What to expect from the Macintosh Operating System in the year 2007

You think your Macintosh is cool now? Wait till you’re done reading this report! Then you’ll really know what a cool Mac is!

All of the following information comes from the “Macintosh Think Tank,” an organization that brings together the latest and greatest minds in the world of Macintosh computing.

The Macintosh Think Tank recently completed its first symposium, which was held in Kent, Washington. The topic of discussion was, “What to expect from the Macintosh Operating System in the year 2007.”

Although attendance at this first gathering of the greatest Macintosh minds in the world was disappointing – possibly due to the fact that the symposium was held on Christmas Day, 1996, the resulting consensus of all participants was astounding, if not earth shattering.

Attending the first annual Macintosh Think Tank Symposium were:

Symposium Chairman: Pete Miner
Think Tank members attending: Pete Miner
Minutes of the symposium recorded by: Pete Miner
Coffee and doughnuts served by: Pete Miner
Post symposium cleanup and floor sweeping donated by: Pete Miner

A short list? Perhaps. However, revelations coming out of this meeting of the mind(s) should be sufficient to keep the Macintosh community bustling with excitement for the coming decade.

Realizing that predicting the future is, at best, a risky business, Think Tank member(s) feel confident that by 2007 the Macintosh OS will be as advanced compared to present day operating systems as today’s computers are to an abacus or a child’s coloring book with crayons. They further predict this new OS will be named Double-Oh-Seven (007), and will also finally mark a departure from the tired convention of using incremental system (x.x.x) version numbers.

Think Tank member(s) predict that Microsoft will still be trying to work the bugs out of Windows 95 and that Bill Gates, on the verge of bankruptcy because he was too stubborn to give up on a loser OS and continued pouring his vast fortune down the Win95 rat hole, will be seen cruising around Cupertino looking for a job.

The Think Tank assures us that the big breakthrough will come in 2005, when a little known publishing and computer consulting company called My Mac Productions (MMP) heads up a well-engineered hostile takeover of Apple Computer Co.

The MMP staff will immediately take over all R&D projects underway at the former Apple Computer headquarters. The major results of their labors will be released in 007. These results will include :

Memory Pulse Collector (MPC)

Memory Pulse Reader (MPR)

Memory Pulse Distributor (MPD)

Reverse Memory Pulse Handling (RMPH)

Molecular Data Identifier (MDI)

Molecular Data Stabilizer (MDS)

Molecular Data Compression (MDC)

Molecular Data Transference (MDT)

Super Duper Handy Dandy All Purpose Molecular Data Math Co-Processor (SDHDAPMDMCP)

As chairman of the Think Tank symposium, I will attempt to give you a brief overview of what these developments and inventions by the crack MMP staff will mean to the average home computer user, come 2007.

First and foremost, computing as we know it today will cease to exist. In order to take advantage of 007 you will need to buy the new generation Mac, as 007 will not run on today’s or for that matter, tomorrow’s computers. Due to the vast quantity of these new units that are expected to be sold, the Think Tank member(s) predict(s) a street price on these new machines to be in the $800 range. The name of this new line of computer’s will be “My Mac.”

What the “My Mac” will do:

The first thing people will notice about the “My Mac” computer will be its lack of input devices. The “My Mac” will not have a keyboard or mouse. Replacing these devices will be two 1″ X 3″ sensors built into the monitor casing, one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom. The top sensor being a receiver and the bottom one, a transmitter.

As we all know, our brains emit a steady stream of electronic pulses that are in fact our thoughts. For years scientist have tried to corral these brain emissions and decipher them. Corralling these brain pulses was fairly simple. However, reading them and in essence, reading someone’s thoughts has eluded the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century. Not so in the 21st century , when the heretofore unknown MMP staff arrived on the scene.

Without getting too technical, the receiving sensor surrounds the user’s head with an invisible collector beam preventing the user’s thought emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. These emissions are funneled back through the receiving sensor and into the Memory Pulse Collector (MPC) attached to the motherboard. The MPC sorts out any unrelated or garbled thoughts that the user has sent. The MPC then sends what it has collected over to the Memory Pulse Reader (MPR). The MPR converts these emissions into binary code and puts it all into a user readable format and shoots it over to the Memory Pulse Distributor (MPD). Still with me? Good.

Let’s say the user is working in a graphics program and the MPR translates the user’s thoughts into something like, “Gee, I think this area over here should be a darker shade of blue.” What the MPD does is send the pixel coordinates of the area the user is focusing on, along with the shade of blue the user has in mind, to the back of the monitor to be pasted onto the screen in the exact spot the user wants to make his changes. I don’t need to tell you that all this takes place in the blink of an eye. Pretty cool, huh? But wait! There’s more!

The computer to user transmitting sensor at the bottom of the monitor will be a truly amazing breakthrough. This sensor will allow complete and total computer-to-user interaction. Using the same scenario as above, let us assume the user has a major problem when it comes to matching up colors, in fact he’s the type who thinks that a light blue suit over a dark orange shirt with a paisley tie and red socks is a perfect match! This will be where the sensibilities of the “My Mac” will take over. By Reverse Memory Pulse Handling (RMPH) the “My Mac” (knowing the user is about to make a bad choice in color selection) will send a jolt of juice back to the user’s brain via the transmitting sensor, suggesting a different color than the one the user has chosen. What enters the user’s brain from the “My Mac” will be a simple thought, one that the user assumes is his own. The user will then either go with the new suggestion, or not (but 99.9% of the time he’ll go with it). Simple as that! No muss, no fuss!

If all this sounds too sci-fi futuristic to you, remember that this will not be available until 2007. Remember, too, that science fiction is usually the precursor of reality.

With that in mind, hold on to your socks or panty hose, cause they’re about to be blown off!

The development by the MMP staff of the Memory Pulse based hardware and software that will be introduced into the “My Mac” computer and the 007 operating system in the year 2007 will be heralded as one of mankind’s greatest advances, ranked right up there with sliced bread and putting a colony of earth people on the surface of Mars (which incidentally will take place on Jan. 4th, 2018). But the MMP staff, not satisfied with just one once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment, will astonish the scientific community by unveiling yet another startling advancement in the computer industry (or anywhere else, for that matter) to be included in the “My Mac” and the 007 system. This second advancement will be a molecule manipulation technology that the world’s most famous and knowledgeable scientist on the subject considered unattainable for at least another 150 years! Fortunately, this famous scientist forgot to tell the R&D staff at MMP.

This molecular manipulation will go something like this:

Scenario: It’s the year 2007 and you’re sitting in front of your My Mac computer, mentally dictating the first draft of your memoirs in the new word processing program from My Mac Productions called Think Write. You suddenly realize you’ve been at this project for the better part of 5 hours and, by golly, you’re getting hungry! You don’t feel like cooking, so you decide to order a steak dinner with all the fixin’s from that steak house you enjoyed so much the last time you were in Amarillo, Texas. You are presently in Seattle, Washington, but this is not a problem because you own a My Mac computer. You can’t remember the name of the steak house but you can picture what it looks like in your mind. Still no problemo! Based on the mental image you send into your My Mac and using the proper finder software already installed inside your My Mac, you mentally instruct the computer to locate this steak house, retrieve a phone number and make a connection via your modem to the steak house’s shipping computer, also a My Mac. The next thing you will do is think about what you want. Your My Mac will sort through your thoughts and convert your images of a fresh salad, a 16 oz. medium-rare T-Bone, a Texas-sized baked potato, an ear of hot buttered corn on the cob, a small helping of Texas beans and a pitcher of beer, into binary coded computer data and send this data to the steak house computer, along with your credit card number, of course.

You go back to work on your memoirs while your order is being sent (true multi-tasking!). About 3 minutes after your order has been sent, confirmation of your order is flashed up on the screen along with a reminder and a caution:

“Your order has been received and is being prepared. Your pitcher of beer will arrive in 16 seconds. Your salad will arrive in 52 seconds. Your entree’ will arrive in 5 minutes and 22 seconds. Please keep the molecule outlet on the side of your My Mac clear during this transmission. CAUTION: Your meal will arrive with a temperature of 162 degrees. Burns are possible: Use Caution. Thank you for dining at The Big Texan.”

What happens next is no less than ingenious.

Your order is prepared in the kitchen of the Big Texan restaurant and put on a conveyor that passes through a sensor attached to the restaurant’s My Mac server computer. This sensor is connected to a Molecular Data Identifier (MDI) inside the My Mac which identifies the molecules passing through the sensor as being animal, vegetable, or mineral. Your meal then passes through another sensor connected to a Molecular Data Compressor (MDC). This device breaks down your meal to the molecular level and compresses these molecules to a suitable size for transfer to your computer via fiber optic phone line, which is handled by the Molecular Data Transference (MDT) Chip.

Once the meal arrives at your My Mac, it travels through the molecule outlet and sort of hovers there while the Molecular Data Stabilizer (MDS) takes over and decompresses and stabilizes the molecules and returns them to their original form. Presto! Time to eat!

None of this would be possible without the Super Duper Handy Dandy All Purpose Molecular Data Math Co-Processor (SDHDAPMDMCP) of course. This little chip keeps everything running smoothly and in the proper sequence. Most of the time!

That last statement is the reason the “My Mac”, in 2007, at least, will have not yet evolved into a full-fledged transporter of human beings and/or large machinery. Although it will seem to work fine for small items, it still had a few bugs and glitches in it that make it unsafe or impractical to use as a do-all, send-all transporter. Take the meal we just received from Texas; it will be just as tasty as if we were sitting right there in the restaurant. However, we may notice little inconsistencies, such as maybe a few kernels of corn imbedded in your T-Bone and small pieces of meat in the holes where the missing corn-on-the-cob kernels should be. Not really a big deal or inconvenience when talking about a steak dinner, but you can see where there might be a problem if a human being were to transfer himself and show up on the other end with an eye located where his ear should be or maybe a thumb and nose trading places. See what I mean? The Molecular Data Stabilizer will not quite yet have been perfected to the zero tolerance mistake level necessary for human transportation. One other small drawback with the MDS is its lack of an Undo feature; what you get is what you get.

So, there you have it, the Macintosh of the future as seen by the Macintosh Think Tank member(s). For any of you cynics out there who refuse to believe the symposium’s predictions or just wonder how the Think Tank member(s) can feel so absolutely certain that this will be the Macintosh of the future, I have just one question and one statement for you.

Question:
Have you ever seen the movie, “Back to the Future?”

Statement:

Been there. Done that.

Trust me! Have I ever given you false information before? Of course not!

Cheers!

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Pete Miner (pete@mymac.com)