BIG STUPID BLUE AND WINDOZE 95 (C)1997 Alan M. Schwartz John is my close friend who, despite overwhelming council, purchased an IBM Aptiva with Windows 95. It was such a deal. John then sought to install his purchased copy of Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0. I have for years condemned BillGates' Mickeysoft and Big Stupid Blue in a lighthearted cascade of incessant vituperation. This has matured into murderous rage. Aptivas are idiot-proof, so the Reset button is absent. Windoze 95 has a Start icon instead. If your 32-bit multimedia 3D stereo surround sound software (screen saver) suddenly decides it doesn't like you anymore and freezes everything solid, you simply fire a shotgun into the hardware and return it under warranty. John turned on the Aptiva as I arrived. After about 20 minutes of pure crap cascading across the CRT - everything from ROM BIOS CGA script to a stereo surround sound belch - there appeared a screen (the Windoze 95 32-bit multimedia Desktop!) bursting with icons picking their noses and scratching their butts like the June Taylor Dancers on time-and-a-half. In the background were big, medium and small IBM logos blue on blue elbowing each other for my retinal real estate. With a double click John could have instantly registered with the Mickey$oft Network, Compu$erve, America Off-Line, two special automatic dialers, a networking matrix... The Uninstaller has the rare property of doing nothing. If you want that 40 megabytes of worthless programming out of your machine you need merely remove the hard drive and put in a new one less Windoze 95. We reconfigured the six dozen cascading Desktop configuration menus to "Off." The background can be any color you want if you want blue. The Netscape CD-ROM slid into the CD-ROM drive. There was a floppy A: drive, there was a single partition C: drive, and there was a CD-ROM drive the system assigned G:. One assumes D:, E:, and F: went through Heaven's Gate and are now winging their way through the cosmos along with Comet Hale-Bopp. Or they are vigorously decomposing after voluntarily committing suicide in a rented San Diego mansion or an Aptiva - your choice. We booted Netscape Install. Everything went swimmingly until it came time to enter some data. Big Stupid Blue and Windoze 95 are terrifically clever: They automatically filled in the pertinent data blocks, admittedly with gibberish. I think this is the "Get Plugged and Play" option. John retyped it all as we made our way through Netscape Registration, pausing to click "Other" on who recommended Netscape to him ("my proctologist"). It came time to pluck the magic twanger and have the modem (built into the Aptiva lest some fool wedge a chicken into a vacant card slot) dial up the Internet Service Provider interface. We heard a dial tone, and a friendly 32-bit window popped up: "Verifying password." I looked at the nascent owner of Big Blue iron. John said, "It isn't my fault!" No argument there, gentle reader, it was a 32- bit multimedia system fault. Pac Bell didn't like it much. The Aptiva modem - possibly assembled by the bleeding fingers of Afgani refugee children from Korean swap meet parts purchased at 40% discount by a newly circumcised Scotsman - never got to warble. Who would have thought language like that could issue from a distaff voice chip? The phone then farted through the speakers and a lovely 32-bit multimedia error window appeared. It said there had been an error. We ran through the procedure three times and three times the dialer crapped out, and in three different ways. The best 32-bit multimedia error window explained it all. We had violated a Module named "blank." Mickeysoft reserves proprietary information to keep the competition from getting a leg up. John returned the Aptiva and the Netscape CD-ROM to the dealer and his phalanx of certified technicians (Mexican day laborers). At this writing they are of the opinion that if they reinstall the entire hard drive and John signs up for Mickey$oft Network, Compu$erve, America Off-Line, two special automatic dialers, a networking matrix... maybe he will go away. Along with my custom Intel clone I own an Amiga 1000 with 640K of RAM, two single density floppy drives, and no hard drive. It has a Motorola 68000 microprocessor, now commonly found honchoing low-end washing machines. My Amiga pretty much does everything "multimedia" the Pentium-powered 16 megabyte SDRAM, 1.2 Gbyte hard drive Windoze 95 Aptiva promises to do, and has a better voice synthesizer. Commodore's big mistakes were doing it better, faster, cheaper, easier, and ten years earlier.