The VALIS Hack

BYTE: Just to put four or five stories to rest, where did the name Apple Computer actually come from?

WOZNIAK: It came out of Steve Jobs’s head, and he’s a sort of private person, so I can’t say what led up to it. He came up with an inspiration. He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names, but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned.

This is the first Apple logo: Newton's apple of inspiration. The story of Newton and his apple of inspiration was no doubt as manufactured as the story of how Apple Computer got its logo. The apple is that ancient fruit from the Tree of Knowledge - the knowledge of "self" - or ego. It may have been a mushroom or it may have been alien genetics or it may have been millions of years of natural evolution, but it sure as hell wasn't an actual apple. Be that as it may, the split with Id is all wrapped up into the symbol of the bitten apple.

Lucifer, the Morning Star, gives the gift of knowledge, his planet is Venus. Venus charts a pentagram in the sky with its route, the apple's seeds are arranged in a pentagram, or a 5 pointed star. A happy coincidence for the apple, the world's most notorious fruit.

I've been drinking a fermented cider beverage lately, called Newton's Folly...

 and we know that Newton's "folly" was alchemy. Computers are like alchemy?

I propose that yes, they are. They, and especially the internet, HTML and CSS, show the basic relationship between above and below - the Word/code and the 3D world/screen. All the world's a web page, and HTML/YHWH, is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

The Kobayashi Maru

In Star Trek 11, Captain Kirk's first notch in his belt of infamy was defeating the Kobayashi Maru - a computer created, no-win simulation that always results in death. Captain Kirk doesn't believe in no-win situations, and he hacks the computer in order to prove his point. As his new programming takes affect, he takes a big bite out of an apple.

Death is the no-win situation, and this was exactly the goal of the alchemist and Sir Isaac Newton - to defeat death - to defeat Adam's curse.

I've become fascinated by this analogy, that our perception of reality is the computer screen, while the code behind the screen is what makes it all happen. Building web sites and web pages, we use Adobe Dreamweaver, a rather exact metaphor for what is really going on.

In creating a website, you have to be rather exact, and even a misplaced comma will fuck it all up. This is much like the rituals of a magic spell, that must be rigidly adhered to. When you get it right, its the voila! moment, and you actually see it, on screen. WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get".

Saw this yellow truck a few days ago, while pondering...

We all know that a computer runs on code, and I would suggest that our own, inner computers, are no different. Our code is made up of symbols, that have the power to actually change our "screen", or what we call "reality". Just say the Word.

OK, maybe it's not quite that simple, but the idea is simple. Of course, the devil is in the details. The important thing is to consider the idea, and perhaps conduct personal experiments if the spirit moves you. This is one result of my own experimenting. Meager, but at least... something. I do feel the need for some practical magic, right about now.

Thomas Edison was famous for trying thousands of times before he finally got it right. Alchemy is much the same.

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

We are now in HTML 5:

Bite the Apple