By Michael Webb, Editor-in-Chief, MikeWebb@CompuServe.COM
Disclaimer: all references to major world religions or other beliefs within the context of this article are not only purely intentional, but also made with full deference and respect to those respective religions or sets of beliefs, and only for the sake of establishing the point of the story. For those offended by such references, or "mild" sarcasm, read at your own risk; the rest of you, have fun. So there.
For millennia, prophets and seers have predicted horrific, chaotic ends for humanity around the year 2000. The Bible speaks of elements of Armageddon, while many modern political thinkers agree that conditions in some parts of the world would seem to be awaiting its arrival; Nostradamus made endless predictions, many of which have seemed to come shockingly true, and others of which foretell catastrophe. There are many others in their ranks, people who continue to warn of earth-rending natural disasters and human-induced "fire from the sky" raining down upon and obliterating all life on the planet. Just as political tension would seem to support such possibilities, the planet has shuddered under the unwavering weight of the parasitic human species, unleashing oddly appropriate, seemingly unprecedented numbers of earthquakes, floods, and other such natural energies upon the people of the Earth.
As it turns out, all of the apparent evidence so far has been a false alarm, and totally unrelated. On the other hand, the predictions themselves are all too true. The original seers were misled, however; a group of modern prophets has seen the truth. After the news first came out, there was much initial confusion, with the tellers of the story becoming mixed up with the story itself, and the prophets have since come to be known instead as the "Profits", because as it turns out, the very rich Bill Gates, horseman of the Apocalypse upon the back of MS-Steed, will ultimately spell the end of human civilization.
Don't worry if you find yourself feeling great shock and frustration over this. Many people were surprised that Microsoft could ever do something so sinister, as without people, there would be no one to buy their products. Unfortunately, it is the plain, unfettered truth, and everything points to it being so. The explanation goes as follows: every two years, Microsoft releases a new version of their Windows operating system. Well, at least they say they will. You see, Windows 95 came out in 1995; Windows 97 was supposed to be out in 1997, but it is now going to be late, probably into 1998. Follow the same progression of odd numbers, and you arrive at 1999 as the next year for an update to Windows, this time Windows 99. Since it is natural for at least a year's delay to put a kink in Microsoft's plans, we can be fairly certain it will arrive in late summer of the year 2000. And that, my friends, is exactly the year of decision that so many have feared for centuries.
As much as Amiga and Macintosh users may believe so, the existence of Windows itself is not enough to destroy the world. It is what happens to it along the way that counts. This can be traced back far beyond the evolution of Windows to the 32nd dimension of Many Things Happening Simultaneously and [Pretending to] Share System Resources in a fair and equitable (yet totally un-"Cooperative") manner, where plugs may play (but all too often pray), and everything in life is what is on THE Menu. Yes, you can look back into history to find that every stage in the development of the Windows stretched existing hardware to the limit, and brought forth sustenance to the makers of the memory.
However, it was in 1995, with the introduction of Windows 95, that the growth became accelerated and exponential. With layer upon layer, and feature upon feature, the operating system became unprecedentedly huge and bloated, with only moderate growth in capability to show for it; memory requirements skyrocketed, while old hard disks were unceremoniously preempted and tossed to the wayside. It not only ushered, but forced, in a new level of hardware technology for PC's.
Just after recovering from this assault, the computer industry is barely ready, and hopelessly unprepared, for the next level, Windows 97. While promising to bring new levels of power and capability to PC's, it will also quadruple system requirements, and Microsoft and the hard disk/memory manufacturers will again have opportunities for high earnings.
But none of this can even begin to prepare us for.........
Realizing the complete futility of hoping to launch their next OS by 1999, Microsoft will change the name of Windows 99 to Windows 2000 (only after referring to it by the requisite two or three major world cities first). And if you thought Windows 95 was excessively hyped, you have no idea what's coming next.
PC owners the world over will tremble in anticipation of the many great new capabilities their computers will have (of course, Windows itself won't add the capability; you only end up with it after you add all the hardware you will need to run Windows itself).
The trouble will only truly begin, however, at 6:00 PM EST the night of August 1st, the year 2000, when Windows 2000 is officially launched. At that time, the shift in weight of money being handed over to dealers, and then to Microsoft, will threaten to upset the Earth's very equilibrium. This will cause some moderate tremors throughout California, Florida, and the midwest U.S., among other places for the first few hours; shortly thereafter, however, cash flow to the memory and hard disk companies will begin to even out the shift in weight, staving off a fatal imbalance. This is an odd market phenomenon known by industry analysts as Preparatory or Preemptive Spending based on foreknowledge by the more experienced consumers in the market, but by Microsoft (since "Preemptive" always was such a sticking point with them) simply as "SmartDrive spend-ahead cache (or "cash", as you see fit).
However, the Profits say that the first wave of new Windows 2000 owners will arrive home from the stores en masse, causing another dangerous shift in gravitational equilibrium. Fortunately, the second wave will be going out to the stores by then, helping to keep things in balance. But the worst will be yet to come. By around 9:00 PM, people will begin the installation process.
The calm is shattered around 9:20 PM. Windows 2000 will place such a tremendous strain upon system resources that all computers built before July 31, 2000, hopelessly overloaded beyond all capacities, will instantly explode violently, spewing bits of transistors and resistors, shards of glass, magnetic media, and CD-ROM's all over the place. In the larger cities, the combined force from this explosion will obliterate entire city blocks. Many lives will be lost instantly, and fortunately, in a quick and painless way (although many people will find themselves stuck in Purgatory until Microsoft releases Heaven 2.0 to coincide with the Second Coming of Christ, but that has nothing to do with this Armageddon, and won't occur for some time...at least until the bug fixes for Apocalypse NT are complete). The CD's fired from the exploding system cases will begin spreading the damage and decapitating poor innocent victims everywhere, while power surges caused by the many exploding computers will send power plants into the sky in an intense blast of fiery debris.
The newest computers will begin to melt down in a sort of a China Syndrome manner, while all real IBM computers will instantly mutually annihilate with nearby copies of Windows 2000, giving off intense gamma radiation that will add to the state of energy flux building over the planet. Through a slight error in internal computations (something about Intel floating point math...the Profits are a little vague here, but are 99.000009345% sure something like this is going to happen) Microsoft's automated Windows 2000 bug-fix release system will begin sending mailings to all registered owners of all versions of Windows throughout the world. The same malfunction will cause everybody in the world with an e-mail address to receive a message entitled "The Plan" with the text "Where did I care to come from yesterday?" written endlessly in an infinite feedback loop. These circumstances will greatly overwhelm the entire Internet, and a global meltdown will commence. At the same time, the number of phone calls to Microsoft tech support that will start flooding in will vastly exceed even the safety limits of the world phone networks, and they, too, will instantly detonate like incendiary bombs, causing a world breakdown in communication, and further death and destruction.
Soon, things will take a turn for the worse, as the earlier tremors will disrupt some major fault lines. The true devastation will begin, as entire continents are rent asunder, and Bill Gates's money bin will rupture and spill its contents out onto the planet. The world will be covered in money to a height exceeding anything accomplished by the glaciers of the last great ice age; the flooding so often foretold will begin, but not with water, as had previously been believed but rather with cold, hard cash.
The ambient energy from the many explosions and meltdowns will compound and exacerbate the imbalances in the already unstable global weather patterns, and the feared "fire from the sky" will begin to fall. Rain, snow, sleet, electric storms, and fireballs will alternately pelt the entire face of the Earth, rapidly wiping out entire cities and killing hundreds of millions of people. Under the assault, Silicon Valley will melt and fuse into one gigantic microprocessor, which will then begin rendering animation sequences faster than Hollywood can use them.
Meanwhile, in a not-so-big city called Los Gatos in California, USA, a group of people will gather around the center of the town for protection. They are oddly unharmed, and the city is strangely unscathed. Without warning, the clouds part, and the Earth silences; the sky of fire diminishes and fades, and once again, there is calm. A bright light appears in the open sky...
The "Proficies" dictate that the final battle between good and evil, between bloat and efficiency, will be over, and Jay Miner shall come again to judge the living and the dead [platforms]. In view of the horribly unwarranted death and destruction, he aligns three planets, holds them down for a few seconds, and reboots.
Only so much can be undeleted, however, and the tokens of the destruction linger in people's minds and in their hearts; people will never again forget the true direction.
Is there any way to prevent this disaster? I was hoping you would ask. The answer is......no. But is it possible to protect oneself? Why, certainly! All one must do is apply a rainbow-colored checkmark decal to the door to one's house, and one will be safe.
In the meantime, we can work to better the future, and prepare ourselves. Above all, we must listen to the Profits. Incidentally, they are living in hiding now, because shortly after hearing about the predictions, Bill Gates expressed an earnest concern about "a loss of profits," and some high-ranking Microserf cronies read a bit too much into it. They then "went to work." Ahem. I.e. "Bottom of the lake, boys." Fortunately, the Profits knew this, too, and took off before they were apprehended. Rumor has it they are currently living in a state of "Amiga Zen" high atop a mountain in which they have organized their thought processes to be as efficient and uncluttered as the Amiga OS, so as to better and more thoroughly predict future calamities. Plus, they're playing a lot of AB3D.
Is there a moral to this story? Yes, I suppose so (stepping up onto soap box...). For one thing, fight the good fight. Oppose code bloat! Fatware must die! Computer hardware may be getting more powerful, but no matter how you look at it, we're still building upon a rotten foundation, and I guarantee you, if we continue along the present course, it will eventually all come tumbling down, so to speak. The accumulation of wasteful programming practices will eventually make everything so horribly convoluted that it will be impossible to deal with, and we will always be wasting more and more of a computer's capabilities (stepping down from soapbox...but ya know it's true, right...? :-)). Plus, cleaning up after an Armageddon is not much fun. Have you ever tried it? Believe me, you don't want to.
But perhaps most importantly among all predictions, prophecies, possible futures, and central ideas, the Amiga will never die.
So sayeth the Profits.