My desoldering gun should arrive today, so hopefully I'll get the Altair
up and running! Before all that I've got to go to my uncle's house and
replace a few of his wall sockets and plug in some extenders/power strips
(so that my aunt will stop plugging in super heavy extenders that
eventually end up ruining the hold on the sockets themselves). He's paying
me a little bit of money for it, so I've got no problem with that. I'll
chalk it up towards that expensive (~$160 USD) desoldering gun. That, or
I'll put it towards building a proper case for my floppy disk drives. I
can get acrylic pieces to put it together for around $90 online and then
just paint it. (Granted, I'd rather have it made out of aluminum or steel,
but that stuff's just waaaay too expensive).
The other day I was reading people's answers on Quora (for the
uninitiated, it's like Yahoo Answers but instead of being a trollsite it's
"sophisticated"), and I came across something that really resonated with
me. The question was "Are we in the golden age of computing" and the
person who answered said no and that in his opinion the golden age of
computing would have been sometime during the 80s - when computing
*itself* was seen as a creative activity and not just as a means of
utility (watching videos, writing documents, etc).
I really understood this. Even though I didn't come around until back in
1998 (and certainly didn't use a computer on my own until I was at least
four or five years old), that's how computing was for me as a child. It
wasn't just watching videos on YouTube (not that I even had sufficient
bandwidth for that until we got 1mbps down in 2008) -- it was exploration.
I would browse through every file and control panel that was relevant to
me or that I thought was even interesting on Windows 98 and XP. Once I
figured out how to write programs, I would start writing them all the time
(this was, for a while - a mystery to me. I had a book from the 80s on
computers with, of course, BASIC programs to key in. Having had no
experience with microcomputers of the 80s, I couldn't figure out how on
earth to do it on Windows. I remember even trying to type it in on notepad
and saving it as an EXE file. Didn't work, obviously). At some point
probably around 6th grade I dived into emulation and Gamemaker games and
showed it off to other people in LIFT - the gifted program at my school. I
would make and edit small videos just because Windows Movie Maker was
there and I could, and I remember showing them off to classmates on a free
day during school. I even tried to download Autodesk Maya at one point,
giving up when the download window said it'd take 21 or 28 days or
something like that (not that I would have ever figured out how to use it
anyway). It was totally about exploration and searching for new ideas and
ways to interact with the machine and with the world. It was a creative
pursuit. And sure, I might have watched some videos or typed up some word
documents - utility computing - but I was constantly in the pursuit of
creative computing -- something I didn't even realize was being put on the
backburner going into the last decade or so. Almost no computer comes with
some obvious, easy way to write programs; Windows no longer has a Movie
Maker; large forums are dying in favor of social networks; and going past
the first page of Google seems pointless. Modern computing isn't perceived
as a creative activity in and of itself and as such isn't designed that
way. The beard's been shaved off and the tie's been straightened (thank
you, season 1 finale of Halt and Catch Fire). But there's hope.
I think that the reason a lot of us are here on Gopher is that same
pursuit of creative computing. There's an element of exploration and
interactivity that's so intimate and fun because anyone can explore and
anyone can create. It's why I love *nix sites that offer something fun and
interactive. It's why I love retrocomputing - a hobby that is in and of
itself exploration of computers. The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has
a room chock full of microcomputers from the 70s and 80s and then a room
of mainframes that you can explore and interact with and have fun with for
as long as you want - which is something that I think also embraces the
user's creative spirit and desire for a more intimate relationship with
computers. Those machines have souls - ones that our own can mingle with
and resonate with and love with. Computing is romantic - can be, anyway -
and I wish more of the world could see it that way. I'm completely
rambling at this point, but if this really resonates with anyone else, I'd
love to hear it.
Anyway, my little Vonets wifi adapter has been knocked about three or four
times since starting this phlog post, and before it ends up getting
accidentally cut off again, I'm going to go ahead and wrap up. I'll post
updates about my Altair on Mastodon - and once it's up and running, a
decent amount of pictures on the PixelFed instance (pixelfed.sdf.org) that
smj's been promoting.
That's all for now! See y'all next time! (Is this how I always close my
posts? lol)
