Growing up cybernetic: So many computers

I have a smart phone, an android G-something that I got last year after losing my previous cheap pay-as-you-go Nokia whatever it was. This thing is pretty cool. I don’t use it as a phone more than once every few days, but I use it as a camera and computer almost constantly. They’re ubiquitos, these things, and the current generation of kids is growing up in a world where everyone above a certain income level is hand-in-pocket away from instant connection with the rest of the world.

It was different for me, growing up. My generation was the first for whom owning a desktop computer wasn’t a big deal.

I speak here from a position of first-world privilege, of course, even though we were poor. We got our first “real” computer, the family computer, in the early 90s. I think it was a 386 PC with a whopping 4 meg hard-drive. My mother kept it in her room, and we were not to touch it unsupervised, lest we “screw it up.”

Cyberdecks they ain’t

But before that, well before that, I owned a host of microcomputers. Technology had always fascinated me, particularly computers. Microcomputers were little more than a keyboard that hooked up to your television. As a pre-teen I would hit garage sales looking for them, buying them when they were cheap enough, and they often were. I think my first was a TSR-80, though I also remember having an Atari 800 and something called a Timex-Sinclair 5000.

None of them had hard-drives. Some of them had floppy disc drives built in, but these scavenged and salvaged machines seldom had much in the way of peripherals. For the most part I would program on them in BASIC, both little games of my own creation and long listed programs from library books and the box of computer magazines I had acquired somewhere. I’d make quick little arcade games and longer convoluted text adventures. It was fun, and if I had a floppy disc I might even save it.

The computer I remember the best was the Commodore 128. That’s 128. Twice as good as the 64, right? It, like the others I had, was a keyboard that plugged into the television. This one also had a tape drive, though. The tape drive looked just like a cassette tape player, and it would take five to thirty minutes to read the data back into the computer. I have vague memories of buying blank tapes to record my BASIC programs onto, and being thrilled when playing them back worked.

Eventually I found a disc drive for it, which opened up new avenues for me. I could buy commercial software products, the kind still sold in stores. Only two games stick out for me, The Legend of Blacksilver and Wasteland.

I cheated at Wasteland

I spent a lot of time playing Wasteland. It was a fun game. The C64 lacked a hard drive, so to play you’d need to save your progress on a set of floppies. Each floppy disk saved a different part of the game. The first floppy saved your guys’ stats, but the other four saved different parts of the game world.

I figured out a process by which I could “reset” the game-world-save floppies without resetting the “character stats” floppy, and thus replay parts of the game over and over with continually improving characters. The game was fun, but I think I got an even bigger thrill from this hack, from the feeling of having outsmarted the game’s designers.

I wasn’t a total nerd

If it sounds like I was just this huge computer nerd, yeah, I sort of was. But I did other things, too, kid stuff. I went out, I rode bikes, I went off into what passes for the “woods” in the suburbs and down to the lake. In the summer I stayed out until dark playing tag or whatever with the neighbor kids, and in the winter I’d slide around on the lake’s ice and build snow-forts.

But yeah, I was a pretty big nerd. It was easy to disconnect from the computers, though. I didn’t carry it around in my pocket. Even when we got the internet, it wasn’t something that was everywhere yet. It wasn’t part of everyday life, it was this weird “other” thing that we could play with.

For a few years, anyway.

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