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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A man whose suspenders curve around his belly
RIP Kenny
He helped friends wire their electric meters to run backward, he hooked his telephone up to his stereo so he could dial a song, and he built sound consoles that were mythic in the music industry.
Love the Dial-a-Song
At the time, all telephones had dial tones, and most were the size of an adult shoe.
The band had begun as “Hookworm,” but they found out there was already a band named that in Dayton, Ohio. After a two-second meeting the New York Hookworm added “68” to their name, the way one does to a password to make it stronger. The “68” was to suggest the French Situationists, not the sex act minus 1.
Naming is hard
Claire’s favorite song: “You Will End Up Dying of Comfort.”
The Mac Plus was programmed to be a “now serving” machine and mounted above like a convenience store mirror. A billiard ball was hung on a string next to it, and was pulled to advance the serving numbers.
How satisfying
Black iron gates opened to a perspective drawing of green lawns and white columns.
Love this imagery
The memories are hard to hear. Lyuben speaks thirteen languages—Bulgarian, Russian, French, but he doesn’t care to count English in that number. “Bulgarian every word has just one meaning. One letter, one sound,” Lyuben will explain, his small arsenal of English reserved solely for its resistance.
No other shop in New York does data recovery. The service barely exists. There are experts in California that charge fifteen hundred dollars a drive. They operate from a clean room with a staff that wears bunny suits and enters through air locks.
“Intel Inside” vibes
Claire’s fingers stretch across a customer’s keyboard in Tekserve’s gang sign. She presses down command-option-P-R and waits until the machine’s start-up sound repeats three times. The P-ram is zapped. Which is code for resetting the parameter RAM, the part of the computer that stores its core character—the sounds it makes, its preferences, its conception of time, its habits good and bad.
Key command contortion gang sign
The LaserWriter was the death of dot matrix and the birth of desktop publishing. It cost $6,995 and was worth every cent.
The job was designing inventory systems for a consortium of Persian rug and wedding gown dealers. Everybody in the office was three times Yee’s age and, for whatever reason, they all ate kidney beans for lunch. So it was just people smoking and farting all day and arguing about rug and lace prices. Yee lasted just shy of a week.
Susan Sontag said, ‘Courage is as contagious as fear.’”
The printer looms beside them. It is wider than Claire and, thanks to the cart and sheet feed, taller, too. Nathan takes his blazer off, rolls up his crisp white sleeves, and slaps his hands together like he is about to dig a grave.
Inkjets are made to be thrown out, save for the Apple StyleWriter, which is no longer manufactured.
Forest Hills is famous for begetting the punk band the Ramones, with their short tight songs. It also bore the makers of ZipIt and StuffIt, early file compression software for the Mac.
