Tap-tap-tap, the Technical History of the Kid

Once upon a time The Kid decided to be a writer. The only thing available in his house when this brainstorm struck was a fountain pen and some onion skin note paper. So this was the medium on which he wrote his first message.

It wasn't very satisfying. The ink smeared easily on the surface and bled through to the other side. He took his allowance and purchased a lined table. This was a bit better. He could write on both sides of the sheet and the lines kept his lettering straight, for his handwriting was never great shakes, or perhaps it was greatly shaky. It was certainly difficult to read (and would deteriorate to total indecipherability as he became the Old Goat). Even at age twelve he knew this would never do.

The nice young librarian at the town library took pity upon him and let the kid peck away at the town typewriter. This limited his "serious" writing to the few hours the Library was open. He began to wheedle and whine for a typewriter of his own. Lo and behold, his grandmother gave him a typewriter on his birthday. It was an old used portable Underwood. It was very similar to the one pictured, except it was older, less shiny and came in a worn black carrying case. It had been brand new sometimes in the 1920s.

But the kid didn't care. To him this was cutting edge technology despite a sticky "e" key. Of all the keys to be stubborn, it had to be the "e" and not the "q". He loved it anyway. It allowed him to write every night for the next ten years.  In 1958 he wrote the first story he was to sell to "Magazine of Horror" called "Last letter to Norman Underwood". (The story sold a decade later in 1968.) It stood as a tribute to the technological marvel he produced it upon, that old Underwood Typewriter.

Sometime in The Kid's twenties, when he had a bit of money of his own, he took a big step up to a shiny new Smith Corona portable. It was all white and looked so streamline with its smooth rounded corners.

But it still came with the same annoyances as the old Underwood, except for the sticky "e" key. The Kid had to keep buying ribbons. He tended to use a ribbon until the keys wore daylight through them and the papers were more embossed than printed. Changing ribbons was a dirty transaction with the new ribbon generally leaving smudges for the first few miles of type, not to mention his fingertips.

If a typo occurred, one dabbed away with White-Out (also tending to smudge and coat his fingertips). If errors or changes were two large, he was required to retyped the blasted thing and to create duplicates meant the horrors of carbon paper (and even more messy fingers).

At one point The Kid even bought a copier. Oh, this was nothing like the Xeroxes to come. This was a clunky plastic bulk of a desktop contraption that required great heat to produce a copy on odd looking paper. He could only copy one sheet at a time and he could only copy eight sheets in a row before the plate got too hot and he had to shut it down to cool. Cooling could take an hour. (And sometimes he burned his ink and carbon stained fingertips on the plate.) [This thing was so ba-a-a-a-a-d, the Old Goat couldn't even Google an image of it!]

Oh how The Kid dreamed there could a magic way to type his stories and not have to deal with carbons and ribbons and heat pads, oh my. And one day along came this possibility...

Sort of...

At lease a first gleam of hope for the future...

The kid bought his first computer, the Atari 400.

It didn't really help at all in all honesty. It was pretty good at running Atari Games, though.

There was no monitor, it hooked up to the TV set. It had no internal storage. It had no printer. There was this flap with Atari upon it on the front. Lifting the flap reveled four cartridge slots inside. This was where the programs went.

The Kid, being all wise,  had also bought an external tape cassette drive with it. This was what the program for Frogger was on, a tape cassette, that took forever to load. By the time it loaded you didn't feel like playing the game anymore, however, tape was also your only storage. You see, he could write his own Basic language programs on this beast and save them on a tape cassette. Big whoop!

It didn't do much for his writing. he could type out a short story and save it to tape, but there was no way to print it. What good was that?

The Kid was disappointed in this reality of the Atari 400, but it gave him hope for something better and sure enough, something better would came along in the years when he was transforming from The Kid into The old Goat.

To be continued.

Tap-tap-tap, the Technical History of the Old Goat

In 1984 The Kid (in mid-transfer to Old Goat) bought an Apple IIc, Apples first portable or compact computer. That was what the c stood for, compact. With a printer and an external disc drive it cost $2100, with all its 1 MHz speed capability. Man of man, did it seem fast...in those ancient days. It had 128K of RAM.

The external disc drive allowed for keeping a program disc in the main drive to run the thing while having a disc in the other drive for storage, rather than constantly switching the discs. It didn't have internal storage. Everything was on 5 1/4 floppy disks.


It came with 5 floppy disks with some software on them:


1. Introducing the Apple
2. The Apple At Work
3. The Apple At Play
4. Inside the Apple
5. System Utilities 

The Monitor was a whopping 9 inches and there wasn't all that much in graphics. It was beautiful if you liked green lettering on a black background, real colorful, eh? The Old Goat thinks the printer was a DOT Matrix type, rather than an Impact, but either way it still used the dreaded ribbon.


The main software was called AppleWorks and it was wonderful. The Kid had word processing, a spreadsheet and a database. The Kid could calculate his budget, could keep lists of his records (uh, for those of you who are not fellow Old Goats, records used to be these vinyl round things with a hole in the center on which was music that you put on a turntable and then played with a needle [Heh! Heh! I know, sounds pretty silly, doesn't it!]) and books. (In a few years the Old Goat will probably have to explain books too once everyone gets nimble with the Kindle.)

And the Kid went to town keying everything he'd written up to that time with that Apple IIc onto 5 1/4 Floppy Disks. The future was now and he had no idea how fleet the future can become yesterday. He should have learned way back in his salad days when he was plugging programs in control boards for such Job-of-the-Future equipment like an IBM 85 Collator. (No, that isn't spaghetti, it's a program.)


But he didn't.

During the early 'eighties The Kid had some influence over the capital budgeting for a big bank. He brought in the idea of sticking these newfangled computers on peoples' desks and even talked his boss into plopping such a project into the business plan. His boss's boss was the Senior Vice-President who ran the whole Operations Department. (In later years this would be called Information Technology, or IT for short. To some IT came to be a bigger monster than that Clown in the Stephen King novel of the same name.)


Well, the boss's boss, who was a brilliant man and a great guy, thought The Kid was off the wall. (Bosses' bosses thought The Kid was off the wall when he wanted to do digital storage and bosses' bosses thought The Kid was off the wall when he wanted to do Check Imaging and it seemed like somebody was always saying The Kid was off the wall. This Kid wasn't off the wall, he was outside the box.)


"Those little things may be fun to play with at home, but have no future in business," said the boss's boss. "The Main Frame is king and always will be king," and so the boss's boss killed the project, much to The Kid's disappointment. 

A year of so later The Kid-turning-Old Goat became the first person in that big bank to have a PC installed on his desk. The Main Frame had its place, but there was a new machine in town and it changed everything. Soon there was another desk sporting one, then another and another until they dominated the desk tops like TV antennas dominated roof tops in the mid-1950s. Main Frames were dead as king, PCs were becoming king, long live the king! Ah, but there was the rub!


The PC was King at work. The Apple was the hobbyist's hobby horse. This was a battle where the better machine hadn't won. 

The Kid-turning-Old Goat made a decision. He wanted his home computer to be on speaking terms with his work computer so he could work either place. However the Apple and the PC didn't get along. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates spoke different languages, so Kid-turning-Old Goat pushed his trusty IIc aside and installed a Compaq Presario, the first in a serious of four such towers to come under the Compaq and then the HP banner that graced his home workstation.


Fine and dandy, The Kid-turning-Old Goat had entered the world of Microsoft Windows, freeze-ups  and crashes, virus threats and Trojan Horses and cords and cables running hither and yon beneath his feet. And now he sat staring at his lifetime of the written word compressed in a bunch of flabby Floppies that weren't on speaking turns with the PC. He wanted his work in the computer, so it was keying everything all over again. He was beginning to think that sticky "e" key and the carbon paper might not have been as bad as he thought.


Now life has moved on and it is the Old Goat who sits behind a keyboard many hours in his remaining years, still pecking out little essays, poems and sometimes stories. Floppy Floppies and hard Floppies have come and gone and all his life's work sits resident on an invisible internal hard disk that will hold gigabytes of data. Backup to the PC is to CDs, which resemble records (see explanation of records earlier in this piece). It seemed a perfect world until one day he are sailing along and struck an iceberg called the Blue Screen of Death and all was gone. It is a good thing the Old Goat was diligent on backing up to those CDs.


But The Old Goat had it with the instability, foibles and failures of the Microsoft miasma. Standing over the stagnant remains of the last Presario, The Kid rose in his memory and his first love strummed upon his heart strings and the memories came back of the Apple of his eye. 

And the ugly gremlin from Microsoft now even speaks to the handsome polished perfect fruit of Apple. All can be right in his world again. He buys an IMac.


And they typed happily ever after -- well, we don't really know that! I mean, life isn't over and you know, the Old Goat is not all that old, so things happen and nobody should say the end with such assurance that everything will always be well and happy.


Yet,  haven't we surely reached the apex of all known technology? The Future is here today, right? Nothing could possibly come along and improve on today, right?

Hey, what's this thing. Its thin and cylindric. Hmm, you move this pointy end over this piece of paper and it makes marks. How interesting. Why you can write with this thing. Now why hasn't anyone ever though of this before? Hmm, thin and pointy? I think I'll call it a pen...