My first computer was a Ti/99. Bought it at Target in Roseville; the Giant Swede bought one too. We both had the cassette-tape backup systems as well, and you had to have the special tapes that had the right graphics. In this case, a grid, since grids meant computers and the future.

 

 

I tried to learn how to program, but it seemed unfulfilling and pointless. I’d never be able to learn how to do what the pros could already do. I’d use it to write.

Except I didn’t. I wrote in longhand on yellow legal paper. But at night before I turned on the TV to watch Overnight, or listen to the latest Elvis Costello or sit on the roof and listen to Harold Budd, I would play text adventures. The first one, Pirate Adventure, opened me up to the imaginative possibilities of the art form, and I loved it. The second one, Savage Island, took place on an island where I had to get a bear to lick salt, could not cut down vines, and heard strange booming sounds. It was frustrating because I always got Dengue Fever.

IT’S BAD said the line and then I died. To this day I can say “I have Dengue Fever” to the Giant Swede, and he knows how to reply.

Walkthrough here. It’s exhausting.

My next machine was an IBM PCJr. It was in color. I bought it from a New York camera / computer company. It came preloaded with Shakespeare. It had games, I think. It had the approval of Charlie Chaplin.

I wrote on it but preferred to bang out my work on my Selectric, which was a real, proper word processor. The PCJr sat in the corner, ignored, more of a signifier of my Tech Savvy than anything else.

That was when I lived on 4th street by Ralph & Jerry's. It sat under the window by the fridge and the answering machine.

Then I moved to Uptown on Irving, and bought a second-hand IBM 386. Now I had a decent machine with a decent keyboard and a printer. I wrote a lot on that machine, but then I saw an ad for a Leading Edge machine, and get this:

It had an amber screen.

This seemed like an innovation. All the computer displays you saw were green, but this was Amber, and the computer had TURBO BOOST. On that machine I wrote my first novel and played a lot of Infocom text adventures. This was a true high-tech life: writing late at night on a computer while listening to music on CDs.

Oh yes, CDs: another part of this amazing tech we had come to take for granted. The disk shelf slid out, motorized. (Ever since we’d see that on 9 1/2 Weeks we had to have it.) I had cable TV, which had 500 channels and dammit Bruce there’s always something on. Late at night there were peculiar shows on the second-tier channels like USA. There was always MTV. I could watch a movie I had rented by placing a plastic tape-slab into the slot, and hearing the machine whirrrr and grab it and take it and settle into place.

I had a remote control.

Things were pretty good. But one day I ran into someone I used to know from college; he’d lived on the same floor - two right turns, one left - and I don’t know why I ran into him. It had something to do with KTCA TV, where I was doing some shows. He had a Mac. I was intrigued. He showed me the screensaver.

Fireworks. Animated fireworks.

That’s what sold me on the machine. The screen saver. It’s often the trivial things; I made the leap to the Mac Iicx in 1989 because it had a color screen and I could highlight text in blue, which was awesome in a way kids today cannot imagine. Then a Quadra 660av; then a Centris; then the iMac, the iMac In seven years - ’82 to ’89 - everything had changed in a way comparable to iPhone’s impact. Now I was “programming” in Hypercard, exploring Photoshop - which I actually rented for a month in 1989 from a local software rental store. At the end of 89 I was on a BBS, chatting with other people in the Twin Cities.

Quite primitive compared to today; quite advanced compared to the TI/99 - but the basics were all there.

Here’s the thing. We all lived with the expectations that computers would be The Thing, but the actual role they played in our lives was more cinematic than anything. We were waiting for them to be useful, but didn’t feel as if we were waiting, because obviously they were powerful tools anyone could use, and were using - why, just look at the movie “War Games”!

It wouldn’t bear fruit until the 90s, when AOL and Doom paid off. But in the 80s? Yeah, we had computers. Yeah, we knew DOS. The future would be along any day, and damn, we were ready.