Macmaster

“ At the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door, Tietjens started violently. He was sitting in a smoking-jacket, playing patience engrossedly in a sort of garret bedroom. It had a sloping roof outlined by black oak beams, which cut into squares the cream coloured patent distemper of the walls. ”

“ When all were there Macmaster would establish himself on the incredibly unique hearthrug and would address wise sayings to the celebrity; occasionally, however, saying a kind thing to the youngest man present—to give him a chance of distinguishing himself. ”

“ They moved with such C.B.s, knights, presidents, and the rest as dabbled in writing or the arts: they went upwards with such reviewers, art critics, musical writers and archæologists as had posts in, if possible, first-class public offices or permanent positions on the more august periodicals. If an imaginative author seemed assured of position and lasting popularity Macmaster would send out feelers towards him, would make himself humbly useful, and sooner or later either Mrs. Duchemin would be carrying on with him one of her high-souled correspondences—or she wouldn't. ”

“ He then gave my people wagons,—about ten altogether; and he had his daughter brought as a teacher, at the rate of fifty dollars a month. But he soon died, and then came our present agent. He was not married at the time, but he very soon learned that there was money to be made, so he went back and got married. Of course he put his wife in as teacher. Mr. MacMasters, for that is his name, has his own method of making my people divide the produce. If they raise five sacks of grain, they give one sack for the Big Father in Washington; if they have only three sacks, they still have to send one. ”

“ He isn’t an artist. But he uses a Macintosh computer.
With the Mac’s famous “mouse”—the pointer device that Joe rolls along his desk to move the cursor—he can effortlessly make sketches.
Granted, Joe isn’t detached about Mac’s virtues, not as a $50,000-a-year software products manager with Apple Computer! And this particular example is trivial. It’s also, however, irresistible. And the story indeed shows how graphics can ease the life of a corporate manager. People also use computer-drawn maps for, say, directing colleagues to meetings in new places. ”

“ MacRoman is an 8-bit Apple Mac-specific character set which allows the display of accented characters and other symbols. To view a text that uses MacRoman, you will have to use an application that supports it, and there are few outside the Apple fold. However, iconv and recode are programs that convert between many character sets, and MacRoman is supported by both.
MID/MIDI (Format for music)
Musical Instrument Digital Interface is a music description language, encompassing not only file formats but definitions of interfaces. ”

“ The pie chart in Figure 1 shows the results of the iMac study. In a pie chart, each category is represented by a slice of the pie. The area of the slice is proportional to the percentage of responses in the category. This is simply the relative frequency multiplied by 100. Although most iMac purchasers were Macintosh owners, Apple was encouraged by the 12% of purchasers who were former Windows users, and by the 17% of purchasers who were buying a computer for the first time. ”

“ Create a frequency table Determine when pie charts are valuable and when they are not Create and interpret bar charts Identify common graphical mistakes When Apple Computer introduced the iMac computer in August 1998, the company wanted to learn whether the iMac was expanding Apple’s market share. Was the iMac just attracting previous Macintosh owners? Or was it purchased by newcomers to the computer market and by previous Windows users who were switching over? To find out, 500 iMac customers were interviewed. ”

“ That will change as special programs come out for the 16-bit machines and as old ones, like WordStar, begin to take full advantage of 16-bit capabilities. Already Apple and other companies are writing new software for computers like the Macintosh, which, if not universally regarded as a true 32-bit machine, contains chips faster than the IBM’s 8088.
For many small businesses, however, 8 bits may be powerful enough even for number crunching as long as the right programs are available.
The wisdom in the micro business is that no machine is ever obsolete—just so it does the job for you. ”

“ You see there’s the Jacobite Macintosh, and the ‘aboaminable’ English Macintosh, and the flirting Macintosh who raps Herr Laurent with her fan, and the fortune-telling Macintosh who reads palms and tea-cup leaves, and the dancing and deportment Macintosh who knows all the first families in Scotland. ”

“ The widely used Apples have their own operating systems—one for the Apple II series and another for the Macintosh.
There’s also UNIX. Ma Bell developed it originally, AT&T Information Systems now supports it, and Microsoft sells a microcomputer version called XENIX. The gurus say UNIX could be the operation system of the future. With it programmers can more easily write software for machines of different brands and sizes and “port” their programs from one computer to another. UNIX may also be good for micros with many people using them at once. ”

“ Do buy a guide for your model of computer or your pet software program; this book isn’t a replacement.
It offers, however, more detachment than a guide touting the virtues of a single machine. I’ll write about the computer I own—yes, I have my biases—but it’ll be as an example, not as the final answer. Frankly, for graphics work alone, my Kaypro II would not suffice. The screen isn’t good enough. The Kaypro’s electronic brain just is not very visually inclined, and all in all, I’d be far better off doing charts with an Apple Macintosh.
Many good paths wind through the Silicon Jungle. ”

“ Mac cursed under his breath. He sounded so cocksure, so all-knowing. He felt like beating himself. His earlier self, who had blithely toured Valier trailing the microphone wires without any real premonition of trouble. It always happens to the other guy—Not this time, chum, he reminded himself.
The gloves were systematically foiling his attempts to withdraw the coil of wire at his side. The tool kit was the ultimate in maintenance work, compact and complete with extension handles for the cutters and wrenches. ”

“ That spring of 1959, a new course was offered at MIT. It was the first course in programming a computer that freshmen could take. The teacher was a distant man with a wild shock of hair and an equally unruly beard—John McCarthy. A master mathematician, McCarthy was a classically absent-minded professor ”

“ The recording-adding machine being designed to print the items and answers of addition, requires power for the printing which cannot be supplied by key depression. Thus an extra means for supplying that power must be provided in the form of a crank lever, or in the latest machines by a motor. The keys in such machines serve only as digital control to gauge the setting of mechanism which prints the items and adds them together. The secondary motion operates the mechanism to print and add and finally to clear the machine for the setting up of the next item. ”

“ On left is an array of 16 analog computers; at right is a large digital data-processing system.
The facility can perform scientific and business tasks simultaneously.
The dictionary also gives us a good clue to the digital computer: “Digital.—Of the fingers or digits.” A digital machine deals in digits, or discrete units, in its calculations. For instance, if we ask it to multiply 2 times 2, it answers that the product is exactly 4. A slide rule, which we have said is an analog device, might yield an answer of 3.98 or 4.02, depending on the quality of its workmanship and our eyesight. ”

“ It’s simply too much wasted motion. I instead just press the cursor keys right above the main keyboard. Or I use WordStar’s cursor-moving commands. And even if I hadn’t learned touch typing a quarter century ago, I’d still wonder if a mouse for word processing wasn’t the Silicon Valley version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Next time you’re in California, maybe you’ll see Apple execs naked in the streets as well as their hot tubs. Well, maybe not. The mouse could be a great marketing tool for sales reps peddling Macs or Apple IIc’s to people hoping to do word processing. ”

“ As Pierre learned more about applying computers to his studies in musical theory, his questions of Max and demands of the Apple became increasingly complex. One night after several beers and a couple of joints Pierre asked Max what he thought was a simple question.
"How can we program the Apple so that it knows what each piece of data means?" he inquired innocently.
"You can't do that, man." Max snorted. "Computers, yes even Apples are stupid. They're just a tool. A shovel doesn't know what kind of dirt it's digging, just that it's digging." ”

“ Again, men of this class, and even those in charge of large departments, took the mere suggestion that they had use for a calculator or recording-adder as an insult to their efficiency, and would almost throw the salesman out. Others would very politely look the machine over and tell the salesman what a wonderful machine it was, but when asked to give the machine a trial, they would immediately back up and say that they had absolutely no use for such a machine ”

“ The old practice of casting a single type only at a time remains. The first idea of this machine originated with William M. Johnson, who obtained a patent for it in 1828. Elihu White put it into use in his type-foundry, and persevered in using and trying to improve it as long as he lived; but he did not succeed in removing the greatest fault, which was a hollowness in the body of the types cast by it, that inclined them to sink under the pressure of the printing-press. The first successful type-casting machine was invented by David Bruce, Jr., of New York, and was patented March 17, 1838. ”

“ Mail programs and text editors such as pico and pine promise much of the power of older programs such as emacs at a fraction of the complexity. Some software engineers are taking this even further, by creating graphical interfaces that will let somebody navigate the Internet just by clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text editor, sort of the way one can now navigate a Macintosh computer — or a commercial online service such as Prodigy. Then there are the Internet services themselves. ”

“ When you prefer an extra-large, extra-sharp screen and giant memory and when you can’t easily find micros of comparable quality. Here, too, I’m skeptical. The gap between micro hardware and the dedicateds is narrowing.
5. When you’re looking for a machine that will run special software that the micros won’t. Fondly, a Hollywood writer-director tells of a script-formating program “dreamed up by some lunatic in northern California.” Nowadays, however, moremore programmers are writing for micros than for dedicated word processors. ”

“ Can business records on magnetic tape or other storage media be used as evidence? Can companies be charged with mismanagement for not using computers in their business? How can confidential material be handled satisfactorily on computers?
Along with computing machines a whole new technology is growing. Universities and colleges—even high schools—are teaching courses in computers. And the computer itself is getting into the teaching business too. The “teaching machine” is one of the most challenging computer developments to come along so far. ”

“ It was this fact, that Locke was the one to introduce the pull-tab, that appealed to Peter more than anything else. He compared the metaphor to the Mate and Joey. The Mate was the first all-in-one portable computer (though inside the company they referred to it as a "luggable," rather than a true portable) that you could easily move from room to room, place to place, but it was nonetheless difficult to use; you first had to understand the utility "tool" programs that controlled the machine and its programs before you could fully employ all of its features. ”

“ A computer that can read for itself, rather than requiring human help, would seem to be perceptive and thus qualify as intelligent.
239Even early computers such as adding machines printed out their answers. All the designers have to do is reverse this process so that printed human language is also the machine’s input. One of the first successful implementations of a printed input was the use of magnetic ink characters in the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) system developed by General Electric. This technique called for the printing of information on checks with special magnetic inks. ”

“ High-speed analog storage permits the machine to make sequential calculations, a job once reserved for the digital computer. But even these advances cannot offset the basic limitations the analog computer is heir to.
84Fewer analog machines are being built now, and many in existence do not enjoy the busy schedule of the digital machines. As the mountains of data pile up, created incidentally by computers in the first place, more computers are needed to handle and make sense of them. It is easier to interpret, store, and transmit digital information than analog ”

“ And you’ll read in an accompanying backup about another hot topic in this era of contact between man and machine. It’s the mouse, the palm-sized gadget that you push along your desktop to guide the cursor (the little blinking line or other marker that shows where you’re typing on the computer screen) .
Some manufacturers love the mouse as a marketing gimmick. And it’s indeed nice for graphics. If you’re a writer or secretary, however, and if you lack three hands, you may be better off mouseless. Why? See Backup X, “Of Mice and Men.” ”