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Macintosh religion?Filed in Notes on April 21st 05 . “The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the “ratio studiorum” of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. I found this reference from an article in the BBC News Technology Web site by Stephen Evans variously entitled The Cult of the Mac and/or Apple a day keeps the music at play. Its all about the iPod thing but dredges up the Eco quote. Eco was writing some years ago (only 10 years but a geological age in Computer terms) and things have changed. I wonder how Eco would characterise my iBook? Still the ‘cheerful, friendly, conciliatory’ front end but now the nuclear powered Terminal with a faint sulfurous wiff from the Unix command line (Mephistopheles like, the command line can show hidden rooms and bring on powerful agents and even control daemons…). There is ‘something of the night’ about how you can be dragging files to icons one minute and piping a Web page from curl to sed to strip the html codes the next. A meeting of the faiths if ever there was one! This is filed under Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are closed for this post. |
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