Days of technology past

This is a younger, hairier, skinnier me back in East Lansing, Michigan (1984) with our first computer, a state of the art KayPro 4. It had dual 5.25-inch floppy drives (no hardrive, so lots of juggling of floppy disks), a 2.5 MHz Z80 processor, all of 64 kB of RAM, a CP/M 2.2 operating system (lots of obscure commands to type in), and a 9-inch 80-column green monochrome screen. It measured 18 x 18 x 15 1/2 inches, and weighed 26 pounds. All of which is to say, extremely primitive by modern standards. It was popularly known as "Darth Vader's Lunch Box" because of the square-cornered, black metal case. At almost 30 pounds, it was luggable, rather than portable. But I was so enamored of it that I duly lugged it back and forth from home to office every day.

For those of us who had grown up with manual Smith-Corona portable typewriters (and later on, IBM Selectric electric typewriters) as the state of the art, this was really exciting. I had spent part of my first year at Michigan State with no computer at all, which seemed a blast into the past. Working for the U.S. Information Service's Office of Research, 1979-1983, I had become accustomed to using a dedicated word processor system called Word Stream, which was again quite an advance on typewriters. I had written my dissertation on it, four hundred pages on 9 or 10 very large floppy disks. Heck, even word processing that I had done in 1974 on an IBM 360 mainframe was easier than using a typewriter again.

Thinking back, word processing clicked with the way I think. I tend to dump in ideas into the memory of a computer in a creative burst, then more slowly expand and edit them into something that flows better. I never had the reporter's knack of composing an article in my head and then delivering it straight into the typewriter or dictating it to someone.

There was also a heady excitement about the early personal computers. I had been following the idea for years in various magazines, including the Whole Earth Review, which had switched its focus from moving back to the commune to moving into the future with the liberating potential of personal computers. I had friends who had lived on communes. My favorite teacher from high school, Lew Watson, had dropped out of teaching, built himself a house out of lava rock on a hill way above Boise, and was earning a minimal sort of living by writing for Mother Earth News. All that was pretty interesting, but when Stewart Brand of Whole Earth took off toward the liberating potential computers in the 1970s, I was one of many eager followers.

I had begun to realize that as a new professor, writing was the center of my career and life. I needed to write like crazy and publish or perish. This tool seemed heaven sent.

It was also fun to play on. My wife Sandy got hooked on Adventure, one of the original text games that came over to PCs from mainframes. (She had already played it on a WANG word processor at an old job in D.C., and was eager to play it again without stealing company time to do it.) (To be honest, everyone in our apartment who could even minimally read -- Sandy, me and our daughter Julia -- got hooked on Adventure. We mapped out Colossal Cave. We made jokes about mazes of twisty little passages all the same. We truly geeked out.)

When I realize that most of my adult life has been spent in close proximity to these machines, and when I think about how they have affected how I think and work, it makes me very curious about the experience of those who have remained isolated from or even unaware of them. This is one of the reasons I work on digital inclusion, making computers, Internet, etc. more accessible. I want to share tools that I like, but I also want to understand how people come to them with very different attitudes and interests. I have to put all geekery aside and become an anthropologist on planet Web 0.0, which is fascinating, but also makes me value the tools even more.