18 July, 1996
I'm in the mountains in Bemidji, Minnesota, in a cabin on a lake. I've been able to scrounge up a 300 baud connection to compuserve on this 4MB Dell 386. Monochrome, external modem, seven-inch screen. I'm writing this in XyWrite 3.5 for DOS and the contrast is way off and I can barely find the cursor. I have no way to test this page before posting it, and that's fine.
A few days ago Max bought a 30 year old Smith-Corona manual typewriter. "This is the future, man" he said. I know what he means. David tells me that in parts of Africa, some volunteer corps are distributing radios with little cranks on the sides. A couple of cranks gives people an hour of radio. Batteries are almost impossible to find. If someone could put a crank on this laptop, I'd give it a dozen cranks for a half-hour of juice and throw away the batteries gladly. Is this suggestion so heretical? If so, why?
I bought a fried 386 from Chris the other day. I'm going to replace the motherboard and make a dedicated Linux box out of it. That oughtta satisfy this command-line lust.
None of the people I'm staying with here have ever used email. But I spent the day playing with three-year-olds and paddling around in a plastic kayak. It was good. This thought keeps running through me: what if I get bored this week? I'm afraid of being bored,and I'm afraid of my fear of being bored. I desperately want for there to remain a still spot in me, a spot that will be content kicking it around a lake with some books and some meandering small talk. I wonder about how the past few years of obsessive computing has changed me, perhaps permanently.
The rec room in the lodge here has an original Space Invaders game, just like the one that was in the 7-11 on the way home from school all those years ago. That game started it all, as far as I'm concerned. Pong was just, like, proof-of-concept. But Space Invaders was the first really addictive game. Hearing those sounds again after all this time made me feel cozy, and in love with history. Am I stuck in the past, like a curmudgeonly old grandfather who refuses to admit that good records have been made in the past 30 years? I'd still rather play Space Invaders than any of those new-fangled games. Guess I'm just an old crank.
Computing without bells and whistles is like returning to air-cooled Volkswagens. Simple and true, its power is comprehensible, manageable. I feel like I can stick both arms down into the engine compartment and still have room to flex my elbows. Cars and computers aren't like that anymore. There are very few things you can fix on a Lexus or even a Toyota by yourself without special diagnostic tools and a college degree. That makes me a little sad, even though the truth is I don't have the time or patience to fix Volkswagens anymore.
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