Rabbit is rich

At a thrift store I found a CD-ROM called The Playboy Interview: The First Three Decades. I was delighted. I remember wanting this when it came out, in 1994, and last week for $2.99 it was mine. I suspect the clerk thought I was a perv, since the case prominently has the Playboy name and bunny logo on the front. She probably wouldn't have believed me if I told her I really wanted to read it for the articles, especially the interviews with Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Paul Sartre; whatever your feelings about pictures of naked ladies, Playboy has long been a superbly written magazine, and the interview is one of its best features.

I must say, this is software of its time. A decade ago, multimedia was the buzzword in computer circles, and before the Internet the CD-ROM was how we were going to get oodles of data into our homes. But we weren't going to get much of that data onto our computer screens: the Playboy CD-ROM is optimized for a screen resolution of 640 by 480, and it refuses to start at all at resolutions higher than 800 by 600. (To read the interviews, I have been copying them into Word.) There's also something sad about the interface, which is clunky, with giant buttons. The influence of the Web has done a great deal to clean up the design of software interfaces, and I applaud that.

The Playboy disc is quite a collection! There are 352 interviews, from 1962 to 1992. Times have changed: one learns from the disc that in the 1960s the magazine covered lots more people with intellectual heft--writers, film directors and so forth--than in the 1980s and later. Early subjects include Bertrand Russell and Albert Schweitzer, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, but by the 1980s, Tom Cruise was more the norm (though I'm also interested to dig into 1980s chats with Daniel Ortega, Garry Kasparov and Prince Sihanouk).

As you might have guessed from my blog, the early history of the personal computer business has been fascinating me of late, and the first interview I read was a 1985 talk with Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple. He was 29 then, and he still spoke of microcomputers with the near-mystical optimism that typified the industry in its early years:

In education, computers are the first thing to come along since books that will sit there and interact with you endlessly, without judgment. Socratic education isn't available anymore, and computers have the potential to be a real breakthrough in the educational process when used in conjunction with enlightened teachers.

I must say, I'm still waiting for the breakthrough. I came of age on a Commodore 64, and the most educational thing I recall doing on it was playing Pitfall II.