Brian Thomas
14 May 2005

Writing software for the Macintosh platform is like being the architect on a planet where they change the laws of gravity every year. Fortunately, as I am thrilled to tell you now, If Monks had Macs survived the Mac's latest gravitational shift. The Tiger didn't bite me like the Panther had. If Monks had Macs also works on Windows. And it really is my lucky year. Bill Gates has graciously agreed to delay the release of the new version of Windows for another 18 months.

Monks was first published in 1988 at a time when the Macintosh looked like a coffee maker. Multimedia was black and white back then and that didn't mean grayscale. It meant that every pixel was either black or it was white. Smackerel, a Canadian multi-media/web firm has published a web presentation that cleverly brings that forgotten black & white era back to the web (and discusses the early day of Monks). Check out "When Multimedia was Black & White" now or wait till the end where I'll repeat the link: http://smackerel.net/black_white.html

At this point I imagine folks asking a question I hear a lot, "But, what is If Monks had Macs?" Over the last 18 years I have come up with a few snappy replies. I just grabbed the 1988 flyer and was amazed to read this gem about the freeware edition:

"If Monks had Macs is about a time before capitalism and a freedom beyond free enterprise."

I hadn't remembered that I had been so feisty then. The explanation of Monks on the 2005 flyer ends on a similar note:

"The Monks CD-ROM includes games, intellectual tools and a fight to take our culture back from corporate sponsorship."

"Meat & Conversation," a demon-infested game was inspired by the philosophy of the anarchist soldier, factory worker, labor organizer, school teacher and Christian mystic, Simone Weil. The other game, "Killing Time," is a contemplative game of solitaire for monks. The two “intellectual tools” included are the "New Journal" and Sophie. The "New Journal" helps you to discover the hidden threads in your writing and your life. Sophie, an e-book reader, features a notebook that records and plays back the location of key passages in a book’s text.

The phrase "taking our culture back from corporate sponsorship" refers to the provocative way that Monks is a 24 volume guide to some shining moments of Western Civilization. One volume displays, life-size, a huge painting by Bruegel of the Tower of Babel. In the captions to its 100 illustrations it looks at the dark side of the Renaissance which included, among other things, the birth of multi-national capitalism. The volume on the White Rose resistance to the Nazis plays Schubert, Beethoven and Bach and displays German Expressionist art as it concisely considers the relationship between art and resistance in Nazi Germany. Another volume looks at photography and resistance in Bush's America.

My favorite of the many one-liners I've written for flyers is also the shortest "Monks is beautifully illustrated, quick and deep." The line written by a critic about the latest edition of Monks that I like best was written by Adam Engst for Tidbits, "A playful sub-current swirls through everything."

If you're interested in learning more about Monks here are some great links:

To share with Revolution users what I learned during the making of Monks I created, "Monks.rev" -- a stack to share techniques and scripts for making great multimedia. You can download this Monks code share project through the revOnline service or via this link:
http://revonline.runrev.com/resources/coding/monks-demo.zip

At the last Mac Expo Harris Fogel of PC Talk Radio interviewed me about the history of Monks. Listen to an archived mp3 of that spirited conversation:
http://www.rblevin.net/webcasts/PCT_04-05_Macworld_1.mp3

Don't forget that you can take a nostalgic trip back to "When Multimedia was Black & White":
http://smackerel.net/black_white.html

Download a free copy of Sophie, the ebook reader from the Monks CD that includes all ten of its ebooks. Sophie is a joint project of FourthWorld Media Corporaton and myself. I'd say a lot more about this exciting project but FourthWorld's Richard Gaskin is planning a separate article about this ebook reader and I'm finishing up a new free ebook and will have more to say about that soon as well.
http://fourthworld.com/products/sophie/download.html

And finally, my web site is profusely illustrated not only with screen shots from Monks and links to my online store, but with photo essays, music and more:
http://rivertext.com/monks.html

I'm grateful to a lot of folks in the Revolution online community who worked hard to make this final edition of Monks a reality. These include Richard Gaskin, Jeanne A. E. DeVoto, Tuviah Snyder, Jacqueline Landman Gay, and Sarah Reichelt. I also received some special help from Mark Waddingham and other members of Kevin Miller's team in Edinborough. I'd like to end by thanking all these folks and the many beta testers from the Revolution community as well.