Anyone remember the days when games actually came out first on Apple computers? All sorts of stuff used to debut on the Apple II - Castle Wolfenstien, Boulder Dash, Karateka (the precursor to Prince of Persia)...
The Mac, and by extension the Safari browser, still has a significant presence in educational institutions. Wouldn't it make sense for Microsoft to build in support for that platform?
The Chinese government issued a decree two weeks ago that all PCs will need to have a licensed operating system software installed before leaving the factory gates in an effort to crack down on piracy.
Spotting the pirated copies of Windows will be easy.
Instead of "Start," the button will say "Very Much Go."
All the people crying that Boot Camp means the end of OS X gaming need to remember a certain reality: no software company with any sense will shut down a business unit that remains consistently profitable. So long as native OS X versions of software continue to bring in money for the companies that create them (Aspyr, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.), they'll stick around.
So the question is, would enough people keep using native OS X apps, thereby maintaining that profitability? I'd say yes, and I'd also say that Boot Camp really won't have much of an overall effect beyond increasing the Mac's market share slightly (and only slightly, because setting up dual-booting is an extra cost in terms of the XP license and the time involved to make it happen); Boot Camp is aimed at people for whom Windows is the exception, not the rule - i.e. people that always use native OS X apps if they're available. I honestly don't see this radically changing anything.
There are certain things that you can just write off without knowing anything specific about them. Such things include commercial American beer, the Doom movie, and most of Africa.
By the time the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, Apple had established itself as the market leader in home computing. Aside from the problems with the Apple III and the Lisa, they'd had an extraordinarily successful run; the expandability of Apple II systems put them in a league of their own, well above the VIC-20, TRS-80, and Atari 800. After the PC came out, Apple and IBM ran neck-and-neck for a couple of years; if you look at photos of the West Coast Computer Faire from that period, you see Apple IIs all over the place, and post-PC introduction, you see the Apple II running neck-and-neck with the PC. Giant booths advertising products "For the Apple II and IBM PC!", often with the Apple II getting first billing, and with both machines prominently displayed side by side. Businesses quickly took to the PC of course due to the IBM name, but in many other areas of computing it was Apple vs. IBM for at least a couple of years, and the outcome was far from clear at the time.
My first computer was an Apple II Plus that we used for word processing, home finances, games, BBS calls, recipes, everything you can think of. Boxes and boxes of 5.25" disks that I still have to this day - hundreds of programs. It was amazingly useful and it seemed eternal.
Here's an interesting excerpt from an article from Creative Computing magazine, March 1984:
Lisa, long heralded as the next step in microcomputing, was expensive ($9995) when first introduced in February 1983 and had relatively little software. The fact that Apple allowed more than six months to elapse between the announcement of the product and first shipments also hurt sales. It may have captured the world's imagination, but as John Sculley, said, "IBM captured corporate America's desktops."...
There are two important questions about Macintosh. First, will it undermine sales of Lisa, since it essentially does what Lisa does at a lower cost; and second, will it cannibalize IIe sales? Macintosh probably will not hurt Lisa sales in the long run. True, it does look like a low-end Lisa, but Lisa can do more and has more expansion capability. Nor is it likely to harm sales of the IIe since Macintosh is not designed as a home machine. It can't use proDOS or DOS 3.3 based software, does not support a color display, and most important, is not being marketed by the Personal Computer Division. ...
Apple faces many problems. 1984 will be the most critical year in the company's history. If Macintosh does not make the impact for which its builders hope, if Lisa sales do not pick up, and if IIe/III sales remain sluggish in the face of competition from IBM, then Apple could become just another microcomputer manufacturer. But with the new direction and new blood at Apple, the company stands an excellent chance of regaining its position as an industry leader. Apple is growing up, and the process won't be easy. With the dedication of John Sculley and with Steve Wozniak back in the picture, it looks as if there will be an Apple in our future.
Notice the perspective with which this article was written: people were already used to Apple IIs in their homes, and so, to them, it followed that the Mac was not a home machine. It was perceived first as Apple's entry into the professional/business market, but the Apple IIe was, in the words of a later article, "the machine that just won't fade away." Sales of Apple IIe machines stubbornly persisted despite the fact that Apple had shifted its focus elsewhere.
I wish that Apple had taken this as a clue to put some real effort into quickly evolving the II line. If it had gotten a GUI long before the IIGS, who knows what might have happened? The expandability and flexibility of the Apple II combined with a slick GUI would have done wonders, perhaps even made it a real threat to I
I work on one Help Desk ticket at a time and completely ignore any phone calls, emails or IMs until I'm done with the that ticket.
"Hey, the network guys are seeing some suspicious traffic - " "Later." "Hey, our loads are skyrocketing - " "Later." "Hey, our front-end web servers have just crashed - " "Later." "Hey, the director of systems administration would like to speak with you - " "Later." "Hey, security's coming over - " "Later." "Sir, we'll need you to come with us." "La - "
Jobs' insistence on controlling all aspects of a product -- from hardware and software to the service that comes with them -- is the new blueprint.
To be sure, Apple is a unique presence in the world of digital media, but the slideshow picture they put alongside this caption was that of an iMac. As far as computers go, total control of the platform is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the oldest one. That type of solution stretches back as far as the room-sized big iron of the '60s and before, but it was most publicly visible, I think, during the '80s, when several companies were vying for dominance of the personal computer market. Commodore, Atari, Apple, IBM - they all had their own little universes where you bought their hardware, ran their OS, and dealt with their disk format. Each company dreamed of taking over with its own end-to-end solution, but that didn't happen. It can be argued that the market is simply too large for any one company to hope for dominance of that kind.
You all may want to check out the ChatterBox interview with Gabe and Tycho that was done this past Sunday. Gabe talks a little about his recent conversations with Jack Thompson. Apparently the first thing Jack said after calling Gabe up and establishing his identity was:
"Let me tell you something, idiot."
This utter professionalism is well-reflected in the text of his fax to the Seattle police.
"There are a bunch of computer geeks out there who think..." "These idiots have been so careless as to..."
I can only imagine what some of his non-game-related correspondence is like.
Also, this has probably been posted before, but here it is again: the ChatterBox interview with Thompson. Lunacy thrown into the sharpest relief.
And here I thought they were finally releasing the successor to the Apple IIGS.
Or they fixed up the Apple/// even better this time. Or they bristled at the term "Apple ][ Minus" and went back to Integer BASIC without Autostart. Or they followed up on that Pippin console.
And the parent poster isn't too far off base in one respect. Apple's market share did drop, not so much because of the move from DOS3.3/ProDOS to the Mac, but because of the way Apple treated their existing base of Apple ][ and//e customers. I mean, even when the Mac came out there was still a huge base of installed Apple//e business customers and Apple pretty much just threw them away, fully expecting them to migrate to the Macintosh. Migrate they did, but to the IBM PC.
Never forget one thing: Apple was the incumbent, with all the advantages that confers. Atari and Commodore together couldn't market themselves out of a cardboard box and both eventually fell by the wayside. I look back at Apple Computer as a company that was at the right place at the right time with everything in its favor, only to squander opportunity after opportunity, relegating itself to second place. And such a distant second as to be almost out of the running, when they could have owned the market.
I always find myself wondering what would have happened if Apple had taken all the energy and GUI focus that they had for the Macintosh, and instead applied them to the much more flexible, expandable Apple II line. Might the Apple II line have evolved into a modern-day industry standard, with as many clones and as much software as PCs have now?
Repeating that just to stave off anyone ready to jump in with a remark about those. I should have made that clear in my first post, but you can refer to my reply. Clones existed, but Apple fought them tooth-and-nail much as IBM did. Why were the IBM clones so much more successful in the end?
Read my above post - and my question. Perhaps you'd like to take a crack at answering it.
And I know about the pre-GS/OS GUIs. They don't count. Apple's GUI was the Mac. Why did they not stay with their ][ core and aggressively pursue a GUI for it?
Yes, I'm aware of the Franklin, the Laser, and the other ][ clones... my question is really: Why did these cloning efforts not lead to a massive spread of the ][ platform in the way that Compaq and other PC clones did for IBM?
The success of VisiCalc turned Apple into a successful company, selling tens of thousands Apple II's to businesses who wanted them only for the spreadsheet.
Here we have the promising beginnings of a company that could revolutionize the business market with personal computers. Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so? Here are my thoughts.
- Apple///. Subpar engineering and other bad choices (such as intentionally limiting backward compatibility) was a perhaps mortal blow against Apple's business entry. Undoubtedly the Mac made up for some of this later, but I've always been of the opinion that Apple should have focused on and expanded their core, the ][ line. It was similar to IBM's PC (and later clones) in its expandability and presented far more possibilities. Why did they not simply pursue a GUI for the ][ series instead of branching off with a completely different product?
- The ][ platform wasn't opened up to cloning. Granted, no one, including IBM, was prepared to actually sanction this; the culture back then was of every microcomputer manufacturer having its own hardware, OS, disk format, et cetera - each one dreamed of total domination with its own platform. It took Compaq's sleight-of-hand on IBM to do it. Why was no such cleverness pulled with the Apple ][ platform?
Here is an example of what you can expect to see should you decide to submit yourself to such torture.
I honestly don't think anyone should view this series in its mutilated, dubbed form on CN, not even newbies. Those of us that love the show most likely already have the boxed set, and can watch it in its proper, unedited, subbed format. Those of us that haven't seen it would be getting the worst possible introduction to the show on CN and might even form incorrect opinions about it based on that mess.
If Apple had opened up the Mac early on - or, better still, given the Apple II line the attention it deserved and opened that up - we might never have seen an Intel Mac.
I've heard the whole spiel on the EU thing from Microsoft's point of view, as can only be gotten off the record by a personal friend (he works on Longhorn). To put it simply, Microsoft will comply with the EU's demands as they have to, and they will adapt as necessary - but there are some things on which they simply will not budge, and most of those relate to how they engineer their software.
Microsoft's internal opinion of the EU is that it is acting entirely for economical reasons, that is, selfish ones. Fining Microsoft millions means lots of needed cash for some of the EU members whose economies aren't doing too hot. It also means the apprecation of Microsoft's competitors in the region (Real, Apple, etc.) who would, to use my friend's phrase, "line their (the EU's) coffers with cash."
Incidentally, Microsoft is perfectly capable of pulling its business completely out of EU nations, though that is of course an absolute last option. Note that such a move would be disastrous for consumers there (and don't think for a second that it wouldn't be), but Microsoft would continue as ever.
Back when The Search for Spock was just coming out, if you can imagine that.
Numb: 6 Subj: SEARCH FOR SPOCK From: St. Paul c64 & IBM Date: 06-04-84 at 11:38 AM
trekkies, don't waste your money - the search for spock is boring, not really believable, and by far the worst of the three. the only high point is seeing christopher lloyd ('jim' from taxi) dressed up in monster makeup and costume, still talking like a spaced druggie. score now: 1 for 3 on trek dreck -- only the wrath of kahn was any good!
He doesn't mention Christopher Lloyd's "Back to the Future" role because that movie hadn't even been made yet. It boggles the mind!
Numb: 7 Subj: Pound a tribble in your ass. From: APPLE AVENGER Date: 06-04-84 at 06:34 PM
To the above ruggie:
I found that Star Trek/// was far the best* of all of them. Star Trek / was to much special effects and no story. Star Trek// was great, but the ending was stupied (play 'amazing grace' at spocks funeraul was stupied!). I found star trek/// at times boring, but the actors got to play the roles as they wanted. The other 2 movies the directors ran the characters. Star trek/// was more for the characters and the people that play them.
The movie gave us a new way to think about star trek. Is it totally over for the entire crew? Will they get a new enterprise? Will spock fully return to us? This we will never know or maybe we will soon know because paramount studios is talking about star trek////.
-Avenger
Loyal trekkie for life
Long before Berman and Braga got their grubby little hands all over it, Star Trek involved eager anticipation. Anyone remember that? *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
The only way this could be better is if it were the Apple II environment. A belated triumph of Woz over Jobs.
Yes, Maya is on the Mac - but you'll be hard-pressed to find many companies using Maya on said Mac.
w ww.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm%3FNewsID%3D14619+ macworld+maya+mac+sales+autodesk&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd= 1&gl=us
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:pfgF8E0i5C8J:
20% of Maya sales are the Mac version, according to Autodesk. (Google cache since Macworld UK is apparently down.)
Anyone remember the days when games actually came out first on Apple computers? All sorts of stuff used to debut on the Apple II - Castle Wolfenstien, Boulder Dash, Karateka (the precursor to Prince of Persia)...
The Mac, and by extension the Safari browser, still has a significant presence in educational institutions. Wouldn't it make sense for Microsoft to build in support for that platform?
The Chinese government issued a decree two weeks ago that all PCs will need to have a licensed operating system software installed before leaving the factory gates in an effort to crack down on piracy.
Spotting the pirated copies of Windows will be easy.
Instead of "Start," the button will say "Very Much Go."
All the people crying that Boot Camp means the end of OS X gaming need to remember a certain reality: no software company with any sense will shut down a business unit that remains consistently profitable. So long as native OS X versions of software continue to bring in money for the companies that create them (Aspyr, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.), they'll stick around.
So the question is, would enough people keep using native OS X apps, thereby maintaining that profitability? I'd say yes, and I'd also say that Boot Camp really won't have much of an overall effect beyond increasing the Mac's market share slightly (and only slightly, because setting up dual-booting is an extra cost in terms of the XP license and the time involved to make it happen); Boot Camp is aimed at people for whom Windows is the exception, not the rule - i.e. people that always use native OS X apps if they're available. I honestly don't see this radically changing anything.
There are certain things that you can just write off without knowing anything specific about them. Such things include commercial American beer, the Doom movie, and most of Africa.
This TV series joins those hallowed ranks.
By the time the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, Apple had established itself as the market leader in home computing. Aside from the problems with the Apple III and the Lisa, they'd had an extraordinarily successful run; the expandability of Apple II systems put them in a league of their own, well above the VIC-20, TRS-80, and Atari 800. After the PC came out, Apple and IBM ran neck-and-neck for a couple of years; if you look at photos of the West Coast Computer Faire from that period, you see Apple IIs all over the place, and post-PC introduction, you see the Apple II running neck-and-neck with the PC. Giant booths advertising products "For the Apple II and IBM PC!", often with the Apple II getting first billing, and with both machines prominently displayed side by side. Businesses quickly took to the PC of course due to the IBM name, but in many other areas of computing it was Apple vs. IBM for at least a couple of years, and the outcome was far from clear at the time.
...
...
My first computer was an Apple II Plus that we used for word processing, home finances, games, BBS calls, recipes, everything you can think of. Boxes and boxes of 5.25" disks that I still have to this day - hundreds of programs. It was amazingly useful and it seemed eternal.
Here's an interesting excerpt from an article from Creative Computing magazine, March 1984:
Lisa, long heralded as the next step in microcomputing, was expensive ($9995) when first introduced in February 1983 and had relatively little software. The fact that Apple allowed more than six months to elapse between the announcement of the product and first shipments also hurt sales. It may have captured the world's imagination, but as John Sculley, said, "IBM captured corporate America's desktops."
There are two important questions about Macintosh. First, will it undermine sales of Lisa, since it essentially does what Lisa does at a lower cost; and second, will it cannibalize IIe sales? Macintosh probably will not hurt Lisa sales in the long run. True, it does look like a low-end Lisa, but Lisa can do more and has more expansion capability. Nor is it likely to harm sales of the IIe since Macintosh is not designed as a home machine. It can't use proDOS or DOS 3.3 based software, does not support a color display, and most important, is not being marketed by the Personal Computer Division.
Apple faces many problems. 1984 will be the most critical year in the company's history. If Macintosh does not make the impact for which its builders hope, if Lisa sales do not pick up, and if IIe/III sales remain sluggish in the face of competition from IBM, then Apple could become just another microcomputer manufacturer. But with the new direction and new blood at Apple, the company stands an excellent chance of regaining its position as an industry leader. Apple is growing up, and the process won't be easy. With the dedication of John Sculley and with Steve Wozniak back in the picture, it looks as if there will be an Apple in our future.
Notice the perspective with which this article was written: people were already used to Apple IIs in their homes, and so, to them, it followed that the Mac was not a home machine. It was perceived first as Apple's entry into the professional/business market, but the Apple IIe was, in the words of a later article, "the machine that just won't fade away." Sales of Apple IIe machines stubbornly persisted despite the fact that Apple had shifted its focus elsewhere.
I wish that Apple had taken this as a clue to put some real effort into quickly evolving the II line. If it had gotten a GUI long before the IIGS, who knows what might have happened? The expandability and flexibility of the Apple II combined with a slick GUI would have done wonders, perhaps even made it a real threat to I
I work on one Help Desk ticket at a time and completely ignore any phone calls, emails or IMs until I'm done with the that ticket.
"Hey, the network guys are seeing some suspicious traffic - "
"Later."
"Hey, our loads are skyrocketing - "
"Later."
"Hey, our front-end web servers have just crashed - "
"Later."
"Hey, the director of systems administration would like to speak with you - "
"Later."
"Hey, security's coming over - "
"Later."
"Sir, we'll need you to come with us."
"La - "
Jobs' insistence on controlling all aspects of a product -- from hardware and software to the service that comes with them -- is the new blueprint.
To be sure, Apple is a unique presence in the world of digital media, but the slideshow picture they put alongside this caption was that of an iMac. As far as computers go, total control of the platform is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the oldest one. That type of solution stretches back as far as the room-sized big iron of the '60s and before, but it was most publicly visible, I think, during the '80s, when several companies were vying for dominance of the personal computer market. Commodore, Atari, Apple, IBM - they all had their own little universes where you bought their hardware, ran their OS, and dealt with their disk format. Each company dreamed of taking over with its own end-to-end solution, but that didn't happen. It can be argued that the market is simply too large for any one company to hope for dominance of that kind.
You all may want to check out the ChatterBox interview with Gabe and Tycho that was done this past Sunday. Gabe talks a little about his recent conversations with Jack Thompson. Apparently the first thing Jack said after calling Gabe up and establishing his identity was:
"Let me tell you something, idiot."
This utter professionalism is well-reflected in the text of his fax to the Seattle police.
"There are a bunch of computer geeks out there who think..."
"These idiots have been so careless as to..."
I can only imagine what some of his non-game-related correspondence is like.
Also, this has probably been posted before, but here it is again: the ChatterBox interview with Thompson. Lunacy thrown into the sharpest relief.
And here I thought they were finally releasing the successor to the Apple IIGS.
/// even better this time. Or they bristled at the term "Apple ][ Minus" and went back to Integer BASIC without Autostart. Or they followed up on that Pippin console.
Or they fixed up the Apple
Quiet you, it could still happen.
And the parent poster isn't too far off base in one respect. Apple's market share did drop, not so much because of the move from DOS3.3/ProDOS to the Mac, but because of the way Apple treated their existing base of Apple ][ and //e customers. I mean, even when the Mac came out there was still a huge base of installed Apple //e business customers and Apple pretty much just threw them away, fully expecting them to migrate to the Macintosh. Migrate they did, but to the IBM PC.
Never forget one thing: Apple was the incumbent, with all the advantages that confers. Atari and Commodore together couldn't market themselves out of a cardboard box and both eventually fell by the wayside. I look back at Apple Computer as a company that was at the right place at the right time with everything in its favor, only to squander opportunity after opportunity, relegating itself to second place. And such a distant second as to be almost out of the running, when they could have owned the market.
I always find myself wondering what would have happened if Apple had taken all the energy and GUI focus that they had for the Macintosh, and instead applied them to the much more flexible, expandable Apple II line. Might the Apple II line have evolved into a modern-day industry standard, with as many clones and as much software as PCs have now?
Repeating that just to stave off anyone ready to jump in with a remark about those. I should have made that clear in my first post, but you can refer to my reply. Clones existed, but Apple fought them tooth-and-nail much as IBM did. Why were the IBM clones so much more successful in the end?
Read my above post - and my question. Perhaps you'd like to take a crack at answering it.
And I know about the pre-GS/OS GUIs. They don't count. Apple's GUI was the Mac. Why did they not stay with their ][ core and aggressively pursue a GUI for it?
Yes, I'm aware of the Franklin, the Laser, and the other ][ clones... my question is really: Why did these cloning efforts not lead to a massive spread of the ][ platform in the way that Compaq and other PC clones did for IBM?
The success of VisiCalc turned Apple into a successful company, selling tens of thousands Apple II's to businesses who wanted them only for the spreadsheet.
///. Subpar engineering and other bad choices (such as intentionally limiting backward compatibility) was a perhaps mortal blow against Apple's business entry. Undoubtedly the Mac made up for some of this later, but I've always been of the opinion that Apple should have focused on and expanded their core, the ][ line. It was similar to IBM's PC (and later clones) in its expandability and presented far more possibilities. Why did they not simply pursue a GUI for the ][ series instead of branching off with a completely different product?
Here we have the promising beginnings of a company that could revolutionize the business market with personal computers. Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so? Here are my thoughts.
- Apple
- The ][ platform wasn't opened up to cloning. Granted, no one, including IBM, was prepared to actually sanction this; the culture back then was of every microcomputer manufacturer having its own hardware, OS, disk format, et cetera - each one dreamed of total domination with its own platform. It took Compaq's sleight-of-hand on IBM to do it. Why was no such cleverness pulled with the Apple ][ platform?
Your thoughts?
There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S.
So that's where all the dark matter is.
This is the first instance in the animal kingdom where males reproduce exclusively by cloning
Are you kidding? How do you think Slashdotters reproduce?
Here is an example of what you can expect to see should you decide to submit yourself to such torture.
I honestly don't think anyone should view this series in its mutilated, dubbed form on CN, not even newbies. Those of us that love the show most likely already have the boxed set, and can watch it in its proper, unedited, subbed format. Those of us that haven't seen it would be getting the worst possible introduction to the show on CN and might even form incorrect opinions about it based on that mess.
Thank god I use Contiki!
If Apple had opened up the Mac early on - or, better still, given the Apple II line the attention it deserved and opened that up - we might never have seen an Intel Mac.
set themselves up for loss of the market monopoly?
Last I checked, Apple didn't have a monopoly on anything.
(Except Macs, and who knows about that in the future...)
I've heard the whole spiel on the EU thing from Microsoft's point of view, as can only be gotten off the record by a personal friend (he works on Longhorn). To put it simply, Microsoft will comply with the EU's demands as they have to, and they will adapt as necessary - but there are some things on which they simply will not budge, and most of those relate to how they engineer their software.
Microsoft's internal opinion of the EU is that it is acting entirely for economical reasons, that is, selfish ones. Fining Microsoft millions means lots of needed cash for some of the EU members whose economies aren't doing too hot. It also means the apprecation of Microsoft's competitors in the region (Real, Apple, etc.) who would, to use my friend's phrase, "line their (the EU's) coffers with cash."
Incidentally, Microsoft is perfectly capable of pulling its business completely out of EU nations, though that is of course an absolute last option. Note that such a move would be disastrous for consumers there (and don't think for a second that it wouldn't be), but Microsoft would continue as ever.
Back when The Search for Spock was just coming out, if you can imagine that.
/// was far the best* of all of them. Star Trek / was to // was great, but the ending was /// at times boring, but the actors got to play the roles as they wanted. /// was more for
////.
Numb: 6
Subj: SEARCH FOR SPOCK
From: St. Paul c64 & IBM
Date: 06-04-84 at 11:38 AM
trekkies, don't waste your money - the search for spock is boring, not really
believable, and by far the worst of the three. the only high point is seeing
christopher lloyd ('jim' from taxi) dressed up in monster makeup and costume,
still talking like a spaced druggie. score now: 1 for 3 on trek dreck -- only
the wrath of kahn was any good!
He doesn't mention Christopher Lloyd's "Back to the Future" role because that movie hadn't even been made yet. It boggles the mind!
Numb: 7
Subj: Pound a tribble in your ass.
From: APPLE AVENGER
Date: 06-04-84 at 06:34 PM
To the above ruggie:
I found that Star Trek
much special effects and no story. Star Trek
stupied (play 'amazing grace' at spocks funeraul was stupied!). I found star
trek
The other 2 movies the directors ran the characters. Star trek
the characters and the people that play them.
The movie gave us a new way to think about star trek. Is it totally over for
the entire crew? Will they get a new enterprise? Will spock fully return to us?
This we will never know or maybe we will soon know because paramount studios is
talking about star trek
-Avenger
Loyal trekkie for life
Long before Berman and Braga got their grubby little hands all over it, Star Trek involved eager anticipation. Anyone remember that? *sigh*