How I Got Into Computers
------------------------

Having just read stinkh0rn's "Linux Life"[1], I was inspired
to write something similar. But the concept morphed into
something else while I was writing it, so I never actually
got to the Linux part.  Here then is the story of how I got
into computers.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s there were multiple
cultural narratives about computers:

a. that they were giant bureaucratic tabulating machines
   reducing us all to numbers so an unaccountable state and
   faceless corporations could control our lives

b. that they would in time become an unaccountable power
   unto themselves, evolving into rogue AIs, like HAL

c. that they were tools of personal liberation that would
   empower us to do amazing things

That last one was less prevalent in my cultural backwater,
arising as it did out of the counterculture and only
gathering mainstream momentum toward the end of the 70s with
the advent of personal computers. Narrative b made for good
science fiction, but I could hardly take it seriously.
Consequently, I saw computers mostly through the lens of
narrative a, as things to be viewed with suspicion and
avoided as much as possible. 

And for most of the 80s I did a pretty good job of avoiding
computers. (Later on, I had somewhat mixed feelings about
that. On the one hand, I belatedly came to realize the
development of personal computing in the 80s was wild and
exciting and I was sorry to have missed out.  On the other
hand, the 1980s were probably the last decade in which you
could be a normal middle class Canadian and not own a
computer.  Given how much of my life has since been spent
staring at a monitor, perhaps it is well that I got to spend
at least the first decade of adulthood in analog mode.)

Not that it was possible to avoid computers entirely, even
back then. I think the first time I used one in any serious
way was in the mid-80s, at my summer job working as a
shipper/receiver in a warehouse.  I worked there all through
my undergrad years.  One summer I arrived to find our
paper-based record-keeping system had been computerized and
there was now an amber screen terminal on my desk. At the
time it seemed to me, fancifully, like the warehouse had
suddenly grown a nervous system, and I was one of its
sensory organs, as I entered data in the 'goods received'
box.

And computers were big at my next job too, as a library
assistant working at the university I had just graduated
from.  In those days the books all had punchcards in little
pockets glued to the inside back cover, and you checked out
the book by running a punch card through a desktop card
reader.  I honed my skills eventually to the point where I
could check out a big stack of books in mere seconds,
slamming cards through the reader "with the tight grace of a
kid slamming change into an arcade game, sure of winning and
ready to pull down a string of free games," as William
Gibson might have written, if Bobby Quine had worked in a
library.

The Library too gave me my first experience of the 'net,
when I realized I could look up books in the collection of
another university library the next province over. Sorcery.

That would have been sometime in the very early 90s. I was
back in school by then. Around the same time, for several
months I had a PC in the apartment, an older model I had
borrowed from my then-girlfriend's parents for the purpose
of writing my graduating thesis.  That was the first time I
had a computer in my home, and my first experience of 5.25"
floppy disks and the miracle of modern word processing
(WordPerfect 4.1, if I recall correctly). No modem; my life
online wouldn't begin for a couple of years yet.

Things got serious when I went back to grad school, this
time for a Library degree. Not having a computer of my own,
I spent a lot of time in the departmental computer lab
(Windows 3.1, MS Word) or when that was full, as it often
was, in the central computing facility, where there was
usually space in an older lab still running a green screen
text interface and Wordperfect 5.1. I got my first email
account, which I recall had 'unixg' as part of the hostname.
Gopher was hanging on but rapidly being supplanted by the
WWW which even then it was clear would change everything.
The Library lab was running Mosaic when I first got there,
but after I returned from Christmas break it had been
replaced by Netscape 1.0.

Eventually I got tired of fighting for space in the labs and
in second year decided it was time to get my own computer.
I didn't have much money so was somewhat constrained in my
selection, settling for a used Panasonic 386 laptop with an
orange plasma screen and a dead battery, running DOS 5.0.
Purchased from a local refurbisher just down the block
called "PC Galore"; they are still in business even today,
30 years later.

That got me through the end of library school. It was good
for writing papers and checking email (in Pine, of course)
but not so great for web work, which had seriously begun to
interest me, personally and professionally.  That became
problematic once I lost access to the lab computers, so it
was back to PC Galore for a desktop system capable of
running a graphical web browser, complete with colour 14"
VGA monitor.  I still remember sitting at my kitchen table
(my only table),launching Netscape for the first time. I had
a powerful sense that the world was truly shifting, that
here was indisputable confirmation that soon the web would
be everywhere. Though there was no way then to understand
what "everywhere" would come to mean.

The old countercultural narrative about computers as tools
of liberation and empowerment was ascendant in the mid-90s,
and was to remain so for the next 15 years or thereabout.
Since then we've seen the resurgence of the older
narratives, a & b, mutating into ever more virulent forms.
Perhaps the cultural pendulum will swing back again one day;
we shall see.

Here ends the story of how I got into computers. In closing,
it occurs to me that this particular literary genre (in
German, "Computerbildungsflugschrift"[2]) having been born
in a moment of technology transition, must eventually die
out, as all future such accountings are inevitably reduced
to "I think someone handed me an iPad when I was 6 months
old."  My son, for example, will never write such an account
as this, although perhaps one day he will write its
antithesis, "How I Got Out Of Computers."  One can only
hope.

Save yourself lad!  It's too late for me.



References, Notes
-----------------

1. gopher://gopher.club/1/users/stinkh0rn/

2. OK, I just made that up

Sun Nov 17 14:48:53 PST 2024