CM article for Mac lovers

[Pat McCotter]

She's a Mac Maniac 
'Curator' has more than 100 machines 

By ALEX HANSON
Valley News
May 28. 2006 10:00AM

Crack open an old Apple Macintosh computer and on the inside are the signatures of the people who developed it.

Those names, of Apple co-founders Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and others, are etched in Marion Bates, too.

In her cottage on the shore of Goose Pond in Canaan and in an adjacent cottage she used to rent out, Bates houses a collection of between 100 and 150 Apple computers, nearly all of them Macintoshes. The rows of rectangular screens set in rectangles of grayish plastic are part-shrine, part museum, part amusement.

"I really like the industrial design of everything Apple's made," Bates said. "They just look good."

The swift obsolescence of computers means that the machines of a decade ago are useless to all but the most expert today. Bates has saved most of her Apples from certain destruction, and is looking for ways to make use of them.

In an ideal world, free warehouse space would emerge and Bates would be able to open a sort of Macintosh museum complete with vintage video games, programming nights and other activities that would keep the computers in use. More likely, she said, some of her computers will find homes with other collectors.
"I don't envision keeping each and every one of these forever,"Bates said.

But collecting old computers is a hobby on the rise, she added. There are annual Vintage Computer Festivals around the country and in Europe, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., maintains a collection of historic computers.

The Macintosh's place in history is assured. It was the first computer sold in large numbers that used a mouse and a "graphical user interface," the simple screen prompts and icons that make daily computer use possible for most people.

In certain respects, the Macintosh determined the course of Bates's life. After seeing their 1984 Super Bowl ad, her mother ran out and bought one.

Bates's curiosity about the computer led her to a summer job at Computer Village, a store in Miami where she could work on Macintoshes. She was 14.

"It was heaven, because I got to take these things apart and figure out how they worked," she said.

She applied early decision to Dartmouth College, in part because the college recommended Apple computers to all its students. Coincidentally, it wasn't until after Bates graduated, in the spring of 2000, that Dartmouth started to sell more Windows-based computers than Apples to incoming students.

Bates, 28, started out as a computer science major "but it was too hard," she said. "My dream was to graduate and go work for Apple."She majored in cognitive science and decided she preferred New England's smaller scale to Silicon Valley.

In the kitchen of her cottage, rows of Macintoshes sit on and under a long table. A bedroom of the neighboring cottage holds stacks of PowerMacs and early Apple notebook computers. Plastic storage bins brim with parts. Keeping some of the computers up and running means hanging onto a few spares just for parts.

Bates is a research engineer at Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies.

Sometimes her colleagues rib her about her collection, but just as often a friend or co-worker tells her about an obscure object of desire.

Bates is less a collector than a curator, more interested in the usefulness of the machines than in their pristine condition.

"I'll never be a true collector because I like ripping them apart and playing with them," she said.