"It has a lilting touch of death-like intoxication," said Prozac.
"It's treated us well."
The Mac Bong, or iBong, is made from a water-filled bong mounted
inside an old Mac SE 30. The bowl of the bong protrudes from the
front of the computer, just below the screen. The mouthpiece sticks
out the back.
"It looks like any other dingy Mac," said Prozac. "But it doesn't
draw as much suspicion if you do have to take it outside the house.
We haven't taken it to Macworld, but it has been to a couple of
computer swap meets. People like it. They laugh. It gets the usual,
'Whoa, dude, that's crazy' reaction. Everyone wants to try it."
The iBong delivers a killer hit, according to the pair. After
smoking the iBong one evening, Prozac wrote about the experience and
posted it online.
"My bong burnt bright," he wrote, "electrifying
fractals dancing in the raging embers, smoke curling like a halo
around my bowed and fatal head.... The restlessness of a
millennium's solitude soared through my rushing blood, the roar of
being alive skipping like a jumping spark through my brain."
The iBong was inspired by the MacQuarium, a famous modification
of Apple's old one-piece Macintosh computers that turns them into
fish tanks.
"We saw the MacQuarium and said, 'Let's put a bong inside one
instead,'" Agapornis said. "We were probably stoned."
The two have actually made three iBongs. The first was made in
1992 and attempted to incorporate both a fish tank and a bong within
the casing of the old computer.
"We were working on a way to make an aquarium with the bong
inside it so that the person taking the hit could watch the fish,"
Agapornis explained, "but the aquarium took up too much room."
They also found the stem was too long, which made it difficult to
take a hit; it required drawing in too much air.
The second model, which had a shorter stem, was too harsh. "It
was like a pickle-jar bong," said Agapornis. "It was pretty
painful."
The third attempt was just right. "It's not bad," Agapornis said.
"It's pretty easy hitting."
But after 10 years of perfecting the design, they are smoking
less and less pot; they've gone from chronic to occasional smokers.
"We're not going through four quarter bags in a weekend -– each –-
like we used to," said Agapornis. "We're not into a void like we
used to be 10 years ago."
Still, "the Mac bong is the best thing to have around when you're
listening to the first four Burzum albums," he added.
Burzum is a Norwegian black metal band.
There is a strong connection between Macs and pot. Both are
countercultures, in the loosest sense of the word, appealing to
people who are creative or artistic, people who, as a particular ad
campaign might say, "Think different."
"The entire personal computer revolution came out of the San
Francisco Bay area and was pioneered by pot smoking members of the
counterculture," said Steven Hager, editor-in-chief of High Times.
"Because these people tend to be highly creative and because Macs
are the choice of most art and video professionals, I guess that's
your story."
A couple of veteran journalists who covered the creation of the
Macintosh in the mid-1980s claim pot had a profound influence on the
design of the machine. That's a claim denied by others, including
Jef Raskin, the head of the Mac's design team.
"The Mac building was a very loose outfit," said one journalist,
who asked to remain anonymous. "The building was permeated with a
certain odor."
Another journalist -- the former editor of a famous Macintosh
magazine -- said the Mac's engineers and programmers were always
smoking weed.
"There were people out the back in the parking lot smoking pot
all the time," said the editor, who also asked to remain anonymous.
"The IBM PC was created by people who drank alcohol. The Mac was
created by people who smoked pot."
The editor noted that many in the Mac's original development team
were pretty young; the average age was about 25, he said.
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