18 February 2008

Not Fade Away


Can there be coincidence that this President's Day, honoring Lincoln and Washington, can simultaneously be the commemoration of the independence of Kosovo and the anniversary of the election of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy?

Perhaps it is just that history is bunk, as Henry Ford maintained, and there are only so many days in a year. Everything new has to displace something old in the canon of memory and allow it to fade away.

We only have so much bandwidth, or at least that is what I have been saying under my breath at the office. It is a Federal holiday, so I will observe it at the office, where I also honor the service of Veterans, and the sacrifice of Dr. King.

Before going, I reviewed a note a friend sent. It was a quick update on what was going on in a peculiar situation. There is a lot, though none of it is any of my business, strictly speaking. Even so, as Marley observed to Scrooge, the business of the living is the living. Plus, and it is so much more interesting than the affairs of those who have passed, which is why we allow the displacement.

At the end of the note was the admonition “don't not respond under any circumstances,” since the text had been composed on one of the original coal-fired steam computers.

Sending back anything with a picture, even one of the postage stamp versions like the one at the top of these would choke it, all that information coming in through the leaky valve on the wall. I sighed in sympathy. To my right hand is a massive Windows machine, a Toshiba laptop with an 18-inch screen that replaced an IBM laptop with a broken screen, which was superceded by another IBM, provided by a company taken over by the French, and finally by the little white cube from Apple that sits on my desk with zen-like calm.

That is all in six years, five separate boxes filled with all the data and documents and pictures and tunes.

I tried to think of what machine the original personal computer might have been from which my friend originated the message. It might have been a Commodore, or perhaps a KayPro. I remember vividly the first business computer and word processor to which I was harnessed on twelve-hour shifts in the blockhouse in Makalapa Crater.

They were boxy things we used to track the Communists, and the “floppies” where the data was placed actually were exactly that; magnetic media seven inches across like a 78-rpm record. I still have some, though I have no idea what I might do with them except use them as coasters for very large drinks.

The first box to which I was chained was the legendary Wang, which seemed to be mostly a word-processor hooked to a messaging system. It had some great features, or some I recall as being pretty advanced, since I still was proud of the massive (and expensive) IBM Selectric typewriter I had at home.

I could type in those days. You might recall the skill. There was a certain deliberation to it, a tempo that permitted the machine to hit the paper with the type-ball, and a concentration required to ensure that most of the right keys were hit, with correct spelling.

That is all long-gone, of course, and I see the evidence in the awful mistakes in my business and personal correspondence. Speed and automation have made things good enough to communicate, and if a certain inferential ability is necessary to understand, at least it is better than a Doctor's handwriting on a prescription.

It is part of the acceleration that has leap right over the transitional generation. The thumb communicators of the cell phone generation have abridged English to its bare fundamentals, LOL, and “emoticons” help us to understand how we are to take it the text, :

The little white Mac that enabled me to escape most of the evils of Bill Gates has now tottered beyond two years of age, and some strange things are happening inside it. The operating system itself has passed over the great divide; it no longer receives updates from Mr. Jobs or his minions.

I receive messages from people I don't know, regretful ones, saying my current system configuration is inadequate to meet their needs for me.

Then it is a new box, and endless copying of copies to another, larger drive operated by swifter algorithms.

That parade has moved on to Leopards, or Jaguars, or whatever they are calling it in the Mac universe; the PC Vista comes in three versions, I understand, a basic one for dummies, and two others for those who require more complex failures.

Looking at the elegant little computer on the desk I realized with a chill that I was again clinging to something past, slipping away. The steam-powered note was probably the last gasp for the Commodore; it will go out with the trash shortly, along with the leaky modum that once was the marvel of technology.

I have every hope of aging gracefully, but the underpinnings of life are moving so swiftly past that there seems little hope of that. Adapt or die. Rip the data into new format. March on, and not let it fade away.

I get the feeling that I should print it all out when this box has run its course this month or next. Get everything in hard copy, so that it has some permanence in this endless metamorphosis.

Of course, it will take a lot of space when someone else has to cart it to the dump, but at least it will be neat as it fades away into the soil.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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