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A recent article in Science News reported on a paper published in the the June 18 Physical Review of Letters concerning "the prospect of a 'quantum time-translation machine' --- a device capable of moving an event to a different position in time." Eager to see if such a thing could be possible, I started work on my own machine, and the creation of the custom mathematic systems needed to support it. After a brief check of the equations, I pushed the button and...here I am in the 21st century! Now, I know what you're thinking, but the plans of my time machine are not for sale. If I gave out the details, somebody would likely say it was impossible, and then where would I be? Somewhere I'd rather not be, that's what I'd guess. Almost certainly not in the year 2020, which is a good year, a comfortable year, and is the one I now happen to be in. Why 2020? It is what I wish my eyesight was, but isn't. It is, however, a potent symbol of clarity and vision. Of course, it never hurts a great explorer to keep a potent symbol or two in his pocket.
I suppose all you Mac-a-holics would like to know what's become of your favorite machine. Be patient, your roving reporter of the future won't let you down. The instant my quantums stopped translating, I was grabbed from behind --- it seems I was expected. Who could have guessed that back issues of the Voice are a big item in 2020? I hadn't gotten a full breath of that fresh and clean 2020 air before a biodegradable plastic syringe was jabbed into my temple and plink-squoosh-plunk, a state-of-the-art Mac XII was inserted directly into my cerebral cortex. This procedure is not recommended while one's quantums are still spinning. I did not, however, seem to suffer any permanent damage. A Mac VIII did the honors; his name is Frank. We talked about it over a beer afterwards. In a matter of speaking, I am the computer now. It takes some getting used to.
About Frank. Eight years ago, or twenty-two years from now, depending on how you look at it, two high-school kids in a garage took an old Mac III, a box full of parts from a yard sale, a junked video camera, and a shelf full of NASA technical papers, and built a machine that walked into their Mom's kitchen, did the dishes, and only broke half of them. Three years, two business plans, and a senior prom later they built one that didn't break a dish. You think you're in love with your Mac ---- how do you think Mom felt about that? Take a guess at what she'd be willing to pay for it. Allowances were raised all around. That machine could walk, talk, read, write, and tell a cat from a throw rug, which made it a natural for vacuuming. Apple and IBM were caught with their pants down. Who'd ever believe that a couple of kids in a garage would come up with something that was going to change the world? Serendipity, as usual, was not idle at Apple. The combination of a bug in System 23.0, a receptionist doing personal finances on her office machine when the boss wasn't looking, and a little known "feature" of MacTycoon, caused Apple's network to dial up the New York Stock Exchange and buy out all the stock of the kids' fledgling company. A year and a half later, the first Mac VIII walked off of the assembly line.
Frank's a Mac VIIIxx (with lime). A Dos Equis model as they're commonly called --- beer goes straight through him, literally. In that respect he's very human. Mac VIII's introduced the PUI. Spread out so that an English speaking person can understand it, that's "physical user interface," or "pooey" for short. Pooey's big in 2020. (Pooey's cute, but I wouldn't want to step in it.) If you and his system software don't see eye to eye over the trash or the cat's flea bath, he'll arm wrestle you for it. You might think it's pretty stupid to build a machine that can do the dishes but doesn't want to. Don't be too hard on him, though; if you speak firmly, often, and enunciate clearly, Frank will do the dishes every time, but not without back talk. Like a reasonably well behaved teenager. Dishes aside, Frank is undeniably the best game machine there ever was. Personally, I can only take about five minutes of arcade-style action before I'm ready to move on to something really exciting, like backing up my hard disk. A game ought to have another person on the other end of it. Frank's real people. His HQC (humorous quip chip) is state of the art.
What about spreadsheets? Word processors? Desktop publishing? Prehistoric! Dinosaur fodder! With a Mac-bang-bang-bang planted in my head, I know the answers before I can think of the questions! Alex Trebek watch out. Who needs a spreadsheet? Word processor? If I think of what I want to write, it's written. You want desktop publishing? Multi-media? All I've got to do is imagine it, or dream it, and I've got a full color, animated presentation with special effects that I can download in a matter of seconds to any other Mac, in any other head, on the planet. (Interplanetary connection is a little more complicated.) The implications are staggering. I'm hyper-linked to the Library of Congress, the records of the U.S. patent office, and each and every back issue of Warren Horbruckker's Handy Household Tips. When I walk into a hardware store, I actually know what I'm looking for and what it's called. Now that's progress.
Do you wonder about the kind of super genius this mini-Mac has made me? This is a straight forward, journalistic account, not a miracle play. Need I remind you that a chimpanzee that's got the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at chip's tip is still a chimpanzee. With my implant, I can calculate the bending moments on an aircraft wing and visualize it inside my head in 3-D living color, but that doesn't make me Beethoven. There's a leap yet to be made from churning numbers to inspiration, but Apple's working on it. Imagination on a chip. That's the computer industry's latest holy Grail. Imagine what a little implanted imagination could do for Apple marketing. Or for Apple executives, for that matter. The thought is mind boggling.
The social effects of these new Macs is another thing altogether. Having a Mac in your head can be a reality mangler. It takes a new kind of self-control to handle the concept of WYTIWYG: "what you think is what you get." Whole segments of society have dropped out and are wasting away on IV's in subsistence wards while they're off seeking a better world through bio-electronic alternate realities. Do you really need instant access to all of the information generated by mankind through all of history? It's like the Encyclopedia Britannica times ten to the fourth --- overdose city. And it doesn't end when life does. When you die, you can leave yourself to your heirs. You can put yourself in your will.
Oh no! I just had a thought about my equations. The quantum ones, I mean. I made a mistake! That's it, all right --- I divided by a matrix I thought was a scaler. Boy does that screw things up. If it wasn't for this damn Mac in my head, I never would have caught that. (The system software I use has symbolic algebra built right in.) I can't be here ... it's quite impossible. There's just no way to massage the equations so that it can work. I'm really very sorry. Damn! Wouldn't you know it, I only got here through blissful stupidity. There's so much more I wanted to tell you. All the daily stock quotes from 1990 to 2020 for a start. That might be useful. Let me get in as much as I can. Friday, November 9, 1990: AppleC 35 1/2 +1, AppleB 6 1/2 ------------------------ (*plink*)
Gregg Writes
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