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PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Was the old Mac a hacker's machine?

A recent discussion on the Well came around to the question of whether the classic Macintosh was "hacker's" machine or not. Conventional wisdom would say no -- it was the very definition of buttoned up. You couldn't even develop software for it without a separate, more expensive computer (the Lisa) in the early days.

But I think there's a counter-argument to be made. Yes, the old Mac was a closed box that didn't allow access to the internals of the OS. However, it was a far more tweakable system for most Mac users than the fragile, inscrutable Windows of that era was for most Windows users.

People who would never consider writing a shell script or even learning what one was were quite happy to swap INITs and CDEVs in and out of their System Folder and twiddle the way the system worked. Much more like playing with Legos than carving wooden ship models, but proportionately more accessible. In a way it was pretend hacking, but even many power users didn't know that. They just knew that they were comfortable digging into what was accessible and changing it to their liking.

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
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2 comments

Some related posts: The iPhone keyboard doesn't suck • iPod touch: one week down, one week to go • A farewell to Palms (hello, iPod touch) • iPhone, youPhone, weallPhone • What is the iPhone running, really? • New MacBook Pro • Obsolescence • Apple battery recall • ExpressCard: what it is • Best feature of the new MacBook Pro
• Comment from spillz, later that day

quit with the mac revisionism, already. :)

you said it yourself, the old mac was a closed system. no self respecting hacker should be put off by fragile inscrutability (frustrated, of course, but that's the nature of hacking, right?)

• Comment from Paul, 1 day later

Guilty as charged. I hijacked the term "hacker". Sentenced to 20 years of reading Digg comments.

I'd still argue, with absolutely no data to back it up, that a higher percentage of classic Mac users felt mastery over their computing environment than did contemporaneous Windows users. As the disparities in open source project success show us, it's not just the fact of hacking but what you're hacking on that creates satisfaction (and thereby keeps the hacking going).

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