This country has always been under the unhealthy sway of terminal bipolarism: E.g., Democrats and Republicans, God and Satan, night and day, right and wrong... So is it any wonder that the same predilection gave us a two-party computer industry defined by the ubiquitous Macintosh and soulless PC? No. But what choice does the consumer have? All third-party candidates (Amiga, NeXT, etc.--although I'm still crossing my fingers for the success of the BeBox) have thus far burned out too early to make much of a difference to mainstream computing. Terminal bipolarism wins again.

Or does it? A band of determined computer scientists from Albuquerque have been slaving away on a project called Executor, and now--about 10 years after its inception--it has finally hit the market in shinkwrapped form. It's an emulator (i.e., a program that pretends it is something it's not) and in a subversive blow against the two-party system, it will run Mac software on your PC.

This is geek software, however--highly experimental and constantly improving. The countless versions prior to 2.0 were released in a stream of ever-better beta copies on the Internet for feedback and debugging discussions, but now ARDI considers the product stable enough to put on CD-ROM. You will not be able to run every damn Mac app on your PC if you run out and buy Executor, but the reasonable number of applications and utilities that do run--and near flawlessly--is astonishing: Filemaker Pro 3, Compact Pro 1.50, Hypercard 2.3 (although apparently I have better luck with Hypercard than most folks) and quite a few others. Probably the most day-to-day useful function of Executor is its ability to read and write Mac disks--including Mac-formatted Iomega Zip disks, a task which to the best of my knowledge is not possible with any other PC utility. [Well, actually, some other clever bunch of people has indeed accomplished this recently... don't know the name of the product offhand, sorry. --Ed.] With a sufficiently speedy processor (66Mhz 486 at a minimum, but a CPU twice that fast will provide truly zippy performance), it's even possible to run Adobe Photoshop 3.0 (to a degree) and the shoot-em-up asteroids game Maelstrom (with sound). If you need to step across platforms now and then, Executor is a wildly useful addition to your software arsenal. --K.S.

System requirements: 386 or better, VGA, 7 Mb disk space, a 3.5" 1.44 Mb floppy drive, 4 Mb RAM. (SCSI Controller needed only to access external Mac devices.) Price: US$249.

(This review appeared, in a slightly different form, in the 1996 "tech issue" of the Weekly Alibi.)