is like, what shortcomings any particular model might or might not have, how reliable they are, what they cost to run, what they’re like in the wet, or anything like that. In other words, anything you might actually want to know. You can e-mail them, but your question or their answer—or anybody else’s answer—will not appear on the site. Of course, there are plenty of Web sites where people do share exactly that kind of information, and they’re only a few clicks away, but you won’t find a word about them on BMW’s site. In fact, if you want proper, grown-up information about BMWs, the last place you’ll find it is at www.bmw.com. It’s a brochure.
Same with British Airways. It’ll tell you anything you like about British Airways flights except who else is flying those routes. So if you want to see what the choice is, you go instead to one of the scores of other sites that will tell you. Which is bad news for British Airways because they never get to find out what you were actually looking for, or how what they were offering stacked up against the competition. And because that is very valuable information, they have to send out teams of people with clipboards to try to find out, despite the fact that everybody lies to people with clipboards.
The people who have got this spectacularly right so far are the guys at Amazon. You go to their site because it’s awash with shared information. The more information there is, the more people go there, and the more people go there, the more information they generate, and the more books Amazon sells. Of course, they are not afraid of open debate because, unlike BMW, they are not responsible for the product they sell. It will take BMW and British Airways a long time and a big deep breath to realise that they are part of the community they sell to.