|
|
|
lower Chamomile trail
Friday, June 20 2003
Yesterday I extended a crude new trail down to the lower Chamomile River, a quarter mile or so downstream from where the Stick Trail crosses it. Today I took Gretchen to see this newly-discovered part of the Chamomile. It's at the mouth of a beautiful mini-gorge full of mosses and ferns, and the Chamomile at this point has a weird tendency to divide into two halves flowing parallel to one another on either side of a long, narrow island.
We continued down the Chamomile to see where it led. As I'd expected, it took us to the "bus turnaround" on Dug Hill Road (the first such turn around above Hurley Mountain Road). This particular turnaround is entirely within Catskill State Parkland and is a favorite of gun enthusiasts, who often pull in here to test out their constitutionally-protected weaponry by popping caps in defenseless trees (as well as anything foolish enough to move). Their shell casings litter the ground here in great numbers.
From the bus turnaround, we headed nearly straight up the escarpment, eventually reconnecting with the Stick Trail some half mile or so from our house. On the way up the steep mountainside I was separated from Gretchen by several hundred feet and I came upon a spectacular waterfall, though (despite all the recent rain) it was completely dry.
My first introduction to a modern computer operating system came in the Fall of 1986 when I signed up for my first computer science class in the then-nascent computer science program at Oberlin College. With this class came an account on a VAX 11/750 minicomputer running the Ultrix operating system. Ultrix is a flavor of Unix, and I quickly came to appreciate its power. One of its most important features was organizational - the soft and hard links that allowed me to create parallel organizations of the file system depending on my ever-changing needs. I became so dependent on this feature that I felt crippled when using other operating systems, none of which had it.
In the spring of 1990 I obtained my first Macintosh, an SE model running OS 6.03. In some ways, the graphical environment greatly improved my computing experience. I could see a visual representation of my things and find what I was looking for without knowing exactly what it was. This is much more natural and primitive to the human operating system than forcing me to come to a computer knowing precisely the name and address of the thing being sought. But in other ways I felt crippled. There was nothing like the links of Unix, and whenever I wanted to open a file I had to drill down through layer after of folder hierarchy. If I wanted to avoid this ordeal, I had to compromise organization.
Enter OS 7.0 in late 1990. A pirated copy of this OS (which I obtained from a friend in Oberlin) changed everything. (Wait - Apple OSes were still free in those days!) Now I could make aliases - the functional equivalent of Unix soft links - to map out more accessible views of my deeply-nested informational universe.
I didn't discover it at the time - and it may have not been immediately available in the first version of OS 7, but eventually there was also this new capability allowing me to drag and drop icons on each other or into documents. This was another huge advancement in bringing actions from the real world into the desktop metaphor. I made palettes of my favorite applications (ResEdit, Resourcerer, DropStuff, MS Word 5.1, BBEdit, SoundEdit) for use as verbs to act upon on the nouns of my files.
When I took my job as a midnight shift tech support guy at Comet.net in late June of 1996, I began the process of gradually abandoning my Macintosh preference in favor of Windows 95. Windows 95 had enough of MacOS 7's features to win me over, particularly given the then-huge price difference in the underlying hardware. (Conversely, I found Windows 3.1 less useful than the DOS command line.)
I've been generally underwhelmed by all the user interface advances since MacOS 7. The most useful I've seen has probably been the editable address bar introduced in Windows 98 (a feature borrowed from web browsers). It brings some of the quick and dirty immediacy of the command line to the world of the graphical user interface, and it's a feature I've come to rely on. Other than that, improvements in all graphical user interfaces have mostly been cosmetic. Drop shadows, transparent and tearoff menus? When they're not stealing valuable CPU power, they're causing more trouble than benefits.
Thus it was curious to read a press release about Mac OS 8, what history has remembered as a minor evolutionary change in OS 7. It stands as a monument to cringe-inducing marketing hype, calling OS 8 "the most significant Mac OS upgrade since 1984."
Tonight Gretchen went out to see a Pixar animated movie with Larry, the realtor who sold us our house.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?030620 feedback
previous | next |
