A Pilgrim’s Digression

[Ed. Note: this is the first in a multi-part series on my experience with technology from 1990 to 2006, or "how I learned to stop worrying and love the Mac." Other parts of this story will be published in forthcoming days, hopefully consecutively if I find time to write them.)

It still seems odd to me to think of the nineteen-nineties in a historical sense, but in large part the previous decade has already retreated into the dim past for most of us. Looking at old television news footage from 1991, the clothing styles already seem antique, the hairstyles too long and outmoded.

Even though barely fifteen years have passed since the beginning of that decade, it already seems aeons ago in large part due to the technological changes that have swept us into a future we could hardly have imagined back then. The Internet existed in 1991, but who knew anything about it, outside a few universities? People were still carrying around a Sony Walkman, rather than an iPod; but Apple computer was still king of the home computer market. Windows was still in its birth pangs; Windows 3.1 would not appear until 1992.

Some of us who used Windows 3.1 might say that Microsoft’s baby was still-born, or at least badly deformed. But that’s another blog post.

I’ve recounted this story several times before for friends: the first computer class I took was in 1990, when I was a Junior in High School. The class was in BASIC and was taught on clunky-looking, ugly IBM PCs. No GUI. No mouse. No hard drive. Just a big, ugly beige box with two 5 1/4″ disk drives, a green-tinted display, and a keyboard. Our class project, on which we spent the vast majority of the final month or so of class, was to code a program that would draw a bunny rabbit on the screen in ones and zeros.

At the time, I remember thinking, “This is the most boring, useless class I have ever taken in my life. I will never have any use for computers.”

At home, we did not have a computer, and I saw little need of begging my parents for one. My High School had no Macs, so I hadn’t yet been enlightened as to what a computer could really do. I typed my school papers on a manual typewriter. Everything else, from short stories to my diary, I handwrote. I had a callous on the middle finger of my right hand from writing, a callous that has now largely worn off, after years of typing. I can barely write a check these days, the muscles in my hand are so weak from lack of practice.

In those days, I read books, instead of blogs. When my parents got up in the morning, they watched The Today Show while getting ready for work and drinking their coffee, rather than checking email or reading the front page articles on the Washington Post website. I watched Today as well, before leaving to catch the school bus; yet even then I thought it ridiculous that a so-called “news” program devoted 3 minutes to the news at the top of the hour, and twenty minutes to interviews and top stories in the first half hour, while devoting the next two and a half hours to topics such as how to lose that winter fat so you can fit in your bikini when summer gets here.

Iraq has invaded Kuwait? Oh well, we’ve still got to do that segment on the must-have gifts to buy your kid for Christmas.

In Fall of 1991, I started college, and not much changed. For my schoolwork, my parents bought me a Brother word processor at Wal-Mart, the kind that took a 3 1/4″ diskette so you could save your work. It took about thirty seconds for it to write a word processing file to disk. It also formatted the disk so that only a Brother word processor can read it. This meant nothing to me at the time, but now that I am, ironically, in Digital Archiving and Preservation as my field of work, I know that incompatible formatting is a huge problem for the preservation of data over the long-term.

About 1999, I found one of my old Brother diskettes, and I also discovered that it was unreadable by any modern computer, PC or Macintosh. A friend said he had one of the old Brother word processors in his closet, so I borrowed it and used it to print out the old school papers and short stories that were on the disk. Then the ribbon ran out (yes, it used a ribbon like a typewriter). There are still documents on that disk that will probably never see the light of day again because in 1999, there were no stores remaining that sold ribbons for an eight year-old Brother word processor.

In 1991, however, I did not in my wildest dreams believe I would one day be working in the technology field. There was simply no chance of that. I was an English major in college. I spent my days reading the Romantic poets and fantasizing about writing great works of literature. I still wrote first drafts of every school paper or short story in longhand, typing them up only after I had made a clean copy in pen. In fact, the few times I tried to begin a piece of writing while sitting in front of the typewriter or word processor, I found it difficult to get started, and I usually gave up after awhile and picked up a pen or pencil. I felt there was some connection between me and the words when I took up a pen and pressed my face down against the white, blue-lined school paper. That connection was broken when I sat tapping at a keyboard.

I imagined myself the curmudgeonly writer who refuses to update his technique to suit modern technological advances. Arthur Miller clacking away on his portable Royal. Stephen King writing his novels with a sharpened, Black Warrior number two pencil and a stack of marbled school notebooks.

It wasn’t that I was a Luddite, necessarily–after all, I had been playing video games since my Dad brought home an Atari 2600 one evening in 1981 or ‘82. I still remember that evening perfectly, though the date is hazy. After we hooked up the console, my Dad and I sat in the floor in front of the TV and played Combat and Activision Boxing the rest of the evening while my Mom read a book.

Looking back on that moment, I see it as the beginning of a transition from one pre-technological era of my life to another technology-dependent era. Indeed it’s interesting to note how my relationship with the Atari shaped my relationship with technology today. I came to look on technology solely in terms of how it could entertain me, and much later, how it could enhance my creativity. Also, eventually I grew bored with the two Atari games my Dad originally bought for the system, and so I begged for other games. River Raid and Pitfall were my two favorites. Immediately, there was this need established to stay current, to buy the latest and greatest, and eventually to “upgrade” the system (a word I don’t think we knew, or at least didn’t use at that time).

No matter how you look at it, the invention of the Atari was revolutionary, at least as much so as the Apple II. For many of us, the Atari was the first simple computer we owned in our homes. No one in my parents’ income bracket could have afforded an Apple, or even a Tandy or IBM home computer.

The Atari, on the other hand, was expensive, but still affordable. My parents put one on layaway at a local department store and paid on it for at least two months before my Dad brought it home. Costing around $200.00, it was not something my parents could afford to go out and buy outright in those days, but for whatever reason they bought one. And several years later, my parents used layaway again to buy me a Nintendo Entertainment System, when those replaced Atari on the video game console market.

However, my attitude towards computers did not really change until near the end of my undergraduate years, about 1994-1995. It is perhaps fitting that a video game had something to do with that alteration in perspective.