Michael Swaine is the former editor-in-chief of DDJ and is presently coeditor of The Macintosh II Report, a journal for Mac II users.
I'm going to miss the little toaster.
The Apple Macintosh that I bought in 1984 now sits on my mother's desk in a small town in the Midwest. Apple has disinherited that Macintosh, killed off the model. Mom tells me it hasn't affected the performance of her machine.
The spot on my desk that was once home to the Macintosh--in fact, a spot considerably larger than was home to the Macintosh--is now occupied by a 35-pound RGB monitor; a keyboard that stays on the desktop because it is too wide to fit on my lap between the arms of my chair; and a large gray box containing a 40-Mbyte hard-disk drive, six slots, and a loud fan.
They call it a Mac, too.
But it's not. A Macintosh is a cute little box of such human dimensions that Berke Breathed could turn it into a character in Bloom County. A Macintosh is an appliance. You can't put a different interface on it, and you can't add internal hardware to it. Can you add cards to a toaster? The only slots in a Macintosh are where you put the bread--I mean, disks. And a Macintosh does not have a fan.
I've also had my hands on a Unix-equipped version of this same machine. It is now possible, as detailed in the pages of this very magazine, to write Unix software that calls Mac ROM routines and/or displays a Mac-like user interface. It is possible to launch a Macintosh application on this machine under Unix, and it is possible to develop software that thinks it's Unix software part of the time and Mac software part of the time, possibly displaying the same Mac-like user interface in either case but possibly not. A Macintosh does not run Unix.
And it's not just this particular model. Apple has redefined the user interface, adding pop-up and hierarchical menus. Throw in color (which is not restricted to the one model) and the choices in the design of a user interface increase by at least three orders of magnitude. But developers of Macintosh software aren't supposed to have any choice in the design of the user interface.
Then there's HyperCard. Bill Atkinson calls it a software erector set, but it's really a virtual machine. It violates the Mac user interface guidelines so fundamentally that it doesn't make any sense to call it a Macintosh program. With HyperCard, Apple is telling all those middle-ground users who don't want to develop application software but who would like to write the equivalent of a batch file that they can't do that on a Mac but they can do it in HyperCard. A Macintosh does not support casual programming.
What it comes down to is this: In the past year and a half, Apple has increased the power, flexibility, and potential of the line of machines it persists in calling Macintosh. In doing so, it has attracted software developers in droves, created a new category of freeware/shareware, established a serious beachhead in corporations, impressed the community of business and industry reporters and analysts, and made its stockholders very happy.
I won't begrudge it all that, I guess. But I wish it'd stop calling the machines Macintoshes. They're not Macintoshes.
They're computers.