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I've waited for MacOS X for a long time, but now that it's here I find myself afraid to make the change. Will making the transition from the old, familiar system be like jumping off a bridge?
The Bridge to Nowhere: Part One
by Del Miller
September 25, 2000
The phone rings. It's Pat: "Wanna jump off a bridge?"
"Sure," I say.
I'm slogging through the bristly wilderness of the San Gabriel Mountains. We've been hiking for hours, Pat and I and about a dozen other intrepid souls, each with his own score to settle with the law of gravity. Single file, through creek beds of ankle turning rocks, up steep switchbacks that seem to never end, amidst the dry, thorny brush, under the blazing California sun; we pant like dogs and sweat like pigs. This isn't hiking, it's the bungie death march. As the miles wear on, a breathy silence falls over the troop; all this metabolic industry wasn't quite what we signed up for. Jumping off a bridge should somehow be a more perspiration free proposition.
At the head of the wheezing procession bounce the cheerful leaders for our expedition, a couple of itinerant bungie types from Australia who have apparently jumped from everything worth jumping from in The Land Down Under, and are now touring the American west for even greater heights -- or depths, as the case may be. While the rest of us husband our breath for the climb, Jim and Mike chatter gleefully in a high-spirited, opaque, Australian slang that sounds a lot like American English except for half the nouns, all of the phrases and most of the decipherable meaning.
They both have that innocent, fun loving, devil-may-care attitude so common among Aussies -- chock full of casual fearlessness that is so charming and admirable when your life isn't in their hands. I am relying on our lighthearted mates to guide me through a sporting event that is not well suited to trial and error and I wonder if my guides' zip-a-dee-do-da approach to this affair is entirely appropriate. I begin asking myself pointed questions, such as, "Just who are these guys? What do they really know about bungie jumping? When did they last inspect their ropes? Will I live through this?"
Answering these questions uncovers a troubling tendency of mine to perform diligent research and to say "yes" in precisely the incorrect order. I think really hard about Australia and I can't recall anyone describing the place as anything but table-top flat, which leads me to wonder exactly what there is down there to jump off and exactly how much bungie jumping experience I should expect from two guys fresh from the flattest continent on the face of the entire goddam planet. I try to recall if I've heard of some certifying organization with a name like, "The International Society of Professional and Responsible Bungie Jumping Guides" but nothing comes to mind, in fact the only thing clearly professional about Mike and Jim is the fifty dollars I paid them for the use of their rope and for taking me to The Bridge to Nowhere.
At this point, the concept of a bridge to anywhere is becoming harder to swallow with every step deeper into this danged wilderness. We are trekking up a steep walled mountain canyon lacking a thoroughfare wider than an ill fed rabbit, so just what sort of bridge might there be ahead? Whoever heard of a bridge without a road? And what do they mean by "Nowhere?" Is this some sort of hoax? The sun is burning us to crisps, strained ligaments are slowing us down and the black flies are in a feeding frenzy. Mountain goats crowd the rimrock, observing us with detached amusement. Visions of the Donner party flit across the low window of my mind. Buzzards circle. The ugly murmer of mutiny whispers through the group. As the general attitude begins to turn surly, we round the corner and...
---
It's been a long march to MacOS X, a journey measured in crashes and restarts. My Windows using brethren crow about their modern memory management , their dynamic memory allocation, their preemptive multiprocessing and their virtual memory scheme that actually works without dumping half their applications into the void. I, on the other, hand have fought the countless stability battles with extensions and add-ons and pursued endless treasure hunts for peripherals supported by my less than ubiquitous platform. I've made these sacrifices for the inate beauty of the MacOS and a host of other reasons, but even this loyalty would not keep me in the fold forever were there not the promise of a brand new technology that would eventually catapult my computing efforts into a shining, endless future.
Happy talk from Cupertino kept me marching on that long, uphill path to the new order. Successive promises of Copland and Gershwin and Rhapsody were each, in turn, touted as the answer to my dreams. Powerful technologies that would, "soon," an always upbeat Apple said, enable me to partake of both worlds -- that of elegant simplicity and of power and reliability. Years of brazen confidence from cheerful Apple spokesmen wore thin, though, and I began to feel like the rube in a carnival shell game -- always ready to swallow my disappointment and again hope for the next big thing.
But time after time, these promised new solutions were stillborn, caught up in Apple's internal problems that were too complex for me to fully comprehend. How could they be so wrong, so many times? Who were these guys that asked for my confidence with such a questionable track record? Did they really know what they were doing? Was the promised bridge to the future really taking me nowhere?
So I began to doubt that Apple could ever pull the Macintosh from its sixteen year old quagmire. Perhaps the time was coming when I would have to make the change to Windows or maybe to Linux. But then a new star appeared in the evening sky and it was called MacOS X. So I just kept slogging along, bouyed by the promise that someday I would find the bridge to the promised land of modern computing and that hope has kept me tied to the Macintosh.
The Bridge to Nowhere
Sure enough, there's a bridge. A full-blown, heavily constructed, concrete trussed, two-lane highway bridge rising fourteen stories over the creek below; it's asphalt roadbed awaiting highway traffic. Everything looks ready for the Mayor's ribbon cutting except that the bridge's ends butt directly against the steep canyon walls on either side; not a sign of a road on either bank nor any indication that there ever was such a thing. Just this absurdly deliberate piece of massive, public infrastructure spotted squarely in a totally inaccessible wilderness.
We all stop and gape, each of us running what's-wrong-with-this-picture scenarios through our tired brains. The Taj Majal would have looked no more out of place. How did this particular elephant arrive in this particular rose garden? Was there some typo on the blueprint and the bridge was supposed to have been built in Lompoc? Maybe it was some monumentally gerrymandered, government porkbarrel, hidden from public view out here in the middle of nowhere.
It turns out, The Bridge to Nowhere was originally part of an ambitious, nineteen-thirties, New Deal plan to connect the western end of the inland valley to the high Mojave desert, with a winding highway through the wilds of the San Gabriel mountains. The project had managed to push a roadbed halfway through the mountains and to construct this bridge across a vital but imposing canyon, when the outbreak of World War II brought progress to a halt. Shortly after the war, as construction was about to resume, a thousand year flood swept through the watershed and washed out the road right down to the granite bedrock, leaving not a trace of man's handiwork. The engineers mumbled lame excuses, packed up their theodolites and went home -- leaving the bridge as an embarrassed testimony to a demonstrably, silly idea.
But right now, we know nothing of this, so we creep cautiously onto the bridge deck, as if the whole edifice is some sort of mirage that might evaporate beneath our feet. I shuffle over to the guardrail and peer over the side.
---
Would MacOS X fare any better than its stillborn predecessors? Perhaps it just might, for it wasn't merely some gleam in an Apple exec's eye, but rather an operating system built on a solid structure that had already proven itself for decades. Based on NeXT's version of Unix and equipped with a user interface that rivaled the Macintosh for ease of use, here was an existing framework that could be built upon, a powerful operating system needing only an artist's touch to make it truly a Macintosh OS.
But wait a minute, this is Unix, the operating system they were thinking of when they coined the term "arcane." How could this mighty OS that runs supercomputers and mainframes ever be shoehorned into a Macintosh? It just didn't fit, it didn't feel right and I wondered if this too was just another glorious promises from Apple.
But NeXT wasn't just another computer company. It was founded by Steve Jobs and carried Apple's DNA in its genes. The NeXT operating system was designed to be everything the Macintosh was and more, and by all accounts it is a superb and shining monument to the concepts of both useability and power. That NeXT failed to take the computer market by storm doesn't invalidate the purity of its concept nor the validity of its design - our so-called, free-market system is littered with products that were clearly the best in class but failed to win in the odd competition for marketshare. NeXT's hardware business was a washout, but it left behind an solid software structure from which to jump into the future, standing alone in a wilderness of mundane alternatives.
But I've been fooled before, so this time I'll look before I leap.
Acts of Random Cowardice
One hundred and forty feet down, a merry, mountain stream skips frothily over boulders the size of Volkswagens. It seems miles below. I suddenly remember what I'm here for and I'm seized with a clear and mighty cowardice that impresses even me. The more I look, the deeper the canyon becomes. I try to imagine myself jumping from this height but all I can visualize is one of Wile E. Coyote's dopplered canyon drops into an infinite chasm.
Ancient regions of my brain kick in, commanding whatever glands responsible for the flight impulse into forced overtime. I search my mind frantically for some honorable excuse for not going through with this, like some inner-ear problem that I somehow forgot. Perhaps I should feign death or maybe forge a note from my mommy.
I walk away from the railing feeling sick. I really don't want to jump off this bridge, rope or no rope. But twenty of us hiked all the way up this mountain to do just that and if I don't go through with it I will look like the lousy stinking coward that I so very obviously am -- and that's just the sort of thing I'd rather keep to myself. So the decision is whether to defy every instinct for self preservation that millions of years of evolution have drilled deep into my being or else to slink cravenly back down the mountain enduring the silent dismissal of my manhood from the others. Somehow, panty-peeing fear was a part of bungie jumping that I had completely failed to consider.
An eon of cowardly torture follows, while Jim and Mike do complicated things with rope and the rest us mill about in a steaming cloud of adrenaline and testosterone, alternating between chest thumping, he-man talk and nervous, slightly astonished squeaking about just how awfully deep that damned canyon really is. Someone is directing me into a harness and now hands are attaching ropes to it. In a haze I climb onto the railing. I stand up. I look down.
---
So I've taken a look at MacOS X and on the surface it appears to be the ultimate desktop operating system. Oh sure, the beta version is bound to be problematic, but that will all be worked out and the finished product will be a dream to use. Won't it? Then I look at the new Aqua interface and I feel the first twinge of fear.
As I examine the sparkly new widgets of the OS X display, I realize just how accustomed I've become to the classic Mac GUI. After all these years, navigating my computer takes about as much concentrated effort as does scratching my head when it itches. The various controls for my computer have become extensions of my fingers and finding my way about is second nature.
There was a time when I was constantly experimenting with various third-party system extensions to modify my Macintosh experience, but I've gradually settled on a set of tools that does what I want so well that I have changed practically nothing in the last two years. I have a nifty extension called AMICO that partitions the Apple Menu window so that the included items are grouped and sorted into my preferred order. There are custom menus and a launcher replacement that streamlines my Finder operations. Now that I think about it, I really don't know what extensions I use anymore, because I've become so accustomed to them that I feel they are part of the Macintosh OS and I'm only aware of their existence when I use someone else's machine.
MacOS X will no doubt break most, if not all of these extensions and will likely offer such a different paradigm that they would be useless even if they worked. But I seriously doubt that even the master touch of Apple could craft an operating system that I would happily use without some level of customization for my own particular tastes.
Most of the fancy desktop tools on my Macintosh began life as third party shareware, appropriated by Apple when their popularity with the computing public made them standards in themselves. The Menu Bar Clock, Control Strip, Launcher, Desktop Pictures and half the doodads I take for granted were once the brainchild of some independent programmer with a better idea. It will take years for the new interface to sport the distributed wisdom of the programming community. In the meantime, I'll have to again start the process of searching out third-party tools. OS X means I will have to repeat the long trek toward my own personal instance of the Macintosh.
My private stable of utilities have stood by me through years of format conversions, debuggings, file renamings and disk repairs. Does the next great leap in operating systems mean that I toss them all over the edge and start over? Perhaps some of my favorites will make a graceful transition across the OS divide, through an upgrade maybe, but more likely new products will be written and I'll have to research, test and buy an entirely new suite.
It took me years of winnowing to find the perfect utilities for my system. I fear that my jump to OS X means I'll have to do it all over again.
---
It is an odd sensation to be deathly terrified of falling off a bridge from which I am about to deliberately leap. Perfectly reasonable thought processes highlight just how unlike a bird I really am and argue, with flawless logic, how easy it would be to crawl right down from that railing and simply admit to the crowd that I can't jump for reasons of religious conviction. My heart isn't working right. Waves of panic are pounding in my ears and actually jumping is still but a theoretical concept. I sense the rest of the group telling me to jump and I truly hate them. Days pass, and then...and then...and then I hear my mother's voice, from out of my childhood but as clear as if she stood there beside me. She says, "Just because everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you be just as stupid and jump too?"
I jump.
Tune in next week for the harrowing conclusion of "The Bridge to Nowhere: Part Two"
Copyright 2000, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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