I know he's watching. As I sit here typing this, Gustav (my 6500) is monitoring my every move. He's an overachiever, using each upgrade I throw into him to its fullest potential, unwilling to accept that his 603 core is inferior to that of his G3 brethren. We all know that our Mac's have unique personalities, and despite drive reformats, processor upgrades, or new RAM, they will always be the same on the inside, where it counts (according to 87% of all preschool teachers). This is what sets a Mac apart from a Wintel PC. Macs have personalities, while PCs are tools with a single Borg-like collective personality: that of Bill Gates (y'know, the one that's devoid of a sense of humor and is convinced that there is no real difference between a bug and a feature).
I've spent weeks researching the basic "Mac personalities" which your Mac can adopt. Each Mac can contain one or many of these personalities. It (he? she?) can also modify these traits to suit the user. Is it purely environmental or is it genetic? Until we can get Avie or Steve to comment, we can only hope to identify and educate. Steve, Avie — feel free to e-mail me at macjunkie@applewizards.net . I'd like to know the juicy info on what you really program into the ROM. Now then, onto the list...
 
 
Bashful
Many Macs have a tendency to be bashful until they are completely comfortable with their users. Scientists at MIT theorize that a specific set of 24 chromosomes are characteristic in determining the shyness that your Mac is "installed" with. Also, misuse at an early age (within the first 30 days) can lead to distrust and increased shyness. In my personal experience, an extremely traumatized Mac needs a soft, caring voice and sometimes some anti-virus software (or a cool new piece of hardware for it to play with). Although shyness is quite common, not all Macs are bashful. I've never seen a shy Mac in an elementary school, which makes me wonder if having PB&J stuffed into the floppy drive can somehow calm the nerves. We may never know...
 
 
Sadistic
Sadly, a small number of Macs are sadistic and evil. Most of the time, a sadistic Mac results from owners that tried that old "drop from six inches onto a hard surface" routine from the Apple III days. Those that do possess the evil gene will change preferences on restart and crash during critical work (before saving, of course). It is believed that the evil gene was not a part of the first generation of Macs, but that increased exposure to Microsoftware during the developmental years may have introduced this gene to our genetic pool party.
 
 
Speedy/Overachiever
This is the personality type that Gustav enjoys most. These systems appear to be mature on delivery, much like French people. Knowing that they are the king of the block at an early age has led them to expect that they will perform well all of the time. These Macs have a bad side, though: they will run for months with massive data corruption to the b-tree, pretending that there's nothing wrong (like the one soldier in every war movie — the one that will sear his own wounds shut and continue to infiltrate the enemy fortress after losing a few pints of blood). These Macs refuse to die, even when outgunned. You can help your computer achieve such a personality by adding terms like "It's only a flesh wound" and "I could crush you with my CD tray" in the speech control panel. It's all about confidence.
 
 
Sleepy/Sluggish
Sleepy/Sluggish Macs are overladen with too many conflicting extensions and too few desktop rebuilds (once a month, people!). Many a Performa came off the line with this gene in the dominant ordination (hey, I'm not a biologist, so leave me alone!). They were never really ready for the real world... slept a lot in class... got teased by the 604 jock Macs. Whether this is genetic or environmental is currently a topic of hot debate. I've personally discovered that throwing a Performa 450 out of the window from the 5th story of any building will speed up the system (if only for 3.356 seconds), so maybe environment has a lot do with it.
 
What Do You Think?
These are what I call the base personalities of every Mac. All other personalities are simply modifications of these...in theory. If your Mac beats your high score in Maelstrom when you're at work, you have other issues. Feel free to write me with your personal experiences (don't take that "personal" to freely... we have to draw lines somewhere) at macjunkie@applewizards.net . And Steve, Avie, I'm still waiting for that email.
