January 26, 2004, 8.34pm • No comments (be first!) » • 795 Views

Think Different. Think At All

The modern father of evolution, Richard Dawkins, has finally caught up with the graphical user interface. In a Guardian thinkpiece, rationalist celebre Dawkins regales how, two decades ago, Apple mimicked Xeroc PARC’s pioneering work in visual computing interfaces to create a computer with a metaphor truly usable by humans - the desktop - while the evil, suited minions of IBM continued to play ball with a DOS command line.

In a glib anecdote, overkeen Dawkins (modus operandi: “evolution, science, reason“) tells how he had to keep up with his Mac-owning dinner party chums by hopping aboard the Apple wagon. But this is a situation which still crops up in today’s fashionable circles, probably more than ever. As proof that computing has transcended geekdom, vitriolic verbal battles light up London bars; black-rimmed wannabe creatives, desperate to profess their fruityness for all things Apple, distance themselves from Gates’ band of virus-prone geeks and nerds (they were the old world).

Sure, we all now know Mac OS is a more elegant, efficient, simple and stable user interface (it will run my next computer, I’ve had it with Windows, I’m switching), but Dawkins’ assertion that “today, the Windows imitation has caught up [with System X (sic)]” is wildly off the mark, misrepresentative… whilst not quite matching Apple’s elegance, Windows caught up through XP in 2001, using most of the same user interface principles.

In Dawkins’ world, Microsoft has only just got itself together for long enough to notice the oncoming GUI revolution. Disgusted with the archaic IBM interface, his complaint that “you’d most probably have to look the command up in the manual and literally type it in” is way, way anachronistic - DOS is archaic now precisely because computing evolved and GUIs became the dominant species. That Apple has produced the best GUI is good for it, its users and the rest of the evolving GUI field - but hardly news.

Apple fandom is probably at a historical peak right now, with the success of iTunes, iPod and OSX (witness the growing hoardes fawning over the lovely plastic white box in your high street). But nobody needed this unqualified, distorted and belated history-of-the-UI lesson from our most hubristic modernist. Dawkins may have just discovered the beauty of OSX, but the artistic community has long known of Apples machines’ superiority in their creative work. He may now be keen to join the trendier Apple ranks, but Dawkins is simply late to the party. It’s great that Apple is now quenching the thirsts it once found hard to reach, but its greatest PR will not come from the ranks of the science lab and the close-minded evolutionists.

Evolution? Some things never change.