The Mac's Most Important Feature

By Brian J. DePardo

Fourteen years ago, Apple gave the masses the opportunity to try something different, graphical computing, and other companies have been playing catch-up ever since.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is coming closer everyday. Some say that they have achieved--even surpassed--the quality of the Mac's interface. While it's true that Windows has come a long way (even I was surprised at the nice refinements in Windows 98's GUI), it really isn't about having folders and icons, desktops and menus. No, the elegance of the Mac OS leaps far beyond that. In fact, the whole Mac experience goes way beyond just the software. It's in the hardware too, right down to the sub-woofer in my 6400. It's TRUE plug and play. It's the slid-out motherboards and the G3's that unfold like origami. It's the little mechanism that pushes the floppy disk out of the drive when you eject it. It's the one thing that Microsoft just can't seem to work into Windows PC's. It's FUN!

I was explaining this to a friend recently, and it brought to mind an experience that I had a few years back.

It all started after I returned home from the grocery store. Of course, I managed to get all the bags into the house in one trip. Before retiring my purchases to their new home in the depths of my kitchen cabinets, I went to see what my wife was up to.

As usual, she was in the office working on one of our computers. My son Holden--a year old at the time--was busy dragging all of our shoes out of the closet, and trudging around the house in them.

Ahh, all was well, wasn't it? Not quite. As I turned to get back to the groceries, something caught my eye. My Macintosh IIcx was sticking its tongue out at me (or at least that is what it looked like). I approached it with caution and sure enough, there was a disk sticking part way out of the drive. I carefully removed it, wondering how it had gotten there. Certainly I didn't think I had left it like that, and my wife rarely used it. Putting the disk aside, I passed it off as early signs of senility, and got up in another attempt to put the food away.

Not so fast...what was that on the desktop? Sitting, like a bad omen under my hard drive icon, was a disk. Not the shadow of a disk that had once been in the drive, it was an actual "live" disk icon. Weird, I thought. I moved my hand to the mouse and quickly dragged that disk to the trash. The disk icon was gone, but nothing came out of the drive. Bending down, I peered into the drive and saw that in fact there was another disk in there.

My pulse started to race. Quickly, my fingers took control with every keystroke, every mouse maneuver I could think of. I even tried the old reliable paper clip trick, but it wasn't budging. The Mac was holding that disk hostage, and I was afraid that the ransom was going to be a new SuperDrive.

In my state of panic, I was too concerned with how to fix the problem instead of what or who caused the problem. I began to realize that I was in a room full of suspects. It was now interrogation time.

Pointing the problem out to my wife, she shrugged her shoulders, and of course, denied any blame. Next suspect: Holden DePardo. Age: 19 months. I had taken him in for questioning before. Previous convictions: computer abuse, file deleting, leaving sticky fingerprints on monitor screens, changing folder names to "p083h;f;oedi30," etc.

I proceeded with the interrogation knowing that it wouldn't take long for him to crack under the pressure. "Holden, did you touch Daddy's computer?" He tried to stay cool, staring up at me with those big baby blues. I decided to rephrase my question. "Were you playing with the disks?" I asked, holding one up for him to see.

And then he folded like a player with a bad hand. He raised his eyebrows and one, incriminating blurb rang from his little mouth: "Uh, oh."

I released him on personal recognizance without saying another word, and retreated back to the kitchen to ponder his sentencing.

After finally getting those groceries put away, I confronted the convicted toddler. I explained that in doing what he had done, he would be sentenced to an early "night, night." He feebly rubbed his eyes, and picked up his cordless Playskool phone to place his one allowed call. Then reaching for his faithful "blankie," it was "night, night."

In desperation, I haul the CPU down to my local computer store to see if it was either fixable, or if they could order a replacement drive. It didn't surprise me when they assured me that the disk drive had suffered severe damage, and was ultimately, unusable. What did surprise me was that they had found not two, but three disks in there. Unfortunately, Holden hadn't realize that when you put a disk in, you have to take it out in order to insert another. Imagine his disappointment when the drive was too full to suck another disk in.

With the price of a replacement drive being close to $200.00 (remember, this is a quite few years ago), I brought my Mac home again, and for weeks played Russian Roulette with my data.

And whom do I blame for all this? Not Holden anymore. He served a reduced sentence for good behavior. Certainly not the fine people at my neighborhood computer store. No, only one could take the blame. Apple. They're the ones who made the Mac so much fun. And how many Windows users can say they messed up their PCs because they were so much fun?

Brian DePardo is a freelance writer and mac lunatic living in East Greenwich, RI. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen magazines throughout the United States and he has just completed his first novel.

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February 09, 2010