Evolution of a Computer Nut

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I bought it with money I received for my Bat Mitzvah and it was the first (and last) computer to reside permanently in my family's home. It was big and awkward, but the color monitor was cool beyond belief. We had only recently bought our first color television, so we were especially impressed.

The Commodore was already on its way out when we bought it, and it sat in our basement for only a few years. My mother used it for her writing; my father bought a copy of Flight Simulator and spent a lot time reading the manuals; I was mostly interested in solving the murder-mystery program.

In high school I moved up to the Apple II sitting in the Journalism room. One day with PFS Write spoiled me forever. I think I may have used the word processing program on the Commodore perhaps two times afterwards. But I still had about as little interest in a computer's inner workings as I did in a car's. (After a semester of Auto Shop, the only thing I still remember is how to change spark plugs.)

I wasn't a complete computer illiterate. Periodically, someone would force me to learn Basic (remember Basic?) again on the mendacious promise that it would someday prove useful. So I learned it dutifully, going so far as to pass the now-defunct technical portion of the QRR, but I never saw the greater utility of being able to program cascading rows of asterixes down the screen.

These days, I am generally regarded by my friends as the one to call when their Macs crash. I can talk SIMMs, SCSI ports and partitioning with the best of them, and I actually do rebuild my desktop on a regular basis. As I was babbling happily away to my friend Rebecca last year about expansion cards versus junking her old SE, she looked at me and said: "You know, Lori, on the surface you're this mellow History concentrator who writes for the Crimson, but inside there's computer geek just dying to get out."

I suppose it's possible. Most normal, right-brained kinds of people probably don't go to Lamont once a month just to read the new computer magazines. Few other writers at the Crimson would prefer spending three hours helping a friend set up her new LC III to actually sitting down and writing a column on the Middle East. And I'm probably the only person I know who considers her greatest accomplishment this year to be passing the "Power User Quiz" in MacWorld.

The change happened gradually, as these things do. I didn't suddenly wake up in the morning one day jabbering about optimization. And, curiously enough, the machine that started it all wasn't even a computer.

As part of its Occupational Arts department, my high school boasted a full scale graphics shop complete with darkroom, light tables and several offset presses. Since everyone in the school had to take three vocational education classes, it was a rare Garfield High student who didn't graduate with boxes of business cards and badly screened tri-color T-shirts. It was here that the newspaper was produced, leaving us at the mercy of machines that had been purchased sometime around the Eisenhower administration. The first one.

My relationship with large unwieldy machines up till this point had been one of pure avoidance; I didn't even go on large carnival rides. Yet now I had to deal with temperamental presses that occasionally shot pages out the window and into the batting cage in the courtyard, a plate burner with a fan about as loud as a 747 and a page folder that could turn whole reams of paper into Japanese fans. And while I never achieved great mastery of our main press, I was generally deemed goddess of the typesetter.

Typesetters, oh ye privileged generation of desktop publishers, are what people used to produce books and newspapers before the invention of the Laserwriter. At Garfield, we would send our files through a large series of cables and buffers to a machine about the size of a refrigerator turned over on its side. The machine would spit out neatly typeset copy onto a canister of photographic paper, which we would then feed through a developer and hang up to dry. At least, that's how it was supposed to work. But typesetters are not as simple as Laserwriters, and whatever could go wrong usually did.

Changing fonts, for example, was no simple matter of highlighting text and selecting "Garamond." Changing fonts on a typesetter literally meant exchanging fonts--lifting up the cover, detaching the "Helvetica" strip from the large revolving drum inside and replacing it with "Garamond." And as each strip held only one point size in each font, changing font size was an equally long process. (Anyone who thinks scalable fonts aren't the neatest thing since removable type has never been faced with the choice of 12 pt. and 24 pt. Helvetica as their only options).

But where other people quailed before the mighty typesetter, I loved it. I figured out what all the weird leading keys on the side of the keyboard actually meant and could fix the buffer with a good whack to the side. Some of my happiest memories of high school are of working amidst the smell of developer fluid.

When I came to college I immediately bought a Macintosh. It wasn't quite as easy to set up as promised (this was back when you had to initialize your hard drive and use the Font/DA Mover to install everything) but once the guy down the hall had it up and running, I resolved to learn everything I possibly could.

I started slow. (This could be said of my college career as well--Tetris had a lot to do with both). I played around with Hypercard, installed Soundmaster and drew my own Start Up Screen. My sophomore year I discovered ResEdit (although I still don't use it much). The summer before my junior year I discovered The Macintosh Bible and made a skyrocket leap in knowledge. I started defragmenting my hard drive on a regular basis and upgraded my RAM to 4 megabytes (the maximum for my lovable but kludgy SE).

But as I grew in knowledge, my hard drive refused to grow with me. It wasn't its fault. Back in 1989 when I bought the thing, 20 MB was considered an immense amount of space. And to its credit, it was remarkably malleable. I used Pagemaker on it for a number of medium-size projects and even managed to squeeze Excel on as well during one heady fall when I thought I would finally get my finances organized.

This summer, I faced the facts. My SE was choking to death with files: Word 5, Pagemaker, SuperPaint, four or five games, a system file stuffed with extra fonts and more utilities than I own pairs of shoes. Even with CompactPro (the small hard drive's friend), I was gasping for breath every time I tried to copy a new AfterDark file. My hard drive was also four years old, the age at which almost all of my friends' hard drives had taken a permanent nose dive. It did not bode well for thesis time.

With this in my mind, I was casually flipping through MacWorld one day when I noticed that LaCie (which makes some of the best hard drives around and even throws in a five-year warranty) was putting all of its drives on sale for about half of what they had cost the previous year. I needed no further proof; someone was telling me to buy a hard drive now.

It arrived last week. It's small and light, with a cute blue nose on one end. The Tsunami 170 MB drive--more than 8 times the size of my old hard drive. I can finally use System 7 without losing half my disk space. It took me less than five minutes to back up my entire internal drive onto the Tsunami and I still have more than a hundred megs left over. It almost seems like a sin to have so much space.

My roommate thinks I'm crazy, of course. She just bought a used 1/40 Classic and couldn't be happier. To her sophisticated computer use amounts to changing the margins on a paper. I think she views my obsession with computers in the same way she does my obsession with Broadway musicals--bizarre but harmless.

Now, if I can just get my SE to play Sondheim...