When I was about six years old, my dad had to buy an IBM PC, one of the original ones, for his business. He was an insurance agent, and the company he represented put all of their actuarial models into a brand new “program” that ran on PCs, and agents were told they would have to run pricing models themselves instead of calling up the home office for the models to be run on the company’s mainframes. Dad wasn’t thrilled about it; to say he’s not technologically oriented would be an understatement. Being a precocious kid who loved anything complicated and new, I volunteered to come into his office and try things out.
The computer was put in the basement of his office in Portland, which was in an old renovated bank building with rough brick walls that caught silences and trapped them. The PC was heavy – thick steel casing and a keyboard that I could barely lift but which made very satisfying clicky noises when you typed – and the fan whirred loudly. The basement didn’t have a radio because it was like a tomb; no signal could penetrate it. I can remember the first Saturday that Dad took me in to test it out. He stayed upstairs in his office, doing paperwork, and I walked down, turned on the flourescent lights, and fired up the machine.
You had to start it up by inserting the MS-DOS diskette – five and a quarter inches of black plastic – before you turned the computer on; if you didn’t, the computer would tell you to insert the disk. Then after a minute or two, you’d get a message in green monochrome saying IBM Personal Computer, MS-DOS Version 1.0, Copyright 1981, Microsoft Corporation. And you’d get the prompt:
A:>
That was all. The rest was up to you.
I had the manual with me – in a three ring binder, with print and fonts that the good engineers at IBM had tried to make as friendly as engineers could – and I flipped through the first few pages to see what to do. I had no idea what to do first.
Today, October 2017, I’ve just finished traveling across the country, leaving Seattle and moving (at least for the time being) to Maine. I’d been in Seattle both too long and just long enough – long enough to feel like my son was doing well, was in school and ready to start his own life, but so long that I had started to lose the thread of where my own life was going, and what I could do with it. I’m sitting in my parents’ living room now, warm, safe, protected, ready for what’s next.
That is real freedom. And it’s not comfortable at all. It’s not fun – it’s not a good feeling, even though I know I’m fortunate beyond words to be able to experience it. We aren’t tuned for freedom as human beings, I don’t think. For all of that, though, I can feel the frisson of potential that it offers me. My stomach is turning. My body craves yoga, craves stretching and releasing the tension that you feel on the starting line of something. It’s good bad terrible exciting awful potential. We are built to learn, but learning starts with doing something and getting that response from the world that says “good” or “bad”, “right” or “don’t try that again”. To get that response, though, you have to do something. You have to type a command at the A:> prompt.
Sitting in that silent basement, accompanied by the hum of the high powered fan required to cool off the 8088 Intel processor deep inside its armored steel plating, I wondered what to ask of the computer. I felt the pit of my stomach collapsing. I felt on the edge of my life.
I typed something in. I hit Enter. The disk drive spun, and I waited for the screen to give me a response.
I’m ready to do it again.