I've just returned from a really long vacation. For six weeks I didn't touch a single
computer. (Well, that's not strictly true; I did stroke many a touch-screen on
information kiosks or ticket machines, but you get the idea.) The first time after my
return that I grabbed the mouse of a live Macintosh there was a brief instant -- just a
single, sharp, fleeting moment -- when I felt the magic again.
Can you remember the first time you got to play with a working Macintosh? Were you
amazed -- I mean really astounded -- as I was? Did you: Peek under the mouse to see
what was there? Click and drag all over the place just to watch things happen? Drag a
file into a folder and then immediately open the folder to see if the file was really
there? Create a nest of new folders deep enough to get bored, just to see if it would
work? Try every combination of bold, outline, shadow, italic, and underline?
I'm betting that the fundamental reason you're interested in programming the
Macintosh is because of that magic. I know this isn't true for everyone out there (some
of you -- gasp -- probably do it for the money!), but I suspect it's true for most of
you, or at least it was when you started. Maybe you wanted to make a little of that
magic yourself. Maybe you just wanted to peek behind the curtain to see how it was
done. Or maybe you wanted (as I did) to find out where the magic came from, to hunt
down its source. One of the problems with that kind of techno-magic, though, is that
the more you learn about it and the more you use it, the more it fades away.
So here's the next question: When was the last time you felt the magic? If you're like
me, the magic of the Macintosh interface has been completely subsumed by everyday
familiarity. It's become a part of everyday life, like matches, or light bulbs, or TV.
I'm sure that when matches were still new, striking one and making fire was an
amazing thing. I'll bet people used up whole boxes of matches, striking them one by
one, just to see it happen. But matches are no longer special; their magic has become
cheap and commonplace and has therefore ceased to be magic at all. People don't light
matches for the thrill anymore (pyromaniacs excepted); they use them to light
something else -- matches have become a means, not an end. Similarly, we don't
marvel anymore at the fact that just by flipping a switch we can make an entire room
as bright as day, banishing forever the night; we think instead about what we want to
do tonight. We don't marvel anymore that moving pictures and sounds can be plucked
out of the air (or out of a cable, these days) and made to show up on a box in our
homes; we think instead about what's on.
This is probably a necessary and inevitable step in a culture's acceptance and
assimilation of a new technology: people stop marveling at the fact that they have a new
ability, and begin simply to use that ability. That period when new technologies still
feel like magic is also the period when a culture is adjusting itself to the technology
and being transformed by it. By the time a new technology has been fully integrated
into society, it's taken for granted, the magic exhausted and the transformation
complete.
So how does this apply to computers? Is the magic from computers all used up? Have
they been fully assimilated by human society and finished their transformational
work? Are they now taken forgranted and just a part of the background noise of modern
life? In the words of my mom when I asked her (at age 11) if I could get a tattoo on my
chest: Hell, no.
Particular manifestations of computers have become a part of daily life for many
people: cash machines, video games, bar code readers at markets, and so on. These are
computers, but they're masked -- the true nature of the machine is obscured by a
task-specific facade. Even the relatively small number of people who use "real"
computers in their everyday lives use them for only a few tasks (word processing,
graphics editing, number crunching, and game playing are common -- somehow recipe
filing never caught on). So they're really just using two or three specific, task-
oriented applications. And yes, these particular uses of computers have become
mundane to those who use them: writers use word processors without blinking,
accountants use spreadsheets without a hint of awe.
But I'm not sure whether computers as computers can ever be fully integrated into
society. They're too slippery, too prolific, too, well, protean. (Protean: able to take on
new forms easily, after Proteus, a sea god in Greek mythology who could change his
shape at will.) Just when we get used to them in one guise, they blur and shift and
suddenly they're something else, something new, something magical all over again.
And that's where programmers come in. We're the ones who get to cause that shift.
We're the ones who get to craft new faces for the machine, like mad, happy mask
makers. We're the ones that get tomake the magic. We get closer than anyone else to
tasting the real flavor of computers -- their malleability and chameleon-like talent
for taking on new forms -- but it's still only a taste, and the price is outrageous.
Making magic turns out to be nothing but hard, grungy work. Being a wizard looks
great from the outside, but there's a downside most people don't see: to create the
magic, you need to spend inordinately huge amounts of time doing completely unmagical
things, and even worse, you have to give up experiencing the magic for yourself. It's
like sleight of hand: it looks like magic to the audience, but to the conjurer it's not
magic at all. Learning that kind of magic means spending countless hours alone in front
of a mirror, practicing the same moves over and over and over until they're automatic
and can be made without even thinking. By that time any residual magic has been
completely wrung out of it.
Like brain researchers who set off to find the source of human consciousness and end
up studying the function of some enzyme in sea slugs, programmers often set off to find
the source of the magic and end up writing device drivers. There's a valuable lesson
there, one that took me years to learn: the magic isn't part of the machine at all. You
can follow the computer's workings right down to the bottom, and what you find is a
boringly predictable mechanism as devoid of magic as a meat grinder. It's like trying
to find musical beauty by closely examining a CD: all you can find is a series of rough
pits in a reflective surface, and there's no indication whatever that those pits could
contain something sublime.
So where does the magic come from? The answer's obvious, once you stop to think
about it: it comes from people. It turns out that computers don't possess any magic of
their own, they're just very, very good containers for human magic. The computer is
simply a shell, albeit one that's infinitely malleable. The people who shape the shell,
who tell the computer what to be, are the real source of the magic. I guess I should've
known.
DAVE JOHNSON wants to know: is he the only one who does watch-cursor push-ups
during time-consuming Macintosh operations? First you find a horizontal black line
(they're everywhere: window frames, folder icons, buttons, even the progress bar
itself), then you put the watch cursor just above it, so that the bottom edge of the
watchband overlaps the horizontal line by one pixel. Now carefully move the cursor up
and down by one pixel, and there you have it -- watch- cursor push-ups! You can do
pull-ups too! Amaze your friends! *
Dave welcomes feedback on his musings. He can be reached at JOHNSON.DK on
AppleLink, dkj@apple.com on the Internet, or 75300,715 on CompuServe.*
Galileo's finger is preserved in a bottle, just like a holy relic, in a science museum in
Florence, Italy. I saw it myself. Really.
Thanks to Jeff Barbose, Michael Greenspon, Bill Guschwan, Mark ("The Red") Harlan,
Bo3b Johnson, Lisa Jongewaard, and Ned van Alstyne for their always enlightening
review comments.