IBM, the PS/2 and Why PCs are as they are...

Herewith an IM exchange from a few years back in which I opine as to when, and how, IBM lost control of PC design and standards. "Tristram" is Darren, a Macolyte par excellence.

Myself: Greetings.

Tristram: How goes it?

Myself: I am having new iMac hallucinations.

Tristram: As am I.. however, my need to keep my finances in some semblance of order has quelled the uprising. I DO think the thing will sell at a solid rate,
however.

Myself: Oh hell yes.

Myself: And I am angrier than ever at the so-called computer makes on the PC side. Looking at the iLamp, I mean, iMac, one realizes how little design and engineering (and thought of any kind) goes into PCs. They really have become mere office supplies, like staplers and fax machines and the like.

Tristram: Pretty damn close thereto, that's true. Function far outstrips form. But for so many PC users, that's just fine.

Myself: All too true. If ya think about it, we really shouldn't speak of "Dell computers" or "Compaq computers" apart from servers or high-end workstations (which actually are designed from the ground up). Apart from those specialty machines, most "brand" PCs are nothing of the kind. They are wholly interchangeable. Someone else makes the mobo, the chip, the drives, etc. Dell or whoever just assembles them (badly).

Tristram: Well, Dell is actually said to be fairly competent. I don't know about the individual MAN, Dell, but they say his company puts together a fairly passable unit.

Myself: Botheration. However, I think Steve is onto something. Apple has to be, well, different. They can't win the "office equipment" battle, because of issues of cost and scale that are - at least for now - insurmountable.

Myself: When I show my PC pals the new iMac pictures, they openly smile. "That's so....great..." is the usual response. And these are longtime, cynical computer guys.

Tristram: Wow. That's amazing to hear... and what did they think of the original iMac three years ago, or the Cube a year and a half ago, just out of curiosity?

Myself: They disliked the lack of a floppy drive and no onboard SCSI port - which even I had to admit was a very fair criticism - a lot of these guys had expensive SCSI devices, and how much would it have cost, really, to slap a 25-pin SCSI-2 connection on the side, next to the USB ports? They loved the iMac's design, though.

Tristram: Well, that is comforting. So they are able to discern what is good and what is chaff.

Myself: As for the Cube, they raved about the design but thought it was pricey (esp sans monitor) and wondered about its market prospects. One said, "You can't have design for design's sake. The Cube should win all sorts of awards... but will it SELL?"

Tristram: But in neither case did they scoff or laugh at the bold designs.

Myself: No. They, like I, love design. We're all ID disciples. The highest achievement of any tool is transparency; do the job without getting in the way of the job.

Tristram: I agree.. thus the appeal of the entire Mac solution.

Myself: Agreed. Although, of course, versatility imposes complication. No way 'round that. But what I like about Apple is that they keep plugging.

Tristram: Yes.. that's definitely the case.. as these machines become more capable, they become increasingly more complex and unstable.

Tristram: Until the advent of the "Modern OSes" that we now have, where a best-of-all-worlds situation can (theoretically) exist. We'll see.

Myself: Right. PCs are horrible in this regard, although WinXP is a big step up. But we must remember that PC development was marketing driven once IBM lost any kind of control (circa 1986-87).

Myself: From that point, security and stability didn't matter. Make 'em cheap, build a lot of them, and sell as many as possible. Oh - and maintain backward compatibility at all costs, as a selling point so folks won't have to repurchase their software libraries when they upgrade. Marketing, marketing, marketing.

Tristram: Right. To that end, meet the parallel port.

Myself: The tech-heads at the OEMs knew then, and know how, how shoddy most of the design was, and how screwy the software was. But their hands were tied. They loudly complained, but they weren't in charge.

Myself: I consider the 86-87 period a watershed in PC tech and system design, not the intro of the AT platform in 84 or the 386 or even the price collapse engineered by Compaq in 1991/2. I have a strange reason, but I think it holds up.

Tristram: Do tell. Most less-informed tech-heads would put the focus on a later time, perhaps, or earlier, I would think. But I'm sure you have a cogent rationale behind this.

Myself: Ok, here it is: in 1986, IBM realized they had utterly lost control of the PC. Dirt-cheap, 100% PC-compatible mobos were arriving from the East (Taiwan, esp), Intel would sell the chips to anyone, and - of course - Microsoft couldn't license DOS fast enough.

Myself: Because IBM had used off-the-shelf parts to make the PC (for reasons of cost and speed of design back when they first rolled it out), they had no control at all over the hardware. The only real "IBM" part was the BIOS, which Compaq cracked -followed by many others. So, what to do?

Myself: IBM's answer was: when you're losing the game, change the rules.

Tristram: Most Kirk-like of them.

Myself: (Trivia aside: IBM's cost per unit for the original PCs was VERY low. They actually ran a smooth, lean operation as far as PCs went. The problem was the enormous, and I mean enormous, overhead of the rest of IBM. But IBM could - and did - build the actual PCs cheaply as Compaq or anyone else did.)

Myself: Anyway... IBM decided to "restart" the PC market with a new series of machines. These were IBM all the way, designed in-house and proprietary (and patented) from snout to tail. No off-the-shelf serial ports or third-party chips here.

Myself: They secured exclusive licenses from Intel and fixed the machines so they would only run IBM's PC-DOS, not the general Microsoft MS-DOS. In order to shoot the aftermarket card makers through the head, IBM redesigned the mobo and introduced MicroChannel 32-bit architecture.

Myself: IBM, in other words, was going out of it's way to make a computer that was NOT compatible with the original PC/XT/AT series.

Tristram: Right. Interesting. A whole new beast that ran their OS well... Mac-like in the sense that they controlled the complete product.

Myself: Exactly. Take THAT, clone-makers! IBM also planned to roll out OS/2 as the preloaded OS - but most of them wound up running PC-DOS because OS/2 wouldn't be ready for several more years. (The OS/2 fiasco deserves its own conversation...)

Myself: So, they called these new machines Personal System 2 (PS2) and rolled them out in 1987 with massive publicity. They even offered a "cloning license", for a steep price, you could start an OEM company and build specialty PS2s (license revocable at will by IBM).

Myself: Some of the PS2s were marvelous. The PS2/80, as I recall, could be disassembled like Lego bricks for service. The PS2s introduced the 3.5 diskette, VGA graphics, the now-familiar PS2-style mouse and keyboard connectors, and a host of other things. There was some solid design behind these things.

Tristram: I remember the PS/2 concept, but I didn't know what was behind it all.

Myself: But they were expensive, proprietary and the performance results were mixed. Had the things been barnburners, the computer world might be very different. But they weren't. Your average Compaq DeskPro 386/20 could match them, and cost 1/3 less, and was - and was industry standard for expansion boards and drives. And that was the killer.

Myself: For the first time in PC-dom, the term "industry standard" not only did not refer to what IBM was doing - it was opposed to what IBM was doing. IBM had actually "Apple'd" itself into opposing the Intel/AT mobo/MS-DOS platform juggernaut; they were knocked flat.

Tristram: Hmm. Interesting in the extreme. Amazing that these culled-together machines, these bastardized Frankenstein's monsters of the computing world, could actually DO anything with something approaching, and even exceeding the aplomb of these finely-tuned machines.

Myself: The kiss of death came when it was discovered that the PS2 series had trouble running versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and Flight Simulator (these were the "reference" software programs used to gauge PC-compatibility) because of video issues.

Tristram: Or Apple's equally-finely-tuned machines.

Myself: Yup. And the PS2's fate was sealed. A number of PC-clone makers formed the so-called Group of Eight and publicly swore they would have nothing to do with the PS2 licensing, MicroChannel or any of it. Shortly afterward, they created a 32bit "new" - but backward compatible - daughtercard and slot design called "EISA."

Myself: IBM just fell apart after that, and would not recover until the mid-90s. A fair number of PS2s were sold to the government and large businesses (no surprise there, eh?) but as far as PC-land went, IBM became irrelevant.

Tristram: Hmph. Well... that's fascinating stuff. I suppose the combined might of a thousand companies pursuing performance and compatibility from a hundred different angles was enough to overcome the singular excellence of IBM.

Myself: Right. Exactly. And that's the problem. With IBM off the throne, leadership passed to... nobody. The only 'leadership' was a committee of hundreds (the cloners, Intel and Microsoft, and the 3rd party software and hardware makers) whose only possible collective decision was this:

Don't have a repeat of the PS2. Don't take chances. No radical design advances. Maintain compatibility at all costs.

Myself: And we've been there, more or less, ever since. Thus endeth the story. Hope it wasn't too boring.

Tristram: Not at all. Very, very interesting. Though the end result is pretty boring. Thankfully, software design hasn't been quite so stagnant through it all.

Myself: No, thank God for software. And, to be fair, there is something to be said for enduring standards. Alas, I don't see any way out of it. The PC market is so massive that advances are slow, grudging and troublesome.

Tristram: Right. The question becomes - when will the industry MANDATE a change? When will the needs of the customer dictate that something needs to change?

Myself: The "cool" stuff that happens seems to occur only when the expanding PC market bumps into something that already exists. Internet, digital video and audio... these things existed "outside" the PC before you could do them ON a PC. Which is why I think Apple has got it right. Computers are no longer some enclosed world of apps and games and printers and the like... They have to "mesh" with consumer electronics and other communication technologies.

Myself: And the thing about Apple is, they seem to really care about "meshing" properly. At the recent Keynote, Jobs mentioned what a pain in the ass digital photos can be, with different apps to capture, edit and organize photos.

Tristram: Right. Such is the case in many fields of digital lifestyling.

Myself: This is so true. Everyone knows it. But the PC folks won't move on it because - God forbid - that would mean presenting a new standard for integrating these tasks and taking a risk. The PC attitude is one of resignation. "Yeah, it's a pain, but it works, more or less." I'm guilty of this myself.

Myself: The Steve said another interesting thing: we would find it absurd to read, but not want to (or be able to) write. Yet in this video age, we are so much all spectators, but not creators. Dammit, cameras and good editing software are essential to our time. Why NOT have a zillion people making their own movies? Lots of folks have stories to tell. Okay, most of it will be crap - but so what? They’re just electrons. Erase it and try again.

Tristram: So true. The key, however, becomes informing the masses that this is something that can be done, should be done, and is now available. And to let them know WHERE it's at, before the PC world stumbles into something approaching parity.

Myself: Right. And call me an elitist, but quality costs money. Macs are on the balance pricier than PCs because of market share, economy of scale, etc. So be it. But you still get one HELL of a computer for the money, and the excellence of design and ease of use DOES make a difference. And at $1299, the new iMac entry-level is a bargain.

Tristram: Longevity counts, as well.

Myself: Yes, that, too. Buying a Mac is like buying a car. Three years' on, it will still be there.

Myself: Speaking of: after the "Megahertz Myth," Apple needs to take head-on the "upgrade" myth. Most people - the solid majority - should NOT have to buy a new computer every 18 mos or two years. That is, pardon my Swahili, bullshit.

Myself: Yes, some will always need the "latest and greatest." But for most folks, the iMac you buy now should serve you faithfully for years. This whole despicable scheme of building (and buying) crap computers because, hell, in 12 months I'm just going to toss it anyway and get a new one, has got to go. This was marketing brainwashing by companies that based their business models on massive volume sales of soft/hardware and therefore had to convince us there was something "wrong" with us if our machines were older than 2 years.

Myself: My 3 year old iMac runs like a clock. Only thing I ever did was add RAM.

Tristram: True enough. The built-in obsolescence thing has been eaten up by the buying public. They really believe in it. Of course, on the PC side, sometimes the two-year obsolescence myth holds true!

Myself: "Oh no, the new 10Ghz MetaPentium liquid-nitro-cooled PCs are out with particle-accelerated video cards and 20 GB of RAM! I must have one! How can I run Word and get email without it! Where's my credit card?!"

Tristram: Not to mention the old couple that came into the Hauppauge Apple store in mid-November, purchased a Dual-800 G4 with not one, but TWO Cinema Displays and an additional video card to drive the second beast, all expressly meant for... you guessed it... word processing and Internet surfing.

Myself: Wow. Maybe with that rig, they can get RealPlayer to work.

Tristram: Hey - let's not predict wildly here.

Myself: True, true. Speaking of, I wish Apple would release these Keynotes and other QuickTime goodies as downloadable files (for those of us with broadband). No matter what I try, they always look like crap.

Tristram: Same here. That WOULD be nice, yes....

Myself: Akamai servers, my butt. In other exciting news: I got x-rayed this morning, and after one of the shots, I hear the tech (behind the screen) say, "Oh, crap." File that under

Things You Don't Want To Hear.

It turned out his pen was out of ink.

Tristram: Most definitely! Do you think you'll make it?

Myself: If I use a different pen, yes.

Apple's Dilemma II (2006)

While I am a Mac fan, I have little patience for overheated rhetoric about Apple vs Microsoft as some kind of sacred struggle between Vision and Compromise. I mean, really.

Apple, at this point, has little choice but to emphasize design and the effective integration enabled by their proprietary platforms because it's all they have left. What else are you going to sell the Mac on? Price/performance? The software library? Please.

I think the Mac advocates' strongest points are these:

1) The open architecture of the PC is a mixed blessing. Yes, you can customize and modify PCs in every possible way, but this also opens the doors for every kind of functional and compatibility problem. We PCers take a perverse pride in our tinkering abilities, but most of us have to admit that we are "technical" by necessity, not desire, because the PC platform is a house of cards compared to the Mac - although things are a lot better now that under Win3.1/95/98.

2) The PC architecture serves a "lowest common denominator" interest far more than the Mac's. "Backward compatibility at all costs" is almost a design rule with PCs - and woe to those who truly try to innovate or improve. Not even IBM could get away with it, when they tried to "bump up" the PC to the next level with the PS/2 architecture, control of the industry was ripped from their hands by the Cloners; a committee of companies led by Compaq dedicated to s - l - o - w progress, if any, in how computers are used.

(Look at how long ancient DOS-code persisted in Windows 95 and 98, at the cost of terrible instability and insecurity in those OSes. Think that was an accident? Lazy programmers? Nope. Legacy software and hardware required it.)

We can't be too harsh, though. Companies that spend literally thousands or tens of thousands on hardware and software do not want vendors telling them every 18 months or so, "Ok, everyone out of the pool. We're changing everything." Ironically, Apple's small market share actually frees them to take chances that no other OEM would dare. Look at the way Apple TWICE successfully migrated their entire business across hardware (68k -> PowerPC) and OS (MacOS -> OSX) lines. I have a hard time seeing a PC cloner doing that - assuming they'd have the nerve to even try.

3) Gear-savvy PC folks who come into discussions like this - including me - with their scratch-built, ultra-cheap PCs and hands-on knowhow, are not typical of computer users. Computer users are getting less 'techie' with every passing year. People can debate the desirability of this, but it's a fact. The fact that you can "roll your own" PC means very little to most PC users. For them, the quality of goods and ease of use presented by the Mac are highly compelling.

Side note: What kills the deal, as I said before, is the PRICE. Even if they can't do the homebrew thing, they know people who can. I have built a dozen PCs for friends and coworkers in the past few years and easily half of them were considering a Mac. They just can't look past the price. You can lecture them all you want about interface elegance and iTunes and whatnot, but they see giving me $1000 to build them a good PC vs spending $1300 for the cheapest iMac or $2500 for the cheapest PowerMac.

4) The "software gap" has everything to do with market share and nothing to do with the technical merits of the PC architecture. Half-Life would have run just fine on the Mac, but wasn't released for business reasons. Similarly, cutting-edge hardware folks (like those 3d accelerator makers) roll their stuff out on the PC first simply because there are more of them, and they'll sell more cards.

5) Microsoft's power has got to be reduced. I don't begrudge them the credit they are due. They've done very good work and - for the most part - earned their success. (Thanks, Steve.)

But Microsoft has reached a point in their corporate growth where innovation of any kind takes a distant second place to smashing all potential competition - not by making and selling better stuff in a "May the best man win" way, but through anti-competitive (and illegal) measures. This was the conclusion of the Court after an exhaustive investigation (and was common knowledge in the computer and software industry before the trial).

There is also the little fact that they were found guilty in court of breaking the law to maintain their monopoly - during which case the company was caught presenting faked 'evidence' regarding certain aspects of Windows and IE.

Of course, the actual punishment was a joke. Proof again that if you're big and rich enough, it can pretty much ignore the law.

Microsoft's current goal - which the management of the company makes no secret of - is to remove control of the desktop operating system from the end user.

This will be accomplished in two ways:

First, the gradual shift from a 'retail purchase' to a 'subscription' model. You won't just buy Windows once for your PC, you'll rent it and pay and pay and pay...

This allows Microsoft to keep the Windows "cash cow" going. They knew all along that high volume OEM and retail OS sales and upgrades wouldn't last forever, that at some point most homes and offices wouldn't be buying new computers as often as they were in the late 80s - early 90s. The subscription model is their way of making you buy Windows all over again at regular intervals, whether you need to or not.

Second, changes in the Windows OS architecture and functionality will make it increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to run Windows off-line as a stand-alone product. Your PC will become less a PERSONAL computer and more of a USER TERMINAL dependent on centralized data services.

This is the real motivation behind their enthusiasm for a wired world and increased deployment of broadband Internet access, as well the new Windows activation scheme.

All this would be less worrisome if Microsoft wasn't the only show in town, but it is. Even J. P. Morgan and Standard Oil never enjoyed the level of market control that Redmond now holds.

Microsoft is not evil. It's simply a company trying to protect and maximize its revenue sources. I understand that. But there are some fights it must not be allowed to win. Apple is key to this. But for Apple to make a real difference, it needs to move beyond producing boutique computers for the Pottery Barn set and take a real bite out of Windows' market.

PCs, Macs & Hassles

What is it with this fetish of endless hardware tweaking among PC users? Some so-called high performance PCs remind me of those hyper-modified cars that are showpieces of technology but are hardly even driven because the engineering is so unstable.

Also, I think we have already reached the point of diminishing returns in all but the most demanding software. Sure, PhotoShop eats computers for lunch, but I've still got a Pentium 3 in my office with "only" 512MB of RAM that runs WinXP and MS Office2K like a champ. It also handles email and web surfing just as well as any nitro-cooled, 733t h4xx0r monstrosity you could find.

Sure, I've got a game computer "dragster" but it's a freak machine. I don't do serious work on it and if it blows up, I won't lose anything valuable. (I back up my config files and saved games routinely.)

A computer that is cheap and fast but also unstable and high-maintenance is not a good machine for important work.

Another thought: one of the editors of MacToday (Scott Kelby, I think) once made the point that when you browse the shelves of Mac books, they are almost entirely devoted to actually DOING things with your Mac. That your Mac is working properly is assumed.

The PC library, on the other hand, is chock full of diagnostic, repair and troubleshooting volumes. At least half the PC books at my local Borders' are devoted to the problem of PCs simply not working.

An observant eye will also notice how many of the top-selling PC software titles, year after year, deal with simply keeping the various versions of Windows running or negotiating hardware hassles.

Ask any computer support person how often they've had to respond to emergency calls for Macs constantly crashing or going haywire - even in a Mac-heavy environment. This might account for the MIS community's opposition to Macs; their very existence presumes offices filled with computers that need constant attention... look at a Mac office and, 99% of the time, you'll see some MIS guy reading Wired all day long and a layer of dust over his stack of "emergency recovery" disks.

Bewarez

On the matter of piracy and computer games...

First, I'm not talking about "Abandonware" - old, off-the-market games that you couldn't buy even if you wanted to. As much as it pains me to say this, being a little naughty is just about the only way to get a chance to play some of the all-time classic titles. (Consider the case of the classic economics/strategy game M.U.L.E., which has been unavailable for 20 years. Even if you found and bought a copy, you'd need an Atari 800 or C64 to run it. And after 20 years, how many of those single-sided floppy disks have survived? How many COULD survive?)

I am talking about the mass piracy of current retail products. Let's assume that BananaSoft's hot new game, BananaQuest, arrives in stores for $50. If some h4xxor clown rips the disc image and FTPs/P2Ps it to his favorite warez site, where 500 of his closest friends grab a copy, that's a loss of twenty five thousand dollars. Now, 733t d00dz reading this will immediately object because I am making the assumption that everyone who grabbed a pirate copy would've been willing to buy the game at retail, rather than just giving it a pass altogether. Therefore, they'd respond, we can't know how much money BananaSoft has actually lost.

To quote the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, "Bullshit." While we cannot know for certain exactly how many pirates would become purchasers if they had to bite the bullet and lay down $50, I feel safe in saying most would. Computer gamers, after all, want to play computer games, and a signature title like BananaQuest would be irresistible to the solid majority of them. This argument - "I pirated the game so I wouldn't have to buy it, but if I had to buy it I might not have wanted it after all, but I did want it so I pirated it" - is just nonsense. It's a facile rationalization to smokescreen theft.

Theft? Yes, theft. The folks at BananaSoft put time and effort into BananaQuest and recover their expenses by charging people for the finished work. If you take their work without compensating them, you have stolen their time and effort. It's that simple; a child could understand it.

There is also the detrimental effect on the larger World of Gaming... I was chatting a few months back with several people on a Direct Connect hub who professed to be ardent Sega Dreamcast fans. At one point, I remarked that while the console's death was shame, at least the firesale prices at the end let us all stock up on titles, extra controllers, etc.

They were shocked to hear that I actually bought games for any price. Their entire DreamCast libraries were warezed - every last game. They had dozens of pirated games each, which they offered to share with me. Now, I know Sega made it laughably easy to pirate DC discs, but even so... When I commented that massive piracy might have caused - or at least hastened - the demise of the DC, they became furiously defensive and asked me if I was "some kind of cop."

The next day, the DreamCast pirates got the mods of that Direct Connect hub to banish me. According to the email I got, I am a "fascist" for opposing no-limit, no-questions-asked warezing. Sieg Heil, baby.

The following is a list of defenses of piracy raised in that discussion, and my responses to them.

Piracy is not like theft, because you're not stealing a physical object. It's just computer code

Yes. The special, non-corporeal nature of software makes duplication and distribution very easy, since there are no physical materials involved (as with shoplifting books) and there is no quality or functionality loss over successive generations of copies (as with copying video tapes). The warez folks seem to believe that, since piracy is so damned easy and carries so little individual risk, it occupies a different ethical category than walking out of a music store with the latest Moby CD in your pocket. This is a self-serving lie. It's the Might Makes Right mentality; in this case, the idea that people who are technically clever enough to pirate games are entitled, as some kind of class privilege, to do it.

Okay, let's get this clear: you do not "own" the intellectual property in your computer games, songs, books, videos, DVDs and whatnot unless you hold the copyright. What you have is a limited user license which, under copyright law, allows you to do certain things and not do other things. Generally speaking, personal use and archival copies are okay but mass copying and distribution are not.

Many software stores don't allow returns - I have to pirate stuff so I can "preview" it and not get burned.

The harsh No Return or Same Title Only return policies of most stores are a direct response to rampant piracy. Merchants were forced to take measures to protect themselves against people buying a game only to pirate it and then returning it for a refund. Some stores still accept returns because they prefer to keep people happy and will accept the 'hit' from the inevitable piracy. That's up to the store.

This is where the nature of digital media comes into play. If I buy a book on Friday and return on Monday for a refund, the bookseller knows there is very little chance that I spent those three days making dozens of copies of it - which in turn could be made to make dozens, if not hundreds, more copies, all of them perfect reproductions of the source.

With analog audio/video sources, it's a little easier - I don't need a printing press and truckloads of paper as with duplicating books - but still takes some doing. I'd still need certain equipment and know-how to mass-replicate them without degradation. Even with that, there is a noticeable reduction in quality between generations of audio and video tape - there is also the time element. Unless you have access to high-speed duplication equipment, copies take a lot of time. The gradual loss of quality and the "hassle" of it all serve as brakes upon mass duplication.

With digital media, it's another story. Huge numbers of copies can be made and distributed very quickly and the fidelity to the source material is PERFECT. Little kids can do it. And that's why merchants have lowered the boom.

So what about customers that get stuck with bad games? Well, when a game is "bad" in the sense of being incomplete and barely functional as a software product (like the infamous Ultima 9), then Consumer Rights do come into play. A similar case can be made for games which are advertised and sold on features they don't actually contain (like the infamous Outpost).

If a game is simply "bad" in the sense of boring, cliched and terrible gameplay, then...well, that's life. Be a more careful shopper. Besides, the release of any major game is accompanied by a withering barrage of publicity and critical scrutiny from the paper and online gaming press. Following the release of Morrowind, for example, I counted three dozen detailed reviews on various gaming sites. Within a month of its release, there was more Morrowind information and evaluation than you could possibly read.

Another thing to consider: the better a game is, the more people want to play it and the more inclined they will be to pirate it (assuming the "piracy is no big deal" attitude prevails). One of the most heavily pirated games in recent memory has been WarCraft 3, which is a quality title that's certainly worth the $60 Blizzard charges, put out by a company that is as "pro-gamer" as you can get.

Blizzard is a "good" company making a "good" game. Has this made a difference? No. Warcraft 3 was boosted right and left, which totally gives the lie to the notion that warezing is some kind of consumerist guerrilla action.

Nor is this a new problem; piracy is as old as computer gaming. CD-Burners have been around and affordable for several years now. Before that, pirates relied on the few who had burners to rip the discs and compress/transfer them to a series of floppy disk images, and the titles were moved around in that form. Prior to the availability of broadband Internet access, private BBSs and face-to-face "swap meets" were used to move the goods.

Games on floppy disks were widely pirated - indeed, one of the most notorious pirate operations on the East Coast of the USA - Pirate's Cove, on Long Island - specialized in floppy disk games for the Atari 400/800 and Apple 2/2+. Even then, piracy was not a matter of "customer revenge" against bad games or retailers. The most pirated games were the best ones - M.U.L.E., Starflight, Archon, the Ultimas, etc.

Piracy is not that widespread / that big of a deal.

It's rather hard to quantify something which is illegal and covert by nature. Still, given the prevalence of CD-burners, broadband access for moving large files and ISOs, and easy-as-pie P2P setups like Direct Connect, and given people's proven willingness to get things without paying for them - especially if there is virtually no risk of getting caught - I think it's safe to say that song, movie, TV show and game piracy is widespread.

An important thing to consider is how EASY pirating has become. The whole scene used to be quite "clubby," but with the advent of broadband, burners, etc. it has exploded. Now anyone with a cable modem or DSL line who knows how to set up Direct Connect can run amok in Pirateland like a kid in a candy store. The essential nature of the activity has not changed. What has changed is the ease and scope of it.

Napster, the World HQ of music theft, was a good example. Napster didn't become popular because a few audiophiles were trading handfuls of obscure songs within their little hobby circles. The appeal of Napster was that multitudes of people were "sharing" mountains of MP3s - most certainly including current, commercially-available music.

As for the cost of game piracy, let's do some math. Suppose I run a peer to peer service - like a Direct Connect hub - and I "share" Warcraft 3 with my fellow gamers. Word gets out and 1 person a day downloads it over a three month period until I need the drive space and remove the files. (These are very conservative figures for a hot new game, by the way.)

Blizzard is asking $60 for Warcraft 3. $60 x 31 downloads/month x 3 months = $5580. Five and a half grand is not a trivial amount.

Games are too expensive.

If Blizzard wants to charge $100 for Diablo 3, it's up to them. If I don't like it, I don't have to buy it. If I say, "Well, they need me, Champion of Fair Pricing, to teach them a lesson!" and go around pirating it, I am a nothing but a thief. I've been a computer gamer since the Apple ][+, and I can tell you that game prices have always hovered around the $30-50 range, and often more. $50 for a game that can give you dozens of hours of entertainment is not highway robbery. Am I supposed to feel sympathy for those poor warez kids, who just happen to have powerful computers, high speed CDR drives, broadband Internet access, various video game consoles and the leisure time to consume (and pirate) endless amounts of anime, music, video games, Simpsons episodes and whatnot? We're not talking about people stealing food and medicine. Enough said.

Retro Lament

The recent purchase of a used Star Control 2 game has got me in Retro Mode. By "retro," I don't mean using a hotrod gaming PC powerful enough to control a Space Shuttle launch to play Choplifter. I mean "Retro" in the sense of quality enduring through time.

It really frosts my flakes to consider how many of the truly great games of yesteryear - real classics like M.U.L.E., Star Control 2, Archon, Starflight, the better Ultimas, etc. - have vanished into the mists for most gamers.

Vanished is certainly the term. We're not talking about the dusty bottom shelf of the local EB or overlooked stacks of $10 jewel cases. Many of the classics are practically unobtainable.

Take M.U.L.E. Published in 1983 for the Atari 800 (and later ported to the Commodore 64), this excellent game never appeared on either the PC or Mac. I'd wager that only about 2-3/100 of current gamers have even heard of it. We're not talking about an average title, either. M.U.L.E. is one of the best computer games ever. Yet, at this point, it might as well have never existed.

Even those old enough (or retro-devoted enough) to even know about M.U.L.E. cannot legally play it unless they have a working Atari 8-bit PC or a Commodore 64. Sure, there are some of those still knocking about. But look, I don't care how elite a vintage PC collector you are; these things were not built to last decades.

There is also the fragility of the magnetic game medium itself to consider. The day is coming - and it's not as far off as we would like to think - when a working Atari 800 will be as rare as a Dusenberg. At that point, those who still possess and maintain them will be either outright professional collectors or gaming's version of manuscript-scribbling monks. Either way, they're not going to let you anywhere near their precious antiques.

Well then, we think, thank goodness for emulators. Problem solved, right? I beg to differ. I don't want to start a nasty (and endless) fight over the propriety of emulators and abandonware. All I will say is that the whole thing is a very shaky basis - legally and ethically - to stake the preservation of classic games on.

What's more, we have to appreciate how small the emulator audience is. Hardcore PC and console gamers devoting time and money to keeping older games and tech alive and spending hours (and small fortunes) scouring eBay for mint-in-box copies of Suspended are fine as far as that goes - but it doesn't go very far. Most gamers are oblivious to this. For them, when a platform (or entire generation) crosses the line into 'dead tech,' it's gone.

Aside from making curmudgeonly Ancient Gamers like me feel old, the historical amnesia caused by rapid technological obsolescence has a detrimental effect on game design overall. Even the best games have a very short 'life' - except in the hands of collectors and die-hards - before they are shoved off the stage to make room for the Next Big Thing.

This not only prevents a lot of people from enjoying (or even knowing about) great games like M.U.L.E. but also prevents the formation of a collective, creative memory for the gaming community. For the bulk of current gamers, any titles older than 5 years might as well have never been made. With the classics out of sight and mind, gamers are left with the same old ideas served up again and again because they seem new each time.

I would also argue that this is a factor in gaming's protracted adolescence; more specifically, the fixation with violence, puerile sexuality and "attitude." Having no accessible past, gaming's collective mind is confined to the Perpetual Now. It literally cannot grow up. Perhaps I'm over analyzing this. But consider this: In most creative endeavors, quality and worth are proven over time. With computer games, that which is old is simply... old. Forgotten. The "good" stuff is always what's about to happen, not that which has endured over time and transcended the circumstances of its creation.

What flat-out puzzles me is why more gaming companies don't see what a gold mine of ideas, stories and great gaming hooks reside in these old worthies. How many games have you played recently that were technically / visually dazzling but utterly empty of good writing, interesting characters and that ever-elusive 'fun?'

Why not revisit, say, Starflight? Here's a space exploration game from 1986 that's smart, funny and genuinely involving. A good development team could port this thing in their sleep. All the tricky writing stuff - character design, background story, dialog, surprise ending, you name it - is already there. A splash of new art, update for DirectX support, and you're done. A classic lives again.

When I win the lottery, I'd like to buy the rights to the golden oldies, assemble some good programmers, and re-release them for Windows and the Mac. I'll bet I could do a good job on Sundog for less than what Romero's Ion Storm spent on office furniture.

Tech Support Sucks

It's been my experience that calling tech support is an exercise in futility. There seem to be only a handful of people at any given "support" center who actually know what they're doing, and good luck getting one of them on the phone.

I cannot recall how many times I've been given troubleshooting suggestions that were either totally irrelevant or just plain wrong.

Nothing makes my day like having a computer problem, calling tech support long distance on my phone bill, waiting half an hour - or longer - to talk with someone and then realizing I know more than he does.

What people need to remember is that these support centers are often run by a contracted company and not Dell, HP or whoever and get paid less for a return call on the same 'incident' than a new call for a new problem.

They therefore have the explicit objective to take as many new calls as possible and then dispose of them as soon as possible; the old "churn and burn." The last thing they want to do is to take the time and effort to seriously and methodically troubleshoot your technical problem.

This is why so much tech support "advice" comes down to R & R (Reformat drives & Reinstall software). They know this will take a long time and force you to get off the phone so they can take (and bill) the next call. Also, neutron bomb measures like R & R probably will solve most problems, so you won't be calling back (even though, if you think about it, you never did learn what was wrong or how to avoid it in the future).

Now, increasingly, we have the problem of tech support being farmed out to non-English speaking countries. On a recent call, I spoke to Vishnapranyahursadanapol (I think) who seemed like very nice guy - SEEMED like, I say, because I literally couldn't understand one thing he said.

I have an ear for languages and I'm VERY comfortable with accents, folks. If I can't understand someone, then he just cannot speak clear English. Period.

My Computers (A Work In Progress)

2003 - Homebrew AthlonXP @ 2 Ghz

2002 - Homebrew AthlonXP @ 1.0 Ghz

1998 - Apple iMac @ 233 Mhz

1997 - Gateway Pentium 2 @ 400 Mhz

1996 - Homebrew Pentium 1 @ I forget

1994 - Homebrew 486 @ 80 Mhz

1992 - FastMicro 486 @ 33 Mhz

1987 - Apple IIgs

1986 - Apple IIc

1983 - Apple IIe

1980 - Atari 800

Notes:

1. Technically, the Apple IIgs was my college roommate's machine. I think it was, byte for buck, the finest computer Apple had ever produced up to that time.

2. The Homebrews were constantly mutating, which is why I only gave the CPU speed (Although I know how to do it, I am NOT comfortable swapping CPUs. When the time comes, I get a whole new mobo+CPU preinstalled and move the drives).

3. I loathed the IBM PC series. While I recognized their importance to the "computer biz," they were crude, ugly and badly designed. Among my geek circle, it was a point of honor NOT to have an IBM PC.

4. I remained an Apple fan up to the IIgs. The Macs impressed me, but they were so damned expensive! When I went looking for a new computer late in 1991, I had the choice of spending $1800 on the FastMicro (i486 / 8 MB RAM, 200 MB HDD) or something like four grand (!) for a Mac of equivalent power and capacity. I knew it was all over. Like a lot of people, Apple just priced me out of their market. So I bought my first PC. Later, though, I bought an iMac out of pure curiousity, and enjoyed it.

Why Windows Won

The other day, a couple of Windozing friends asked me, in effect, "If the Mac was/is so great, what happened? Why did Windows win?"

Well...

Windows only really began to matter when version 3.0 was released in 1990. Before that, it was important, but hardly a standard. With 3.0, people finally had a good, capable GUI for the DOS + Intel platform. Combined with ever faster and cheaper Intel processors and the Clone Wars (which began when Compaq slashed prices across the board to prevent upstarts like Gateway 2000 doing to them what Compaq itself had done to IBM), users could afford "byte for the buck" computing power that would have been unbelievable only a few years before.

After IBM shot itself in the head with the PS2/OS2 debacle, the "leadership" of the PC industry fell to the Clonemakers, who then went at each other tooth and claw, creating a frenzy of price/performance competition that remains with us today.

I've been using Windows since version 2.0. Nobody I know has ever actually considered it superior to the Amiga, Mac, Unix, NeXTStep, or what have you...

I think Windows triumphed for these reasons:

1) The only REAL competition, Apple (sorry, Amiga fans), took itself out of the running by sticking to a controlled, proprietary architecture and moving the Macs "upscale" when Intel computers were becoming more affordable by the day.

2) MS-DOS. Yes, I know. I didn't like it either. But for vast numbers of people, Microsoft's command-line mediocrity WAS computing (Microsoft didn't even invent it, but that's another story). Since Windows worked "on top of" DOS, you could have a GUI and not have to buy a new computer - hell, you could even keep your old DOS software and run it outside of the Windows environment.

3) OS/2. The worst fiasco in the history of software, it took IBM off the playing field for years. Read Paul Carroll's book BIG BLUES to learn the whole sorry tale. So, let's look at Microsoft in the early '90s. Their two chief GUI competitors are Apple and IBM. Apple is playing a whole different game, and IBM has torpedoed its own ship. MS-DOS, their existing OS, runs the vast majority of the world's personal computers. And their GUI, Windows, has - at version 3 - finally found its legs.

Windows inched towards the Macintosh GUI for years. With 3.0, it was more than apparent. Certainly Apple thought so, because they promptly sued Microsoft for it - and lost after years of drawn-out courtroom wrangling. Bill Gates (and his counterparts at Intel) placed their bets on the idea that if your competition makes a gorgeous machine that costs a fortune, and you make an adequate machine that is affordable to multitudes of people, you will win.

People were willing to pay a premium for the Mac's capabilities in the days of DOS and early Windows, when it was the only good GUI show in town. But as Windows improved and prices dropped to the point where a capable Wintel computer cost less than HALF of what a medium-level Mac did, it became harder and harder to justify spending the price of a good used car on a Macintosh.

In the office environment, the situation was even worse. With the exception of desktop publishing, businesses had no need for a GUI, and they sure as hell weren't going to pay what Apple was asking. On top of that was the ascension of Novell Netware to the LAN OS throne - with a command-line interface straight out of DOS. The Macintosh and GUIs in general were irrelevant to Netware. You could configure Macs for Netware's IPX protocol and attach them to Netware LANs, if you wanted to. But that's the crux of it. Why WOULD you have wanted to?

Apart from aesthetics, why would the average 1990 business user buy a Mac when they could get a Wintel (or even DOS) box that did what they needed a computer to do - for a fraction of the Mac's price, ran more software, was infinitely configurable, and on top of that, was by that time firmly established as the industry standard?

Some argue that, were it not for the killer Mac+PageMaker+LaserWriter combination opening a whole new personal computing arena (desktop publishing), Apple would have been ground into hamburger in the late '80s. I wouldn't go that far, but it's sobering to remember that the Mac, originally, was not a sales hit. Only with DTP - the Mac's killer app, so to speak - did Macs really begin to move.

What Did Apple "Steal?"

In defense of Apple, and to clear the air.

Among Windozers, there is an annoying anti-Apple slander that's been going around for years: That Apple "stole" the Macintosh GUI from Xerox PARC after Steve Jobs & Co. visited Xerox one warm sunny day.

During this visit - the so-called 'Daylight Raid' - Steve Jobs and what would become the Lisa development team saw Object-Oriented Programming, an Ethernet LAN and the SmallTalk GUI.

Xerox showed their Apple visitors these treasures with the clear understanding that Jobs might take the ideas back to Apple. Some PARCers later went to work for Apple to help develop them. Xerox received some Apple stock in trade for the visit. Every part of it was above-board. Not even the loosest definition of corporate espionage applies here.

And, let's remember, Xerox's management could have capitalized on PARC's work, and built computers based on the SmallTalk GUI, at any point - even before there was an Apple Computer Company. Xerox chose not to, for various reasons. But Apple didn't stop them from doing anything.

(In an interview from the PBS show Triumph of the Nerds, former PARC member and Apple Chief Scientist Larry Tesler observed: "After looking at it for 5 minutes, he (Steve Jobs) understood more about our technology, and what it could do, than the Xerox executives who had been looking at it for 5 years.")

Even so, they say success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Apple did not simply port SmallTalk to the Motorola 68000. A huge amount of work went into modifying and improving Xerox's work into something friendlier and more efficient for end users.

Unlike the Xerox computers, Apple's Lisa and Mac were not "lab machines" existing solely for computer scientists to experiment with. There is a world of difference between a computer which is a design project for techies to kick around (which the Xerox Alto was) and one which is a finished, retail consumer product that regular folks will use (which the Mac was). Those two things are - if you'll pardon the expression - apples and oranges.

(I'd go so far as to say that anyone who thought the Lisa/Macs were only incrementally improved Altos had obviously never actually used an Alto.)

If I see a car and am inspired to build my own, I still have to build a car. No easy thing. Just because I'm not re-inventing the idea of "steering" or "engine" or "brake pedal" doesn't make it any easier.

Part of the blame for this undying "Apple stole the GUI" nonsense rests with, alas, Apple itself. In the early days, it suited Apple's self-image and PR mythology to contrast Jobs and his young, smart Apple gang with old, slow, stooopid big tech outfits like Xerox. The story of "hip" Apple putting one over on decidedly-uncool Xerox must have been too delicious to resist, however much they knew it was hogwash.

The truth is that Steve Jobs' visit to PARC was not the world-changing epiphany the Official Jobs Hagiography would have you think. According to Michael Malone's book Infinite Loop, Jobs was actually set up to have his Lightbulb Moment by Apple techies. Many key Lisa/Mac concepts (incl. the GUI) were well underway before that fateful visit. Ideas about evolving the computer display and user interface beyond ASCII and command lines were in wide discussion all throughout this period. Xerox did not 'own' them, and a lot of people at Apple (and elsewhere) were keenly interested. What remained was to get Jobs on board.

Finally, it's worth mentioning again that nothing Apple did prevented Xerox from capitalizing on PARC's work. For various reasons, Xerox dropped the ball - although exactly why is hotly debated.

You can hardly blame Apple for seeing a good idea and running with it anymore than you can blame Nintendo for believing that people DID want to play home video games, just not the mountain of crap surrounding Atari's VCS, and going ahead with the release of the NES after the Video Game Crash of 83-84.