Summer MacWorld: Mania in Boston

September 1994

This summer's MacWorld in Boston was its usual self: thousands of Macintosh enthusiasts having a wonderful time at their favorite game, looking at the newest things to do with a Mac. The show was summed up for me the first day when I ran into an old friend who used to work for Compaq and now works for Visioneer. “This show isn’t like other computer shows,” he said. "There’s something different about it."

There sure is, I replied. The difference of course is obvious. Everyone is having fun. No need to wait for the end of the day to party. The main event is all day long, right on the convention floor.

What can I say about a computer show where my favorite software package wasn’t a productivity biggy (although Microsoft rolled out the new version of Microsoft Office for Macintosh and it’s going to be fine, available later this year, as the individual pieces ship), but rather a children’s toy. It’s called Aqua Zone and it turns your Macintosh into an aquarium. This is not a screen saver, but an Artificial Life simulation. The fish are unique and you must feed them and take care of their environment. While you can put them in background or turn them off to use your computer for more mundane tasks, their clock will keep right on ticking. Forget them while you go on vacation and you’ll find them swimming belly up on your return. You can delete dead fish and start new ones, but they won’t be the same fish. This is electronic life. The developers say the game is a kind of cult craze in Japan and it could be a great gift idea in the U.S., a good non-violent toy as well as a way to practice the responsibility of having a pet.

We also had a wonderful time playing with multimedia, from standard stuff life the latest versions of Canvas and Fractal Painter (look for their new kid’s package Dabbler) to new goodies like the newest from Kai’s Power Tools (HSC, Santa Monica, moving to Santa Barbara CA). Their KPT Bryce allows you to create artificial landscapes that look eerily real or completely fantastic. Either way, they’re amazing and can be as complex and as customized as your want to make them. We watched, absorbed, for nearly an hour, as their wizard made this new tool do its tricks. Of course, we’ve scheduled an entire day to play with it when it arrives, but we’ll probably need a memory transplant (although it theoretically runs in 6Mb) to really use it properly.

AppleScript is now debuting (a way to create cross-application macros and custom applications) and we saw an amazing front-end tool to use with AppleScript. Look for MainEvent, which makes programming with pull-down menus and dialogue boxes really possible. I actually understood what was going on all the time and I have every intention of taking this Washington, D.C.-based product to heart and trying to write some cross-application toys of my very own.

The very best event of the entire conference, however, was seeing Dr. Steven Hawkings, the Lucusian Professor of Mathematics from Oxford, speak on Black Holes and the Origin of the Universe, an event sponsored by Radius. Although profoundly handicapped by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), Professor Hawkings communicators by a special computer and voice synthesizer. Like all genius-class scientists and thinkers he has the ability to make very hard things seem amazingly simple. It’s much easier to understand his books by listening to him than by reading them! You are about to have this chance: A CD-ROM of Black Holes is coming out in the October timeframe which is the complete text of his book, plus a very sophisticated interactive game including Dr. Hawkings, Einstein, and Marilyn Monroe. It, too, teaches his theories.

As I said, there’s no place quite like MacWorld. Maybe that's part of the difference between using Mac's and PC's, too.

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Entire contents © 1994 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.