Until now, no one at Casa Deus would have ever believed that these ugly, morally reprehensible things would come to disgrace the pure offices of Deus Ex Machina Software Inc. But there they were, two Windows machines, cheezily manufactured lumps of plastic and metal, sending their middlebrow America Online and Mine Sweeper vibes into the Silicon Tower of 86 Magazine Street.
At least, this was what I was being told. Frankly, I was only just learning to tell one kind of machine from another, and I had just been lucky enough to have used a Mac in the past instead of a PC. Like any other "there but the grace of God go I" survivor, I should have felt blessed that my boss at BC had handed me the right kind of machine in my savage-like ignorance.
But my past luck was of no use to the Deus Exers, who were confronting one of the first concrete manifestations of the company’s cleanup campaign. ExCommunicate 3.1 was going to be Windows NT-compatible. And someone was going to have to bend their proud neck and write the thing.
Sascha, Jonathan, and Catfood all knew how to program for Windows. Drexler, Ian, and Frick---the rest of the Deus Ex inner circle---had never lowered themselves to learn, even though it was a fairly easy skill for those learned in the ways of programming. The willful benightedness of these latter three struck me as a little prideful and silly. Then I thought about what I would be like if I were a Unix hacker: just as bad, I’m sure, if not worse.
Frick wouldn’t even touch the new computers. She said that they had an inelegant microprocessor. She stared at them at a distance with her arms and her long dark hair folded around her protectively. She hadn’t even bothered taking off her biker jacket. "Sascha," she said shortly. "I did not come to work for you to hack anything but Unix. To lower myself to this crass commercial level is evil. It’s very simple: You force me to line Microsoft’s pockets, I quit."
Sascha shrugged. "Whatever. Your loss. Not that I particularly love Windows environments or anything. Hackers work for Microsoft, too, by the way."
"Your statement is self-contradictory. They’re not hackers any more," Frick growled. "Programming for Microsoft right now is like programming for defense in the 1960s. Microsoft is the Borg. They’re the military/industrial complex we all need to be fighting against. They destroy your individuality. Or they subvert it, and let you have the pathetic fallacy you’re all working together. Face it, Sascha: what would you have done in the 1960s? Would you have cut your hair to get paid a lot of money to work on bombs? Your hair is a bit short right now, BTW."
"I would have done AI research at Rand," Sascha said, a little defensively.
"Look, Frick," said Jonathan, "what’s more important, your little old-school hacker pride trip or the continued survival of this company? I have a family. If Wendy and I both lose our jobs..." He raised his hands fatalistically.
"I’d appreciate it if you didn’t refer to anything I do as ‘little’," Frick said loftily. "And this company is on its way to failure mode anyway if it feels it has to mess around with PCs. Why did you hire someone from Microsoft? Did your wife convince you to do it? Is this some grand plan of yours to go content-free? Control-C, Strathmore! Stop what you’re doing!"
"We’re going to be vortexed into nonexistence if we start treading Microsoft turf," Ian said. He put down his bottle of wheat grass juice and brushed back his blond hair angrily. "If we’re lucky, they’ll buy us out. If we’re not, they’ll replicate our technology and drive us out of business. The whole paradigm is so bloody wrong."
"Lest you forget, Frick," said Sascha, "or if you’ve been reading Marion Zimmer Bradley books instead of industry publications, in this last year alone, use of Windows NT machines has zoomed from 3% or so to almost 60% in some industries. People are comfortable with PCs. If you’re a naïve or semi-naïve user, you just don’t want to be dealing with the vagaries and vicissitudes of Unix. And most workers have PCs on their desktops anyway..."
"I can’t believe the chameleon crap you’re spouting," said Ian. "Are you going to turn into one of them just to save your almighty name? Opportunism knocks, Sascha Strathmore’s there. Funny thing, that."
I had been witnessing this confrontation from my butler’s pantry, where I had desperately been trying to write a press release: "Deus Ex Machina Software Announces Windows NT Compatibility with ExCommunicate 3.1." This release was to be sent to Peter Greer of Technology Today, among other important individuals, in order to prove what a clean, with-it company we were.
Will and Sascha, despite their growing tensions, had jointly commanded me to create the press release. I was having my own moral qualms about authoring it. This was because ExCom 3.1 was what’s known in the software industry as "vaporware": in other words, it didn’t exist yet. And, considering the manner in which this company conversation was progressing, it might not exist, ever.
Morals aside, I did wonder a little at the marketing wisdom that would advertise a potentially more popular product when we were not exactly being bombarded with orders for the current one. If something more desirable that ran on cheaper hardware was going to be available in a year, wouldn’t customers just wait for it? But I wasn’t sure if it were my job to question, and especially not in the middle of this fracas. Write now, query later.
Besides, I was getting the tiniest of intellectual crushes on Peter Greer. I was scoping out Peter’s clip file on the Internet, as I had done with Sascha some months earlier, and his body of work was deserving of moderate respect. Besides, he was an awfully humanistic tech writer: "What Price Copland?" from Macazine. "Pub Crawling on the Web," from Internet Underground. "Zen and the Art of Solitary Sportsmanship: Three Local Athletes Discuss Their Mind-Body Strategies," from San Francisco Monthly. And "Rock Rage in Cyberspace," a small item from Rolling Stone.
The argument in the next room was getting punchier. I pushed my chair just a little more out of the closet and watched the Deus Exers standing stiffly around the new computers.
"Luckily, we got this company started without any ideological wars over which version of Unix to use," Jonathan was saying. "I don’t want to get into any factionalism now. The people who know Windows can program in it, and the people who don’t, or won’t, don’t have to. I just don’t think it’s good for the company to split profits differently."
"Actually, Jonathan, you’re being too kind." Sascha hopped up on the table. "Let’s cut to the chase. Frick, have you been listening to our marketing people? Have you been listening to our customers? Our customers---the people we get our salaries from, in case you forget that your rent money doesn’t come directly from Dennis Ritchie---are actually not that interested in 3.0. They’re willing to wait a whole product cycle to get 3.1 for Windows NT. And do you know what they’re going to do then? They’re going to throw out their Unix boxes because they don’t want to deal with them any more."
Frick’s round face was flushed and she opened her mouth to protest. Sascha cut her off. "So Jonathan and I have made some executive decisions. ExCom 3.1 is going to be written for NT. If people want it on Unix, we’ll port it to Unix. And Frick, if you don’t want the ideological hassle of submitting to the Borg, your job can be doing the porting back to Unix. It’s true you’ll get the second-hand work, but at least your conscience will be clean. Understand?"
"When I was a teenager in New Jersey," said Frick, her voice trembling a little---was she going to cry or otherwise show some "female" emotion? I crept closer--- "I worked as an intern at Bell Labs. I was in Dennis Ritchie’s office. Without Dennis---he wrote Unix---you’d probably still be submitting your program jobs on virtual card decks to virtual card readers. I watched Dennis and his team create Unix PWB. They had the right minds. They had the right vision. They were pure. They were so open-minded that they let me help them, because it didn’t matter to them that I was a 14-year-old girl.
"You know what else? Dennis was so grateful to me for my programming help that he was going to name a command after me. ‘We have all these other one-syllable commands---sed, awk, cat, grep---I don’t see why we can’t have one called ‘frick,’" he said. They couldn’t find another command that still needed a name, but that wasn’t the point. I could have had a Unix command named after me. How can I give up a history and community like this? I bet Bill Gates doesn’t name anything after his interns."
"That’s very touching, Frick," said Jonathan. "I don’t think you understand that I’m not bloody thrilled about this either. On the other hand, I’m not sure how savvy you are about market forces. Maybe you hack for love---but people don’t buy ExCom for love. They buy it because it has a function. And for a lot of our customers, the most efficient way to execute that function is through Windows NT. Seems that our customers don’t care that ExCom on Unix is server-free. They’ll use a server more comfortably, because they’re more familiar with that system. You can hope that the market retrogresses into something you’re comfortable with; you can pretend that things are like how they used to be. It doesn’t work. Just ask Sascha’s father."
Sascha stood up and hoisted one of the Windows boxes with a grunt. "Who’s going to help me set these up? Where are we going to put them?"
"Let’s put ‘em next to each other so we can sit side-by-side and commiserate," said Jonathan, grabbing the other one.
"Sascha, what about your little side project?" asked Ian acidly. "You must not be so secure about the future of ExCom on Windows or any other environment if you’re working on your own nest-egg parachute."
"No," said Sascha. "It’s not a nice world out there anymore. But at least I’m pragmatic enough to take care of myself if things go wrong. You should do the same."
Frick walked over next to Ian and watched Sascha with narrowed eyes. "I plan on it," she said.
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