October 03, 2002
It wasn't that long ago when the computer was unavailable for the masses. I don't mean "unavailable for purchase", but the necessity and, to a greater extent the interest, just wasn't there. I remember these days fondly, as you would be hard pressed to find an imbecile actually using a computer; if they wandered near one, they would proabably be banging the keyboard in frustration.
True enough, these were simpler days. Consumer computers hooked up to television sets, and rarely exceeded one tenth a megabyte of RAM. My parents, of course, were the ones responsible for introducing me to the computer, in the form of a Commodore 64. Eventually developing a penchant for the system's interpreted BASIC, I wrote an endless supply of disk utility programs, usually limited to formatting and copying. They had the simplest of functionality, but my skill at creating character graphics to dazzle my programs was unmatched. Nobody in my house stalled when needing a file utility. Simply grab the black Verbatim 5.25" floppy with the red and white label marked "Christopher's Disk" in my dad's handwriting, and you'd have yourself any copy and format utility you'd want. And they'd have the slickest character animations outside of SEQ files.
Of course, we weren't limited to these basic uses. We got ourselves a modem and racked up the bills on Quantum Link! This, of course, was the predecessor to America Online, but it wasn't nearly as dumbed down as it is today.
After endless hours online, chatting, playing games, spending our Q-Pons on Q-Link T-Shirts and such, we moved to Florida where, sadly, there was no local Q-Link access number. Our need to keep phone lines busy was not being met, so my brother and I hunted for local BBSes. The two that we found (Storm Rider Estate, Igor's Lab) became our regular hangouts, eventually becoming friends with the SysOp of the former. In what must have been a complete brain malfunction, I deemed it necessary to label myself with, in retrospect, what was the lamest name I could possibly think of. Still under the influence of this synapse misfire, I logged on these boards and became known as 'Skateboard Demon'. Shut the hell up. I know it's stupid. Anyway, as utterly riduculously named as I was, I did have a skill with character graphics, which I used to create logon screens for The Estate. BBS usage became common for my brother and I, so after our parents blessed us with our own phone line, we bought up every 1541 and 1571 we could afford and started our own. A single line C64 BBS with 5 drives.
God I liked F8.
Of course, I started this novel with the point of explaining how the computer was limited to people who knew how to use it. If someone wanted a computer, they were forced to learn the commands to get it to do what they want. There was no point and click on a C64 (unless you count GEOS), so you'd have to get by on commands. I would go to school and hack programs on the TRS-80s while kids would watch me, and laugh when I used the "print" function because, as they put it, "There's no printer attached!" I got a few of them believing that I could hold up a piece of paper to the screen, and it would transfer over to the paper from there.
Now I'm being punished for those jokes, for these are the people that are calling me for technical support. That Commodore holds a special place in my heart, but with its glory came a curse. If you know the intricacies of a computer, you become the person to whom all of the ignorant masses of the world turn when their computer doesn't do exactly what they want. Computers are in 8 out of 10 homes, and 6 of those 8 have only the faintest idea of what they're doing. They don't realize that if you don't know what's going on, and you refuse to learn, you shouldn't have bought a computer in the first place.
Strange things you realize when you start getting nostalgic.
(07:46)
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