As you might surmise from “Link 2” and “Link 3″ above the masthead illustration, this blog is still, as they say, under construction.

I’m at the low end of what looks from this vantage point to be a very steep learning curve as regards the technology of blogging. For the first time in more than 20 years, I feel like a true computer illiterate.

My first experience with computing technology wasn’t even a computer — exactly. In the very early 1980s, I acquired a Xerox 850 dedicated word processor. The word processing program was hard-coded into the CPU box. And the CPU box was about the size of a standalone dishwasher. Seriously. Desk height and a couple of feet deep. It weighed a couple hundred pounds, and it moved about on casters. It came with a magnificent black-on-white, portrait-oriented display, though. And the keyboard had an early version of a touchpad mouse. It was called (again, no kidding) a CAT, an acronym for something or other. The floppy disks it used for data storage were 8” in diameter — the size of a 78 RPM record — and really were floppy.

A year or so later, another then-comic book writer named Gerry Conway — he’s now a producer on *Law and Order: Criminal Intent* — showed me his new personal computer. Sure, it processed words, but it could also do other exotic things, among them communicate with other computers using something called a modem.

Then, Gerry showed me a service called MCI Mail. It was a cross between the two technologies we now call email and fax. You could send electronic messages to other MCI Mail users, but you could also upload files (in ASCII format) to be printed out on the other end and delivered as hard copy. The cost was about the same as sending a document by Federal Express — but it no longer took 24 hours to get where it was going.

I was sold.

I bought my first personal computer, a Kaypro 10, from a store called Friendly Computers in Los Angeles. With the expensive daisy wheel printer and the extravagantly fast 1200-baud modem, I believe it cost nearly $7000. The Kaypro 10, pictured below (additional pictures here), had 16K of memory and a massive 10-megabyte hard disk; it came with a bundle of software (some of which actually worked) and, at about 40 pounds, was considered “portable.” The built-in screen was green-on-black and measured 9″ diagonally. The operating system was called CP/M. The interface was a command line.

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Friendly Computers was well-known in town for the quality of their service and for the care they took in teaching customers how to use a computer. My instructor was Beth Slick (then Woods). In my first lesson, Beth presented me with a stark choice. Either I could learn to control the computer, or I could let it control me. The former meant achieving some degree of mastery over the operating system and application software. The latter meant living in a state of perpetual dependence and confusion. I chose the former.

I was an idiot. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

One piece of bundled software that didn’t work very well was the Kaypro’s modem program. A sympathetic friend gave me a copy of another program, one that demonstrably *did* work but whose manual was written entirely in geek-ese. In those days, there was no “plug and play.” (Hell, there was barely even “plug.”) Modems didn’t configure themselves. That was the user’s job, and it typically involved tweaking a long list of interdependent software and hardware settings until the modem, the computer, and the communications program proved willing to cooperate.

A couple of blocks from my apartment in Burbank, there was a 24-hour coffee shop called the Copper Penny. I took the manual and a couple of packs of cigarettes to a booth there, read the manual over dinner, and then, over what seemed several gallons of coffee, read it again — and again — and again into the wee hours of the morning until, finally, I thought I understood it.

Turns out I did. Stomach sloshing with cheap java, brain amped on nicotine, I walked home and before dawn had the modem working.

How I long for the good old days — when men were men, and computers were weight-lifting apparatus, and modems were intractable — the days before RSS, CSS, XML, XHTML, PHP, pings, trackbacks, URIs, and comment spam!

I can’t believe I have to go through the equivalent of the goddamn coffee shop experience all over again!

Can somebody even *do* that at age 57?!

I guess I’m going to find out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 9th, 2005 at 12:02 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.