!C for Computers
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agk's phlog
11 June 2021 @ 1902
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written on Pinebook Pro
with intermittent power due to thunderstorm
after the bank closed before I got there
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I think the first computers I saw were an Apple Macintosh
Plus and an IBM PC with monochrome amber display running
DOS in my elementary school library. I searched the card
catalog for books and played Oregon Trail.
My dad's a preacher. A woman in the church invited me to
use what I guess was the Mosaic browser to look at the web
around the time of Yeltsin's coup. My dad typed his sermons
on a typewriter. I typed school papers on it. That's why I
hit keys hard. I never learned to touch-type, but can bang
out a good typescript on the overused ribbon in a manual
Underwood.
My dad got a laptop with WordPerfect for DOS to write
sermons near the end of the Bosnian War. It had a reflect-
ive monochrome display, parallel port, and 3.5" floppy
drive. Maybe an early Toshiba Sattelite? He eventually let
me write school papers with it (and print them on a Brother
dot-matrix printer). I played Operation Neptune. I bet it
still boots and runs.
Around 1996 I got my own typewriter. Dad got a desktop.
I made an Angelfire website and played Myst. I made 'zines
by cutting and pasting camera-ready art and typewritten
pages. I had them offset printed and helped the print shop
with folding and saddle-stitching them and other jobs to
get a discount.
In 2001 I had an Apple iBook for a year. I used Pine to
read and write lots of emails related to protest organizing
and did poorly in school. After that I didn't have a compu-
ter for a decade. I used computer labs for email. In 2010
I used my boyfriend's circa 2003 laptop and two large file
cabinets to keep research notes, write a book about verna-
cular medicine in central Mississippi, and write my first
resume.
I got my first mobile in 2005 from a friend who wanted to
support my low-resource medicine and disaster response
work. It was a flip phone. She put me on her family plan.
Til then I checked a shared voicemail from payphones. In
2010 my then-sugardaddy bought me a BlackBerry Bold. It
made keeping up with email and writing long SMS texts
easier. It was useful in Haiti after the quake. BBMs got
through when calls and SMS failed.
I got a Toshiba nb205 netbook with Windows XP around 2011.
When it failed to boot got I got an NB305. Since I couldn't
do anything useful with Windows 7 Starter Edition, I
installed CrunchBang, an openbox-based Debian derivative.
I spent a lot of time in forums and checking reference
books. I eventually replaced openbox with i3wm, a tiling
window manager. I broke its cooling fan when I threw it out
a 3rd floor window in 2013. Otherwise it still works.
Today I use:
* Nokia 2610 mobile mfg 2006 -- GSM calling and SMS,
* OnePlus2 mobile (AOSP) -- VOIP calling, XMPP chat,
music/podcast listening, reading blogs,
* ThinkPad X61 mfg 2007 running Debian/i3 -- laptop,
* Pinebook Pro running Manjaro/i3 -- school laptop.
* ARPA account on SDF's public access Unix server
running NetBSD -- social computing.
My machines don't like Zoom videoconferencing. The Nokia
has to be replaced soon because 2G carrier equipment is
being retired. I don't particularly like computers, but
these are the ones I've known.