from: mw3
date: 01 october 2024
scene: porch, sky just light enuogh to silohouette the trees, light rain
hardware: thinkpad x201
title: hello

hello.

i like old computers. i like new computers too, but try to avoid the 
entanglement that virtually unlimited processing power and connectedness 
seems to bring.

when i was small the personal computers came, and impressed me
greatly. i wanted to wield the magic. there were ataris and commodores,
apple ][+s on av carts, and serious (and slightly less colorful) computers 
with the floppy drives inside the case, like our Tandy 1000.

when i was in high school i found the internet, particularly the waning 
days of usenet, comp.os.linux.* and comp.os.plan9. i enjoyed lynx and pine,
downloaded .tar.gz by the boatload, and installed linux on the family 486,
on a small partition at the end of the second hard disk.

i did a lot of programming, reading, learning, a little raytracing, a 
little typesetting, and lots of what we used to call "application": finding
any excuse to use the computer to make other jobs faster, better, or at
the very least more interesting.

as the child of a mechanical engineer (and mechanic), i felt like computers
were not enough in isolation, even though they were my favorite, i wanted 
to find a way to combine the world of building, fixing, and living with 
the pure joy of applied imagination and triumphant organization that i 
found in computing. so i went to school to be... an electrical engineer.

turns out, traditional ee doesn't really bridge that gap as much as it 
creates its own island somewhere in the middle. but it was too late, time 
to make some money. stories for another day. i don't regret the additional 
knowledge that i found along that path, but it is time to get back to 
computing just a little more. 

i was pleased to discover the old protocols are not completely
gone as i had supposed. (thank you to everyone that kept the fires burning
these last few decades!) 

i am not here to relive the glory days so much as to pick up right where 
i left off, exploring the possibilities trapped inside these machines.
(and avoiding the pitfalls displayed by their commercialization on a 
massive scale.) 

of course in the mean time the world has changed, and i have changed.
one outcome of this change is that i need to write, plainly, 
about what i am learning and about what i have already learned. 
after all, working with computers is really just an extension of working 
with what we find in our minds.