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What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?
- bin_bash 5y agoI'm not well versed in fiction. I am curious though, is there a subset of authors that are more into comprehensive world building than Douglas Adams? Would JK Rowling respond the same way? I suspect not
- nottorp 5y agoYou mean the kind of comprehensive world building that ends up with the book reading like an AD&D manual? Not everyone enjoys that.
- alisonkisk 5y agoIt doesn't have to be in the book, it can still influence the book to make it internally consistent and well motivated.
- davidgerard 5y agothat's not a plus point for Rowling, it's turned out
- Macha 5y agoTolkien is the obvious example. The Silimarillion always struck me as a worldbuilding reference forcibly turned into a story. George R. R. Martin is a modern example. The level of importance of world building really depends on what the goal is. I don't think h2g2 would have been majorly improved by a lot of world building, but I can appreciate the world building that's been done for Pratchett's Discworld, though that's as much a reflection on the length of that series than Pratchett's priorities
- fragmede 5y agoDouglas Adams has build numerous comprehensive worlds so I don't think it's that. Computers, and the speed with which they've changed, are a particular detail of world building that makes the sort of snarky answer given by Douglas Adams necessary. You see, if he'd written that Arthur Dent had an Apple ][, with a 1.023 MHz CPU, 4 KB of RAM and an audio cassette interface, as was the newest thing available in 1978 when the first version of the story aired, then any readers later on would have been jarringly taken out of the carefully built world, and forced to check when a computer with 4 KB of RAM was modern, assuming their eyes didn't glaze over first. JK Rowling exercised similar authority in the world she created for Harry Potter, as the Muggle Prime Minister was never named and naming the Prime Minister Sir John Major or Tony Blair would have done a similar disservice to that world.
- II2II 5y agoDirk Gently had a reference to the Macintosh II. Perhaps not a specific model, but enough to date the book. I think the truth is he was an enthusiast and simply dropped in references on whim. Besides, he never really struck me as a world builder since the stories seemed to craft the world rather than the other way around. You are right about technology references being jarring. I nearly died laughing while reading the Wrath of Khan about a decade after its release. The size of a game mentioned in the book was dwarfed by games at the time I was reading it by over an order of magnitude.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoAdams also often made jokes about the Macintosh Portable. In particular about how non-portable it was (it came with a huge lead-gel battery)
- throwanem 5y agoAdams says as much as that he's not a "world builder" in the linked article, yeah. I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself researching everything from the geological and climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up not really mattering all that much to the story, because for the most part what matters in a story is the characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes to determining what situations and circumstances can feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and the scene does more for the story than all the worldbuilding in the world. Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation - it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support. You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and more with the characters whose stories you are after all trying to tell. (Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a Doctor Who scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and also his legendary work-shyness, I don't really credit him with having thought the whole thing far enough through to identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt the lack of a concordance describing the complete history of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about Milliways.)
- abruzzi 5y agoIf you take a creative writing class you’ll find it is very common to give characters agency beyond what the author wants (e.g. I was going to have her do this, but she disagreed and did that…) and part of that is building a larger world, creating backstory for the characters. A great example is in the Quentin Tarantino film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” the main character stars in a Hollywood wester TV series. Even though the movie only shows a tiny bit of the series while they’re filming a couple scenes, apparently Tarantino wrote several full episodes of the hypothetical series. This kind of backstory writing seems to be pretty common. (My MFA is in creative writing, so I spent a lot of time with other writers.)
- throwanem 5y agoLook to the subgenres of science fiction called "hard" and "high concept". In hard sf, scientific plausibility is a major desideratum - Andy Weir's The Martian is a widely known recent example, with the entire story built on a foundation of entirely plausible near-future space engineering. (It's also a somewhat rare example in which this focus on feasibility does not come at the cost of characterization.) In the related but distinct high-concept sf, the story is designed around a given concept such as "what if humans became telepathic?" or "what if FTL communication was possible but FTL travel was not?", and serves to explore the consequences of this idea in great detail. Unlike hard sf, the concept doesn't have to be plausible, but like it, one often encounters stories where the concept outweighs the characters. I think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is a good example here, outdoing the reputation of its field by using its concept to tell a compelling and beautiful story that also happens to be about giant sapient jumping spiders.
- cecilpl2 5y agoIn fantasy, I'd recommend Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, and Malazan as some of the best examples of deep worldbuilding. Wheel of Time in particular.
- dilippkumar 5y agoOh boy do I have an answer for you. Steven Erickson, Ian C. Esslemont and their friends spent a decade world building while playing table top games. First Erickson then Esselmont started pouring over that world into the Malazan series. It is, without question, the largest, most complicated, most inspiring entertaining engaging and satisfying collection of plots, sub plots, sub sub plots, sub sub sub plots, super plots, super super plots and possibly super super super plots. I'm only 2 re-reads in - people who are into their 4th or 5th re-read tell me they are still discovering layers. The downside is that the first book in the series - Gardens of the Moon - is ridiculously difficult to get started with. There's a read-along blog that Tor did that helped me get through it - but it's still a challenge. I had to downgrade from an audiobook to an ebook and then to a paperback because I kept flipping back to remind myself who someone/something was.
- blahedo 5y agoN.K. Jemisin is a currently-active author who is phenomally good at world-building. (Also, resists the urge to show off the world just-because, and instead reveals it organically as the main POV characters interact with it. Highly recommend.)
- ksherlock 5y agoThe book (So Long and Thanks for all the Fish) was published in November of 1984. At that time, there were only two models of Macintosh - the 128 (released in January) and the 512 (released in September). Numbering and naming didn't start until the 512 was released so the Mac 128 was originally named simply "Macintosh".
- matthewdgreen 5y agoThat’s right. There were no variants of the gen-1 Macs (if you ignore Lisa.) The 512 was nicknamed the Fat Mac, and IIRC there was a hardware upgrade path from the 128 to a 512: as a result many former 128s “silently” became 512s and you wouldn’t notice this fact unless you looked carefully at the back (or popped up “About this Macintosh…”, or wrote the check yourself.) I think we ended up with 128s that went all the way to 1MB (Mac Plus?) internals eventually, but my memory may be playing tricks on me. Here’s Douglas Adams’ Mac SE in the UK computing museum: https://twitter.com/andytuk/status/731523049221181440?s=21 https://twitter.com/andytuk/status/731523049221181440?s=21
- pmarreck 5y ago> and IIRC there was a hardware upgrade path from the 128 to a 512 Yep, my parents paid for that upgrade, on my incessant prompting... and now I honestly can't remember if we went to 512k or 1MB... There were some things, I believe, that required at least 512, like I think VideoWorks (which eventually became what everyone now knows as Flash, and which was REALLY fun to play with at the time!)
- adolph 5y agoIt’s interesting that Adams didn’t have a particular model in mind, that Apple Macintosh could be a generic reference given that Adams did do HyperCard development. Maybe he saw that from the eyes of a storyteller and not a technologist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599 Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599
- spdegabrielle 5y agoWoo cgi that’s takes me back. How old is the software running this site? > `cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2`
- Macha 5y agoGiven that it supports TLS 1.3, (HTTPS at all really, given the age), IPv6, etc., someone has been maintaining it all these years. I have to imagine the dynamic content has long since been statically archived, as I'm not sure I'd trust the security of any late 90s perl cgi script.
- nerdponx 5y agoMaybe they are using Nginx in front of a 90s Perl CGI script?
- b112 5y agoOr, as you suggest, someone over time kept updating the scripts and backend... EG, small changes over time, is often less work than a rewrite. It's not illegal, or insane to use cgi and perl.
- indymike 5y agoEvery day I visit a site that reminds me how durable code really is. I'm starting to see programs that are outliving their developers. In many ways it is surprising given the amount of churn there is in the techniques and tools we use to build software.
- ninkendo 5y agoSomething about CGI and perl always rubbed me the wrong way. On every request, you're spawning a new process from disk, reading the entire script's source code (including everything it imports), compiling it, and running it, just to throw all that away. I do appreciate how simple it is, and how much it inherently frees its own resources, but it seems super wasteful. I'm actually quite shocked how common it was in the early days of the internet.
- zajio1am 5y agoI do not think that it is unreasonable question. I generally assume that authors have more ideas about their fictional worlds and characters than are revelaed in their books. But there is clearly difference between authors about level of their internal worldbuilding, where one extreme is Tolkien and opposite one is perhaps Douglas Adams.
- DeusExMachina 5y agoEven Tolkien was not able to satisfactorily answer fundamental questions like the origin of orcs.
- msh 5y agoI thought that was explained in the Silmarillion
- gjsman-1000 5y agoRead the Silmarillion if you haven't. It's dense (like a history book), but explains the machinations of Morgoth and Sauron, the creation of Dwarves and Orcs, and clears many things up. The only pity is that J.R.R. Tolkien never finished it, so some things like where Hobbits came from or where the Blue Wizards went remain (mostly) unaddressed.
- BanazirGalbasi 5y agoSome of Tolkien's other writings show that he wasn't happy with the explanation that ended up in the Silmarillion. He had multiple other explanations, and none of those is fully canon either.
- jimbokun 5y agoSeems like the kind of thing that never would have been finished no matter how long he lived.
- topynate 5y ago
- khendron 5y agoThis brings to mind the time I was at the national art gallery listening to a tour/talk by a well renowned sculptor. Somebody in the group gestured to one of the pieces and asked “does the transition of the floor from green to grey signify the subject’s disillusionment with current environmental policies and the increasing hopelessness of contemporary civilization?” The artist’s reply was “I ran out of green.”
- TomK32 5y agoSamuel Beckett on the question who or what is Godot answered "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." [1] [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/20046.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/r...
- voidfunc 5y agoI have a liberal arts degree and this reminds me so hard of basically every literary or artwork analysis I did. People spending way too much time trying to come up with the most bullshit interpretation of things.
- gonehome 5y agoIt reminds me of that pg essay - the more bogus the liberal arts the more bullshit is used to obscure and complicate meaning. It was specifically about writing, but the attempt to over complicate still applies imo. “And then of course there are cases where writers don't want to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example, or at the more bogus end of the humanities. But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is better.” http://paulgraham.com/talk.html http://paulgraham.com/talk.html
- prox 5y agoStudied too. First thing my teacher said “You have the world of artists, we create whatever we feel the need to create. And there is a completely different world of the art critic. Never let the two meet. There is no license to paint.”
- 5y ago
- jancsika 5y ago> "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely unanswerable question. No, he just doesn't want to answer it. Which is fine. But there are like, hundreds of other writers who would expound in great detail on the type of computer and its relationship to the story-- until their handler scoots them off to sign autographs or pay bills or whatever.
- dreadlordbone 5y agoAnd they would all be less funny and insightful than Douglas Adams.
- jancsika 5y agoThat's just an appeal to authority. You're essentially claiming that the question is unanswerable because Douglas Adams-- a funny and insightful author-- said so. Meanwhile, I'm quite sure Frank Herbert would talk at length about little details of his characters and goings on in the Dune universe. Hell, even Linus understood this-- see the "s is sad" commit[1] from a four-year-old and Linus' relevant rant[2]. It's delightful to me that the world's crankiest operating system maintainer is more willing to entertain trifles than a fiction writer! 1: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=690b0543a813b0ecfc51b0374c0ce6c8275435f0 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... 2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 Edit: clarification
- Veen 5y agoIt's not that the question is unanswerable, but that there are competing conceptions of what fiction is. For some writers, what's in the book is all there is. The characters don't have a life outside of the book. Nothing happens to them after the narrative or before it or outside of it. There is no world beyond what they create. If a detail isn't included in the text, then it doesn't exist. Asking a question like "what mac?" is a sort of category error. It's like asking Edvard Munch what the man depicted in The Scream had for breakfast.
- iqanq 5y ago...yet he still chose to specify that his computer was an Apple computer, and not just a computer.
- fartcannon 5y ago
- iqanq 5y agoAnd the original question says: >Was it a snazzy little all in one number, or a hideous boxy thing? Which would also say something about the character.
- fartcannon 5y agoAs I wrote it, I was thinking about the character and honestly? I think he'd still have a Mac. Arthur was kind of an asshole.
- smoldesu 5y agoExactly. Trying to define the machine dilutes it's symbolism; it's not an SE/30 or a IIx, it's a Macintosh. A literal plot device.
- fortyseven 5y agoI suspect this question's answer was more just an opportunity to write what he did for comedic effect, as opposed to any actual impossibility of answering the question being asked. I mean, his entire writing career was dedicated to inventing details about people who don't actually exist. That's writing.
- jimbokun 5y agoThe answer is about the story writing process, which is more interesting than philosophizing about the model of Dent’s Mac, which is why I think he chose to answer that way.
- Veen 5y agoHe created the world to tell the story; he didn't tell the story to create the world. The story is primary, and if a detail is irrelevant to the story, why invent it? Some writers do it the other way around: they invent a world and then make up stories that happen in it, but I don't think Adams approached writing in that way.
- BirAdam 5y agoDouglas Adams was a comedic genius. His writings covered science fiction, philosophy, and adventure… and were constantly amusing and hilarious. He wasn’t really a world builder in the sense of Rowling, Tolkien, or Martin. His worlds were often never fully explained as that wasn’t the point of his work. His work was to raise a laugh and provoke thought, not to convey a complete imagined world. The original radio broadcast was in ‘78. The BBC TV series was in ‘81. The game was in ‘84. The books were released in ‘79, ‘80, ‘82, ‘84, and ‘92. It is safe to say that in the earliest tellings, Arthur would not have had a computer. If he had, it would have been one of the 8bit early micros. By ‘84, he’d likely have had a Macintosh 128k. By ‘90, he could have had a plus, se, 2, or something similar. The real answer is, Douglas Adams was a Macintosh fan. It’s that simple.
- kwhitefoot 5y agoTo me, Douglas N. Adams' worlds were always much more convincing than Rowling's. They have that accidental, chaotic quality, that seems to be the way the real world is rather than the way Tolkien's is where everything is viewed through the lens of history so thoroughly explained and everything has meaning.
- BirAdam 5y agoThat is likely largely because much of Adams’s world is poking fun at ours.
- Digit-Al 5y agoBoth authors had different aims. Tolkien's aim was to build an entire fictional word with a rich history. Adam's aim was to reflect upon, and poke fun at, the human condition. (A simplification of course.)
- pmarreck 5y ago> Arthur would not have had a computer Well, at least until he got a hold of one of those Hitchhikers' Guides :) (which for all intents and purposes seem like a portable, possibly intermittently-networked Wikipedia computer)
- jvanvleet 5y agoWay back when Adams also posted occasionally on his own Usenet group. When he did the answers were often very similar. I got the distinct impression of someone who had found something he was very good at but not particularly interested in doing.
- barrkel 5y agoOr, someone who was creative and enjoyed creating things, but when one or two of them get a fanbase, it becomes a burden, because fanbases by their obsessive nature want more of the same.
- sircastor 5y agoThis reminds me of reading Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” many years ago after being a little familiar with the Game. I recall one of the characters doing some espionage work and unpacking his explicitly stated Macintosh PowerBook. Clancy was an avid Mac fan and I feel like a lot of us at the time (especially the rough days of the mid 90s) it was a nod to other Mac fans. I never finished the book, I wasn’t really into Clancy.
- hindsightbias 5y agoClancy could always be seen wandering around at Macworld Expos.
- TMWNN 5y agoClancy and Rush Limbaugh were two prominent Mac advocates in the 1990s when Apple seemed doomed and everyone outside publishing and graphical design had more or less abandoned the Mac.
- Schiphol 5y agoWell, I don't think Dent's heart is mentioned in the Hitchhiker's books but still he has one. Why? Because he is a human being, and by default those have hearts (although Adams could have made it otherwise). The general point is that inevitably works of fiction drag truths from the real world into the fictional one. Many things (and perhaps which Apple computer Dent had in particular) are neither true nor false in the relevant fictions, but that doesn't mean that inquiring whether they are is nonsensical or misguided.
- mattl 5y agoHe had a beige PowerMac G3 and he ran Rhapsody on it and he loved it.
- bombcar 5y agoI feel this answer is really the only fair one - unless you DO have it as part of the story or the story background these kinds of “fan questions” lead to flippant answers that are designed to fit the current day.
- nkrisc 5y agoI have the same kind of bafflement that he does here whenever anyone starts really getting into the details of fictional characters. I see it often when people get upset when a character on a TV show or in a video game changes in some way. I can't relate to it at all, I don't understand it. If you were perfectly willing to pretend this character exists at all, why can't you just pretend they're still the way you want them to be? None of it is real, it can be anything you want to imagine! Why would anyone care what kind of computer Arthur Dent had?
- axegon_ 5y agoTIL: * Douglas Adams has a website which is still operational. * He died in 2001(I was left with the impression that he died in the first half of the 90's for some reason).
- BruceEel 5y agoWhat kind of Apple Mac? A Mac!? Somehow I'd convinced myself he'd bought a IIGS, I was way off...
- alanbernstein 5y agoAdams himself says "I like to think he's the kind of person who would have an Apple Mac", which suggests an existence for the character that is not strictly confined to the sequence of words published in the books.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoStrange. Not funny. But the key of creating of an artificial world is not that they are artificial but it is a world. And we concern with the character because that world is linked to this world. Obviously some question is crazy. But what is his favourite food in earth, what tv programme he liked to watch … all valid questions. The storyline may mean it is not what the writer want to create. But the world is independent from the author somewhat. If he cannot add to it, we can. That is the fundamental argument for the arthur not the only voice matter in the world it created.