See You on the C-Drive
(A Series of Late 20th Century Fragments)
The world of IT entered my bloodstream (somewhat) in the third grade, back in those naive halcyon days of 1991. As a quiet Midwestern nine-year-old, I spent my time reading dinosaur books and watching footage of Operation Desert Storm in round-the-clock news coverage. Up to that point, I'd been familiar with microfiche readers in the local library and overhead slide projectors in the classroom. Third grade brought a new class to my schedule, an experience that would shape my life from then on: Computer Lab.
Our lab was outfitted with a fleet of Apple IIs. For software, we were provided with several educational programs from a company perfectly suited to supporting our Minnesota classroom. MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium lasted from 1971 to 1999. While the name may not be familiar to most people today, the company's products certainly are. MECC published titles like Odell Lake, Number Munchers, Spellevator, and the venerable Oregon Trail.
When my dad brought our first family computer home in 1995, it presented me with an interesting challenge. This was a brand new, creamy white Packard Bell 486 desktop PC running Windows 3.1 with the company's custom Navigator GUI. What could I do with it?
First, explore. There were multimedia CDs with video clips, animations, and sound effects. My brother and I used these to create imitation talk show interviews. A digital encyclopedia let me hear historical figures speak while reading about space exploration and military technology. Even the simple acts of watching the OS boot up, exploring file directories, and customizing the user interface were exciting technology journeys.
Second, create. Oh, Microsoft Paint! I don't care how advanced Adobe Photoshop is, nothing beats simple straightforward pixel-by-pixel art. Over the decades, I've used it for book covers, technical diagrams, photo editing, and memes.
Third, games! Rodent's Revenge! It started simply enough. Then, The Learning Company with Ancient Empires and Gizmos and Gadgets. Starflight, SimAnt, Star Trek 25th Anniversary, Myst, and EcoQuest. I bought a joystick for Star Wars: TIE Fighter, the most engaging flight simulator I've ever played. They weren't time wasters or casual distractions. They were immersive, captivating, challenging, and entertaining. You were the star of your own adventure, no better way to spark the imagination.
By 1997 I was in ninth grade. At home, the operating system was still Windows 95. At high school, we only had a small computer lab full of gray MS-DOS machines, bulky units with ominous green screens, chunky IBM keyboards, and five-inch floppy disk drives. No Internet in either location for another two years. It was in this lab, and at home, that I learned to type.
Gaming helped train me before the formal classes started. A combination of muscle memory and keyboard memorization, particularly driven by sprawling flight simulator hotkeys like in F-117 Stealth Fighter 2.0. 1997 was the year I decided to try my hand and imagination at creative writing. First was the pencil and paper draft, then the typing into Microsoft Works and later Office.
While at home, I had the helpful assistance of Mavis Beacon, a personality who I would learn years later never really existed. At school, it was our lab teacher. We'd spend 45 minutes each day centering lines of text. Address a letter, write a company letterhead - the kind of administrative formatting previously done on typewriters. We'd cover our hands with paper, much as I'd used to play the piano without looking down. One exam was a blank QWERTY keyboard where we had to fill in every key. I became a fast typist, never as fast as my mother who was a medical transcriptionist, but I could go at a respectable clip.
Three years later, what's in a screen name? As Joey said in Hackers, "I need a handle, man! I don't have an identity until I have a handle!" We'd survived Y2K, living in the future, and the Internet was more than a digital library. It was a growing community, and in this world you needed identity. Something to mark you as unique, tech-savvy, clever; this took the form of three indicators: a screen name, buddy icon, and "away message," best represented through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). AIM was released in 1997, but our small town Internet didn't reach the speed and user base to fully appreciate it until I was a senior in high school.
My screen name (ech0plex88) came first. I was into the trance music scene, and over the summer I'd heard the track Never Gonna Come Back Down (Hybrid's Echoplex Dub) by BT. Having no idea what an echoplex was, I liked the science fiction sound the word had. The "88" came from 88 Keyes, the piano player in Dick Tracy. Since I'd also played piano for several years, it became a long-lasting combination that I still use over 20 years later.
The profile picture and away message were more transient. Clever film quotes, often from Fight Club or a Tarantino script. Some variation of an edgy skull, bonus points if it was a GIF! This was the extent of it, several years before MySpace gave its community absolute control over customization. This was still pre-college, though, and in a school with 400 students across seventh through 12th grade, everyone on your buddy list was only a few steps distant anyway. It was more about exploring these communities, understanding the potential, and imagining how the much larger college population would make the experience interesting.
Two other services started around that time, opening other aspects of what the Internet had to offer a small town Midwestern teenager: Ministry of Sound Radio (MoS) (1999) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) (1998). Electronic music was not a common genre where I grew up. From what I'd read in magazines, it seemed an enormous movement in Europe, which limited my exposure. This kicked off a shopping spree of the Global Underground series of CDs, and any other electronic artist catching my attention. Ministry of Sound Radio's simple audio stream gave me a useful capability: listening to my favorite music during study hall without having to carry a CD case and player along. This technology only improved when I started college, particularly when I discovered Music for Hackers, a topic I've written about previously.
IMDb was a movie fan's dream. As a kid, my grandfather had what I thought was the only satellite dish in our town. Through this, he recorded hundreds of films off Showtime, HBO, and others, three per tape. This addiction to film has persisted to the present day. IMDb served several functions. It was a trivia repository, giving me behind-the-scenes details which made my favorite movies that much more interesting. It also provided recommendations, sending me down the twin rabbit holes of Japanese special effects films and Italian Mad Max knock-offs. Finally, it was a community through an extensive series of message boards. If you ever wanted to nitpick plots, discuss alternate endings, debate a filmmaker's intent, or simply start a flame war, those boards were for you.
That trusty 486 served our family well to the end of the 20th century. It endured countless hours of games, tinkering, dial-up Internet, and Windows 3.1/95/98. In 2001, I went to college with my own briefcase-sized Compaq Armada laptop, continuing the spirit of tech exploration and enjoyment born six years earlier. Though the brands, form factors, and software have changed, my enthusiasm for The Computer (both as a tool and symbol of the future) has yet to fade.