After ninth grade, a friend of mine, named Scott, left town (almost as soon as he arrived - he showed up in the middle of my eighth grade year). He moved back to Illinois with his family. I think the family came to Texas with his step-dad for work, but then his mother & step-dad split, & so, back home it was! He was the first friend I ever made without my little brother - my little brother & I were pretty inseparable before then - & he was the first friend I made who had no interest in being friends with my little brother, which of course annoyed my little brother no end.
His leaving broke my heart. The last phone call we had, we spoke very honestly about our lives. We shared interests like comic books & Dungeons & Dragons, but we never really talked about our past. Are we allowed to rate phone calls? That one was in my top ten.
In those days, phone calls were hella expensive & something about writing letters seemed... Well, we must've written a few letters. I remember I would send him comic books, although my mother told me it was too expensive after a while. Anyway, at some point, someone told me - this would've been in 1984 - about something called bulletin boards. For these you needed a computer. & of course a modem. Imagine! Scott logged in, posted a message, or sent a private message, which I could get instantaneously. It was beyond imagining.
But. My family was very poor, we could no more have afforded a computer than a mortgage - we were lucky we lived in apartments that weren't hovels. No one really explained that to me, as no one really explained to me the value of money or the way money worked in the world, & so I harbored a great resentment about it. Friends at school were able to use computers to talk to faraway buddies, & also they had word processors instead of crappy old typewriters. Why couldn't I?
This isn't really about Scott, with whom I stay a little acquainted on Facebook these days. (The damage of years apart means, alas, we'll never be friends like we were thirty-five years ago.) It's about those computers.
Some ten years later, I worked in a language lab which played cassette tapes (recently upgraded from reel-to-reel tapes) for students studying this or that foreign tongue. One person in the department - perhaps its only visionary - a fellow named Eric - somehow convinced the powers-that-be to turn the lab into (partially, at first) a computer lab. It was equipped with Mac Quandras, & being in charage of the lab, I got one, too. While I had previously used an old Mac SE to write papers on, & probably to play Solitaire on, I had never been connected to what I was told was called the internet. It was late 1994. Suddenly I was sending email, surfing the very limited web, & discovering Usenet.
It's very hard to believe it's over twenty years later, & the computer has been for almost all this time my favorite machine. At one point I might've said it was the turntable. But I spin tunes from my computer every day. Maybe I might've said it was a car, but I travel farther & faster with little complication by pointing my browser someplace & clicking. In 1994, I started deejaying, so maybe for a time the radio was my favorite machine. But maybe more people listen online to any radio I do than capturing waves with a receiver.
Which is not to say, of course, that the computer is perfect. But if I am honest with myself, I have to say that it's my favorite machine. Except the living machines I have in my house with me. But I suspect all this time we have been discussing human-made machines exclusively. Weren't we?
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