Because of MacOS X, the Macintosh community will be going through some interesting times: Were part of the Unix world now and the rules are much, much different. How will the merging of the Unix world into ours change the Macintosh culture?

 

Rope and Chain

by Del Miller

March 28, 2001

 

It was way too hot to be cutting wood.

We had felled a half dozen trees into a narrow draw, where they lay all twisted together in a house-sized pile of interlocking pick-up-sticks. The immediate plan was to chain them, one tree part at a time, to the tractor and pull them up the steep incline. My father sat high upon the tractor seat, directing me, all of twelve years old, in the fine art of hooking chains to fiendishly entangled tree limbs. He had an exquisite sense of exactly which tree limbs should be rigged and in precisely what order, but conveying that plan to me was hindered by his sadly lacking facility with indefinite pronouns. "Hook that chain to that limb and the other to the other one," he yelled over the roar of the tractor engine.

I nodded and turned to the task, but there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of tree limbs all around me. I started looping the chain over a likely looking branch, but he yelled down, " No, not that one, the other one." I looked up the hill for some better clue, but all I saw was him twisted around in the seat waving his arm at most of the hillside.

"This one?" I yelled.

"No, not that one, the other one." he shot back, pointing his finger in the general direction of Pluto.

"You mean that one?"

"NO! The other one!"

"Over here?"

"NO! Right in front of you!"

"This one?"

NO! NO! THE OTHER ONE!"

This exchange, escalating in both volume and confusion, went on for several minutes amid rising exasperation on his part and a proportional panic on mine. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and he was becoming horribly frustrated with my cretinous inability to divine the difference between fifty identical tree limbs that were somehow differentiated by the words this and that. I was very tired of standing in this snake infested pit, jabbed and bruised by broken off branches, in a high-noon, midsummer furnace with sweat running down my face and hordes of chiggers gnawing assertively on my ankles. I gave up trying to figure out what he wanted me to do and started looping the chain around branches at random, in the sure knowledge that he would stop me if they weren't the ones he had in mind. And of course he did.

"DADGUMMIT!" He finally groaned, in something like agony. Now, for him, "dadgummit" was a fearsome curse and I knew from experience that we were hurtling like artillery shells toward one of those rare and golden "moments" that sometimes occur between a father and his son. He set the brake, cut the throttle, climbed down off the tractor and, frowning terribly, stomped down the hillside in the manner of Godzilla touring Tokyo, He grabbed the chain out of my hands and testily hooked it to a branch that was in no way unlike any of the others, turned, loomed over me, and spoke to me these words that I will never, in a million years, ever forget:

"Boy," He said, hands clenched at his sides, "You'll never amount to nothin' 'till you learn to work with rope and chain."

Now, there were a number of responses I might have made, but most of these were of the sort that a sane person just wouldn't make to my father, so I turned away. Inside, however, I was seething at the sheer absurdity of his statement.

"Well excuse me, Daddy-O," I wanted to say, "but there are quite a few people who amount to something in this world who manage to have other people do the rope and chain work, and if I have my way that's the sort of future I have in mind - And if I never touch rope or chain again in my life it would be just dandy!"

 

Rope and Chain and Software

But I didn't say it of course, and over the years I've even come to recognize the underlying truth to his words. There is a value in working with your hands, in developing the skills to get under the hood of our daily existence and actually make things work. It's people like that who actually build the world around us, the world of convenience and appearance that the majority of us tend to take so for granted.

Take a look at our computers. How many of us use these things to actually compute? No, most of us point and click at icons that someone else designed, which activates software routines that someone else wrote, that in turn run programs that someone else laboriously created. The programmers that create this code are the Rope & Chain gang of the computing world, the ones that actually get their hands dirty building the software that most of us see only as the windows and cursors and dialog boxes of our graphically oriented environment.

The Graphic User Interface has been such a blessing to us in the Macintosh world that it has become, for most of us, our idea of what a computer should be. When we think of the Mac, we think of a particular set of standard doodads on the screen and the particular ways that they behave. The GUI too, is in a very real sense, how we define ourselves as Mac users and we've created an entire subculture around this thin, widgety veneer that is the face of the MacOS.

Over the years, we in this Macintosh culture have become very comfortable with our GUI persona, but that is about to change in a major way. For MacOS X, with its Unix core will completely alter the entire Mac community and it will never be the same.

 

There goes the neighborhood

This seachange in the Macintosh world will not be because of bouncing dock icons, translucent windows or increased stability; on the surface, MacOS X is actually more similar to the old OS than we are generally willing to admit. The real impact of MacOS X is that it will open the society of Macintosh to another, wildly different, computer culture: From now on, the future of the Mac world and of the Unix world are forever entangled.

While it is as inaccurate to define the "average" Unix user as it is to describe an "average" Mac user, I think it is fair to say that the Unix crowd has an entirely different viewpoint on computing. These are Rope & Chain kinda guys, they see computer software, not as an interface, but as a living thing to be worked with and molded by their own hand. They don't "install" software as much as they "build" it. Most of them are programmers, or at least have a level of coding expertise that would shock the average Macintosh user. Where we vaguely perceive the MacOS as a display on the screen and a collection of prepackaged and dressed up tools, the Unix folks see their OS as massive switchgear driving the very logic gates of the hardware. The Unix people don't view their computer as a personal space, but more as a porthole into the vast world of computing technology.

We have gloried ourselves in the creative freedom given by the Macintosh interface; prided ourselves on the intuitive feel of our machines that enables us to be creative without dirtying our hands with the rope and chain of computer complexity. Meanwhile, the Unix crowd has been building moonrockets and mapping the human genome, forging the infrastructure of the corporate world and creating the backbone of the internet. The interface was an afterthought.

There are probably no two groups in the computing world as widely separated in philosophy, background and habit as are the users of the Macintosh and of Unix, yet, because of OS X we will soon be sharing the same software, the same hardware and bumping into each other in a way that has never happened before.

Be prepared for culture shock.

 

Will the circle be unbroken?

Unix people don't particularly like Apple and for a variety of reasons. The open source contingent of Linux and GNU harbor a widespread distrust for the proprietary aspects of an OS owned by any corporation and, in spite of Apple's commitment to the open source license, there is still a low murmur of suspicion that Apple will someday pull a fast one and hijack Darwin into some proprietary scheme that torpedoes the entire open source movement. Further, these people tend to disdain the fancy trappings of mass market computing, with their blinking GUIs and shrinkwrap.

The other primary group of Unix users consists of those who have grown up around the Big Iron companies such as DEC, AT&T, Sun and IBM. They look down on the Mac as a toy, as if it were a frat boy in a biker bar. For these folks to accept the Macintosh will require the consumption of serious amounts of crow.

But accept it they will, for Apple will quickly emerge as the largest Unix vendor in the world - a force simply too great to ignore. With grudging acquiescence, more and more Macs will wind up on the desks of hard core Unix users.

 

Across the great divide

But what will this mean to us - the loyal MacHeads who for all these years have carried the Macintosh banner through the valley of the shadow of Microsoft? Will the arrival of these Unix gurus in our midst cause our Macintosh culture to grow and to be enriched, or will the two sides sit across a great philosophical divide, separating those of us who love our Macs from those who see it as simply a convenient platform for their true love, Unix. Will these code-wielding, Unix folks consider themselves Macintosh people or will they look at our color-coordinated, GUI intensive computing experience and feel like lumberjacks at a Mary Kay convention?

Will the thousands of Unix programs that now clock their way through the world of science and big business find their way to the Macintosh, compiled and GUI'd and cleaned up for the rest of us to use, or will we look at the bounty of the Unix influx and only see a plethora of command lines, two letter acronyms and increasingly cryptic jargon? Will the Macintosh community be split, Morlock versus Eloi, its energy diluted by cross purposes, or will we see the best of both worlds, an Apple at the head of a computing powerhouse of industrial strength products and unexcelled consumer design?

 

One big happy family

In spite of the cultural differences there are many reasons to believe that the Mac community and the Unix world will forge a partnership of enduring harmony. For one thing, our Unix brethren do share one characteristic of Mac users - an abiding distrust of Microsoft. The famous friction between Apple fans and the Microsoft juggernaut pales in comparison to the resentment that the open source movement feels toward Microsoft - seen by many of them as the ultimate enemy of open software. Both camps have suffered at the hands of the Windows monopoly and the unity of Unix power and Apple's market strength, there may finally be a measure of security.

Programmer's love nothing more than for their programs to be used and enjoyed by others, but the Unix developer faces a pretty tough market in which to distribute software. The Unix population is relatively small and word of mouth, bulletin boards and esoteric trade journals are the primary channels by which Unix programmers can make their wares known. But the teeming millions of Macintosh users form a huge, pent-up demand for the powerful programs just a compilation away from the mass market - as long as the programs look like Macintosh programs. This will be an enormous incentive for Unix developers to embrace the Macintosh way.

The Unix mavens will also discover one of the industry's best kept secrets - that over the last few years, the Macintosh has quietly evolved into a workstation caliber platform priced lower than and made far more accessible than the systems they are used to. For the same reasons that we have come to love the Macintosh - high quality hardware closely integrated to the operating system, ease of use and a huge range of productivity tools - the Macintosh may very well become a darling of Unix users who in the past dismissed the entire platform.

Finally, the biggest reason to believe that the Unix world will embrace the Macintosh comes from the most unlikely direction - Apple Computer itself. The entire Darwin project is managed and run by NeXT expatriates who understand intimately the Unix mindset. This group will provide cohesiveness and leadership for the open source community that will, I think, be eventually appreciated by everyone involved. Combining the power of distributed development with the corporate discipline of Apple is a new formula for the open source movement and, if it works, could make an enormous difference.

 

Growing up

But how will the merging of the Unix world into ours change the Macintosh culture?

Once upon a time, the Macintosh community dared to change the world, but because of Apple's eroded marketshare and the eternal threat of extinction from the Windows goliath, the dialog in the Macintosh community, these days, seems more concerned with mere survival. We flail at Microsoft and at a business world that ignores us; and we seem to focus only upon art, consumer entertainment and on the minutiae of our minority computer interface. We've grown inward and our interests have narrowed to a few, small market niches that are but a tiny part of the great big universe around us.

I miss the days when being a Macintosh user meant something bigger than just the machine upon the desk. I miss the feeling that changing the world was a valid goal and promoting the Macintosh into the far reaches of the computing world was a way to do that - one desktop at a time. We now have an opportunity to bring back those days, but we won't do it by cloistering ourselves into this little Mac ghetto, spending our time in an exchange of bitches about whether the icons should bounce or not. We have to haul ourselves out where the rest of the world lives, a world of real applications and real needs where we can contribute. That will take more than the status quo: We'll never amount to nothin' 'til we learn to work with rope and chain.

We need some new blood within our community. Some big-shouldered, well-traveled, rope and chain sorts with the brawn to pull us out of our little oyster and into the larger world. We need a crowd deeply experienced in applications beyond desktop publishing, entertainment and education and with such strong credentials in the computing establishment that the IT folks who make all the platform decisions can find nothing to say against the Macintosh. The Unix crowd is just perfect for us, they will help revitalize the platform and spread the Macintosh gospel across an industry that, I think, sorely needs it. They will help us grow up.

So let's welcome the Unix movement as an ally, and build solid bridges across the two cultures. Some of the changes might be uncomfortable at first but we'll learn a thing or two about rope and chain.

Copyright 2001, Del Miller. All rights reserved.

Del

Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com

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