Last week I spoke of my the crappy Macintosh SE on my desk. It's slow, it's stained and it's ugly. And it has been replaced.

I've replaced it with a contraption that at heart is a Mac, but looks more like a toaster that exploded. After finding the motherboard for a Mac lying about, I stuffed its lifeless silicon body into an AT&T computer box, this making it a totally unauthorized Apple Macintosh clone. And at $6.99 to build, the price was rock-bottom right.

With a bit of tweaking, it now serves Web and some other things, and is called Abacab. I called it that mostly because I was able to hijack that domain name from Trinity, as they weren't using it anymore.

Now I have a dilemma. I have added one more computer to the fabric of the Internet. One more purring, whizzing, logging machine serving its wares to the world expediently. But what should it serve? What reason has it to exist?

That brings me back to a larger question. With millions of people getting America Online and Compuserve disks with their favoriate computer magazine, we are now flooded with these millions of users who joined for one reason -- to be online. Just to be there. Never mind that it costs $10 per month and some more if you go over your time limit. You're online.

I think this is a very important point in Internet lore. People are now joing just to say that they can be here. Just to say they have an E-Mail account. In thinking of the 40-some-odd million on the Internet, I think we have to understand that many millions are there just there for the pretty icons. We have to give them a reason to stay. E-Mail is simply not enough.

My point, you ask? I believe there should be more sites like the Journal, serving magazines, and not just corporate information. Some sites simply point you to a phone number -- what use is that? I am calling for an expansion of creativity and depth in the Internet, one which I hope the new year will bring.

© Trincoll Journal, 1995.