I was both too old and too young to ride the first
wave of personal computing.
Too old, in that I was well past the early stages
of adolescence when home computers hit the stores,
so computer games did not hold quite the
fascination for me as they would had I discovered
them earlier. Nor was my peer group much
interested. And as for my parents, both
Depression babies, I'm quite sure the thought of
buying a computer in the late 70s or early 80s
never crossed their minds.
Too young, in that I was not yet even remotely
gainfully employed and settled down into a middle
class lifestyle, with the disposable income that
would enable me to afford something so costly of
such seemingly limited utility, and the space to
house a beast as cumbersome as computers generally
were back then.
In other words, I was neither an early Boomer, nor
the child of early Boomers, but rather somewhere
in between.
Still, that's not the whole story. Ultimately,
it's just that I wasn't (yet) interested in
computers. While it's true my high school peer
group had no use for computers, I did from time to
time hang out with members of the local science
fiction club, and many of them (being a bit older
than me, some even with jobs) were quite into
personal computing, so I did have some exposure.
And I recall at one point during my gap year
between high school and college, being offered a
job tending the computer room for a local company.
I have no idea what that would have involved -
changing tape reels? Gathering up fanfold
printouts and routing them to their destination
via internal mail? I turned it down, for reasons
that made sense at the time, but I've sometimes
wondered what might have been if I'd accepted:
would I have caught the bug that much earlier?
Would I have started my career in computing a
decade or more before I actually did? I'll never
know.
The foregoing autobiographical maunderings were
prompted by a book I read over the weekend, "Extra
Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace" by David
Bennahum. Written in 1998, it belongs to a genre
of books that attempted to explain computing
culture to a public that had suddenly become aware
of it and wasn't quite sure what to think. I
picked it up because I was hoping it would give me
an idea of what I'd missed out on, by not being
born a few years later than I was. What would it
have been like, to grow up obsessed with the first
generation of home computers?
As it turned out, "Extra Life" answers a slightly
modified version of that question: "What would it
have been like, to grow up obsessed with the first
generation of home computers, and also attend a
Ivy-League prep school in Brooklyn?"
The first part of the book covers the expected
material, how a timely gift of an Atari computer
diverted the author away from unsavoury teenage
activities like drugs, truancy, and petty crime
(shoplifting), to a world of programming,
videogames, BBS's, and petty crime (software
piracy).
But the second part veers away from the expected
narrative when the author is enrolled in a school
called Horace Mann, that is well-resourced enough
to have its own computer classroom, with a PDP-11
running RSTS/E, of all things. Thus the author is
fortunate enough to experience not only the early
days of personal computing, but also the latter
days of time-share computing, that would typically
have only been available to university students
back then. Bennahum's description of his
experience in his high school computer lab has
curious echoes of accounts of other, better known
time share computing facilities, such as Stephen
Levy's description of the MIT AI lab. The events
at Horace Mann aren't quite of the same historical
signficance, but the interpersonal dynamics and
the lab's rise and fall are curiously similar.
Despite not being quite what I expected, "Extra
Life" makes for some interesting reading. It's
particularly fascinating to read the author's
lament that the advent of packaged software and
GUI interfaces had turned computer studies into
something rote and trivial, so unlike the voyage
of discovery it was for him and his friends when
the world was new. Revisiting his school in the
mid-90s, he doesn't quite seem to grasp that HTML
coding could be the kind of gateway drug to
computing that BASIC was for his cohort.
Of course, as the years go by, and the layers of
abstraction continue to pile up like so much
sediment, and the videogames become entire worlds
themselves, and non-deterministic programs like
LLMs are now the order of the day, an oldster like
myself can perhaps be forgiven for wondering if
maybe now we really are past the point of no
return, where no one really has or can have an
understanding of how all the pieces fit together,
and any high school kid foolish enough to try to
make sense of it all will find, not enlightenment,
but terminal confusion.
But take heart: Like most old people lamenting
change, I'm probably being way too pessimistic. I
expect the kids, at least some of them, will be
all right.
