The Catholic Machine.

Two observations, one from 1997 and one from 1995.

Another piece from Carmen Hermosillo (aka humdog). This is an excerpt from Veni Redemptor which is available in full here.

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Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

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 counter-reformist 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. Everybody has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter- reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions; when it comes down to it, you can decide to allow women and gays to be ministers if you want to.

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic. . . .

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And Sherry Turkle, on the Apple II in Life on the Screen (1995):

The Macintosh interface—its screen, really—simulated a real desk.

Not a logical interface, manipulated with logical commands, as my CP/M system on the Apple II had been, but a virtual reality, albeit in two dimensions. This was a world in which you navigated your way through information as you would through space.

In fact, when you held a mouse and moved it around by hand on a flat surface, you saw your physical movements mirrored on the screen by an indicator icon, usually an arrow or a pointing finger. When I used the Scribble program on my Apple II, I typed such things as "@center[@b(The Macintosh Mystique)]" to indicate that I wanted a centered subheading, "The Macintosh Mystique," printed in bold type. Although I didn't analyze the Scribble program any further, such requirements kept me in touch with the idea that I was giving commands to a machine. I felt that I needed to use symbols and a formal language of nested delimiters (parentheses and brackets) because my machine needed to reduce my commands to something that could be translated into electrical impulses. The fact that my machine's printed circuits were physically exposed to view reinforced this notion.

Writing on the Macintosh was an altogether different experience. It did not feel like commanding a machine. A simulated piece of paper appeared. A flashing pointer told me where I could start typing. If I wanted the words "The Macintosh Mystique" to appear centered and in bold type, I typed them and moved the mouse to manipulate their position and form. If I did this correctly, they appeared as I had desired, right there on the screen. I saw no reference to anything beyond the magic.

The simulated desktop that the Macintosh presented came to be far more than a user-friendly gimmick for marketing computers to the inexperienced. It also introduced a way of thinking that put a premium on surface manipulation and working in ignorance of the underlying mechanism. Even the fact that a Macintosh came in a case that users could not open without a special tool (a tool which I was told was only available to authorized dealers) communicated the message. The desktop's inter-active objects, its anthropomorphized dialogue boxes in which the computer "spoke" to its user—these developments all pointed to a new kind of experience in which people do not so much command machines as enter into conversations with them. People were encouraged to interact with technology in something resembling the way they interact with other people. We project complexity onto people; the Macintosh design encouraged the projection of complexity onto the machine. In relationships with people we often have to get things done without necessarily under- standing what is going on within the other person; similarly, with the Macintosh we learned to negotiate rather than analyze.

With the Macintosh, personal computers began to present themselves as opposed to and even hostile to the traditional modernist expectation that one could take a technology, open the hood, and see inside.

The distinctiveness of the Macintosh was precisely that it did not encourage such fantasies; it made the computer screen a world unto itself. It encouraged play and tinkering. Mastering the Macintosh meant getting the lay of the land rather than figuring out the hierarchy of underlying structure and rules. With a traditional command-line computer operating system (CP/M was one, MS-DOS is another), linear, textual commands had to be entered at a "prompt" mark. In these systems, there was no way around learning the commands. You memorized them or you had a cheat sheet. With the Macintosh, exploration was the rule. The manual was for emergencies and exceptions. Computer virtuosos had always explored computer systems in this experimental, "tinkerer's" style. The Macintosh made this kind of learning through exploration available to almost everybody. As in the video game culture that was growing up at the same time in the mid-1980s, one learned to learn through direct action and its consequences.