Man, Bytes, Dog

By James Gorman

Many people have asked me about the Cairn Terrier. How about memory, they want to know. Is it IBM-compatible? Why didn't I get the IBM itself, or a Kaypro, Compaq, or Macintosh? I think the best way to answer these questions is to look at the Macintosh and the Cairn head on. I almost did buy the Macintosh. It has terrific graphics, good word-processing capabilities, and the mouse. But in the end I decided on the Cairn, and I think I made the right decision.

Let's start out with the basics:

Macintosh:

Weight (without printer): 20lbs
Memory (RAM): 128 K
Price (with printer): $3,090

Cairn Terrier:

Weight (without printer): l4lbs
Memory (RAM): Some
Price (without printer): $250

Just on the basis of price and weight, the choice is obvious. Another plus is that the Cairn Terrier comes in one unit. No printer is necessary, or useful. And - this was a big attraction to me - there is no user's manual. Here are some of the other qualities I found put the Cairn way out ahead of the Macintosh:

• PORTABILITY:
  To give you a better idea of size, Toto in "The Wizard of Oz" was a Cairn Terrier. So you can see that if the young Judy Garland wss able to carry Toto around in that little picnic basket, you will have no trouble at all moving your Cairn from place to place. For short trips it will move under its own power. The Macintosh will not.
• RELIABILITY:
  In five to ten years, I am sure, the Macintosh will be superseded by a new model, like the Delicious or the Granny Smith. The Cairn Terrier, on the other hand, has held its share of the market with only minor modifications for hundreds of years. In the short term, Cairns seldom need servicing, apart from shots and the odd worming, and most function without interruption during electrical storms.
• COMPATIBILITY:
  Cairn Terriers get along with everyone. And for communications with any other dog, of any breed, within a radius of three miles, no additional hardware is necessary. All dogs share a common operating system.
• SOFTWARE:
  The Cairn will run three standard programs, SIT, COME and NO, and whatever else you create. It is true that, being microcanine, the Cairn is limited here, but it does load the programs instantaneously. No disk drives. No tapes.

Admittedly, these are peripheral advantages. The real comparison has to be on the basis of capabilities. What can the Macintosh and the Cairn do? Let's start on the Macintosh's turf- income-tax preparation, recipe storage, graphics, and astrophysics problems:

At first glance it looks bad for the Cairn. But it's important to look beneath the surface with this kind of chart. If you yourself are leaning toward the Macintosh, ask yourself these questions: Do you want to do your own income taxes? Do you want to type all your recipes into a computer? In your graph, what would you put on the x axis? The y axis? Do you have any astrophysics problems you want solved?

Then consider the Cairn's specialities: playing fetch and tug-of-war, licking your face, and chasing foxes out of rock cairns (eponymously). Note that no software is necessary. All these functions are part of the operating system:

Another point to keep in mind is that computers, even the Macintosh, only do what you tell them to do. Cairns perform their functions all on their own. Here are some of the additional capabilities that I discovered once I got the Cairn home and housebroken:

• WORD PROCESSING: Remarkably the Cairn seems to understand every word I say. He has a nice way of pricking up his ears at words like "out" or "ball". He also has highly tuned voice-recognition.
• EDUCATION: The Cairn provides children with hands-on experience at an early age, contributing to social interaction, crawling ability, and language skills. At age one, my daughter could say "Sit", "Come" and "No".
• CLEANING: This function was a pleasant surprise. But of course cleaning up around the cave is one of the reasons dogs were developed in the first place. Users with young (below age two) children will still find this function useful. The Cairn Terrier cleans the floor, spoons, bib and baby, and has an unerring ability to distinguish strained peas from ears, nose and fingers.
• PSYCHOTHERAPY: Here the Cairn really shines. And remember, therapy is something that computers have tried. There is a program that makes the computer ask you questions when you tell it your problems. You say, "I'm afraid of foxes". The computer says, "You're afraid of foxes?"
  The Cairn won't give you that kind of echo. Like Freudian analysts, Cairns are mercifully silent; unlike Freudians, they are infinitely sympathetic. I've found that the Cairn will share, in a non-judgemental fashion, disappointments, joys and frustrations.
• And you don't have to know BASIC.

From the book "Questioning Technology", edited by John Zerzan and Alice Carnes.
New Society Publishers, Philadelphia PA. ISBN: 0-86571-205-0.

for inquiries or permission to reprint, please contact James Gorman at jgorma@nytimes.com.

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