Marching Along

One fun but disconcerting activity during the Google trip was our visit to the Computer History Museum, just down the road from Google HQ. Think about it: We've already had computers long enough (and in enough flavors) to warrant a museum about them. What was disconcerting about the visit was how many of the systems I had owned, operated, or both - including a mainframe that used punched cards. Typing data onto punch cards at John Hancock in Boston was my first computer-related job. Emphasis on related. Speed and accuracy were a curse and a blessing, since finishing my work early meant having nothing to do for the rest of the day. It also got me a reprimand from the boss that I was making others look bad and didn't have enough experience yet at the firm to be promoted. No surprise that I gave up the attempt to conform after only about 6 months. Even for a high schooler, I could see this was a dead end.

Despite such an unsatisfying early experience, I bought my first computer in 1982 while taking an intro to programming course in Panama, and promptly got distracted by Zork! Luckily, programming came easily to me, so my grades didn't suffer. A few years later, Howard and I built a hard drive for an Atari ST using parts contributed by my brother, Ken. We even reformatted it from MFM to RLL, effectively doubling the capacity to a whopping 40 MB. Wow. All of this was well in advance of hard drives becoming common on home computers, and back when you had to do more system administration for even the simplest PC.

Shortly after that, I bought one of the very first truly portable, laptop-style computers, a Toshiba T1000. Mitch Kapor donated one of these to the Computer History Museum, and seeing it surprised me. There weren't a lot of people who had them. (You can see a shot of it by looking at the Visible Storage collection). It had a half-height screen and weighed probably 10 pounds. Of course, there was no GUI back then. I used edlin, a sort of vi for DOS. When Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 came out, every "feature" involved either a complicated series of text commands or function key combinations. Even so, working with it didn't seem particularly difficult; mostly it was just tedious command-memorization. When the first Apple (and then Windows) GUIs came out, it seemed like magic. Simple tasks were suddenly simple. Who knew? I even managed to convince my boss that installing email in the company (Eudora - which would work in our multi-system environment) would be a true benefit to the business. Isn't that funny! In short, I've participated in the various computer revolutions throughout the decades from the 70's to now, including having PC, MAC and Linux networks at home, at various points in time. They were all fun tools, but the emphasis is/was on tools.

Perhaps that is why I was mostly annoyed by, and not particularly amused at, being called a "microsoftie" by a colleague the other day. It was intended to be an insult -- this guy's idea of a sell-out is anyone who gets frustrated by command-line-driven programs and/or owns a PC -- and came in response to my exasperation at the arcane aspects of R and LaTeX, which make even the old text environments seem simple to use. I guess this just proves that self-image doesn't necessarily coincide with how others perceive you. I've been so busy congratulating myself for persisting in a difficult goal (PhD in CS) at such a late point in life, that I've completely overlooked how frustrating it must be for others to deal with me. God knows it probably takes the patience of a saint. Luckily, my advisor is neither sarcastic nor insulting; he is very supportive. So I will continue to march along and hope to get my PhD one of these days.