Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
Feb. 18, 2003: My Cyber Days
For the past year, I've been annoying family and friend alike by being constantly online.
I had been using an Internet answering machine service that records messages from my phone line and downloads them onto my computer.
But I know it was frustrating for them to continually get a mechanical
voice instead of mine. And it was expensive for me to always be returning
long distance phone calls.
So I decided to take the next step and get a high speed cable modem. Now I can be on the Internet constantly and it won't inconvenience anybody, except my dog, who seems to believe she should be getting far more long walks.
It's hard to believe there was a time I hardly ever used a computer. But that was only because the personal computer did not yet exist.
My first computer was a Texas Instruments computer, which we hooked up to an old TV as a monitor. We used a tape recorder to record data. The recorded sound was a series of beeps and whirs that I think would make a terrific sample for a techno song.
In those days, I was writing a text adventure game in BASIC. I had a three-ring binder with pages and pages of handwritten code. The game had no graphics, unless you count making the text pretty colors.
The next step up was the Commodore 64 (with a whole whopping 64K of memory!). This was the family computer, and even though we had a color printer, somehow we never used it. I'm not even sure if we had it hooked up. It's funny, when I think about it, to remember teaching myself to type by using a typing handbook and a manual typewriter whose "7" key stuck.
My interest in BASIC programming continued, and I looked forward to the "Family Computing" magazines we got in the mail. I would type in the latest programs and get very excited about the effects it would produce: simple sounds, blocky graphics, and even animation.
We had a few games we loved on the Commodore 64. There was an Indiana Jones game which consisted of solving puzzles. Once you solved the puzzle, you moved on to another level.
Our favorite
game, though, was "Ghostbusters." My brother and I spent long
hours honing our skills for this game. It was pretty sophisticated for
its day; you could choose different vehicles, and the graphics and sound
were good. Of course, I'm sure I wouldn't view it the same way today.
We also had a program called "Koala Paint" that came with a "Koala Pad" you could draw on with a stylus, which was converted into a computer image. It was a lot easier than trying to draw with a mouse, or even a joystick. (Does the younger crowd even know what a joystick is?) I kept a disk full of my creations, the big 5-inch floppy disks, back when they were actually floppy. My proudest accomplishment was a reproduction of the cover from David Lee Roth's "Crazy from the Heat."
I remember being envious of my friend John, who was able to dial into a local BBS. I desperately wanted to participate, especially since I had a crush on John, but my parents couldn't see the value in it.
Then I went to college, and things would never be the same.
Back in the days before e-mail accounts were common, before they were given to every Penn State student, I got a mainframe account to use Minitab, a statistical program, for my statistics class. Soon I was stopping in more than once a day, not to work on Minitab but instead to instant message friends through the Penn State mainframe. I had friends, even then, who were SysOps, and I used to pick their brains for how to accomplish various things regarding file manipulation and archiving.
I soon discovered the USENET newsgroups and became a frequent poster to a variety of groups: rec.music.dementia, alt.vampyres, alt.fan.monty-python. Many of these postings still exist today, in the Google Groups archives.
When the semester ended, I thought I'd have to say good-bye to my new addiction, but then I was accepted into the scholars program. A mainframe account was one of the perks. This was terrific, as far as I was concerned.
At about this time, I was also doing the Monty Python Society newsletter, so in addition to the mainframe terminals, I used Macintosh computers to work on ReadySetGo, a very basic page layout program.
I remember how excited I would get over silly things like friends who had created their own startup disks with customized sounds. One friend had a startup disk with the Monty Python quote, "Oh, I see you have the machine that goes bing!"
There were mischievous people who'd put something called the Talking Moose on the Macs in the computer lab, which would come up on random intervals and say something or make a sound.
Oh, the fun we had.
When Penn State moved to offering POP e-mail accounts for everybody, I still logged on via the mainframe. I kept the account through my entire career there, even for the year after I earned my graduate degree, while it was still active. I felt morally superior because I never moved to the more "user-friendly" interface of Eudora.
In about 1992, a friend showed me how to FTP, and we'd go to the computer lab and download all sorts of freeware and shareware and applications, all of which fit comfortably onto a 1.4MB floppy disk.
Then in 1993, we discovered the Web and never looked back. In the early days, you had to download not only NCSA Mosaic but also a slew of plug-ins that would allow you to view pictures or listen to sounds. We were ahead of the curve, but it wouldn't be long before many people thought the "Web" was synonymous with the Internet.
It wasn't until a few years ago that I learned some basic HTML programming and then stepped up to DreamWeaver, which is something like a not-very-user-friendly page layout program.
In my cyberworld, I've had incarnations on MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucinations), which are like a social version of a MUD (Multi-User Dimension). The difference being that MUDs are primarily about fighting and puzzle solving, while MUSHes are more about intrigue and roleplaying.
I've also done the chatroom thing and even flew out to Idaho once to meet a guy I met online. Don't worry; those days are long, long over.
These days, most of the time when I'm online it's work. As a telecommuter, it's my daily tool. And then, of course, there are my personal projects like this online journal and like Wild Violet.
Looking back on all those years ago and how things have changed, it was an exciting journey for me. With each new discovery, I was intrigued, invigorated.
Over the years, I've become such a multi-tasker that it's not unheard of for me to have more than a dozen windows open as well as the radio, or even the television, where I might be recording a program to watch later.
When I think about it, I'm not too far from William Gibson's view of the cyberpunk. Without the designer drugs or the "wetware," of course.
With that in mind, here's a poem I wrote about six or seven years ago:
A Cyberpunk Speaks of Love
By Alyce WilsonMy meat parts are fond of you. Don't know
about the brain; haven't downloaded that part.
I have destroyed my interchangeable wetware,
file chips I slip into my neat
brain crevice. Gone: my programs for random
sexual encounters, capriciousness; the only
brain implant I kept was for "cool." Style is
everything...
Now, I code myself a string of commands.
Accessed by voice mail, only by you. No
shareware for this batch. All restrictions apply.
But be warned: I have spread myself
through cyberspace. You see, I've been pulled apart,
bits at a time, by those who need me. The Net connects
my seperate parts with silver floss, almost invisible.
So you can take one part -- my toe, for instance --
and say you own it. But 'til I break the ICE
blocking the rest, you must wait.
I should ask what you'll do with my spare parts,
should you want them,
but my center no longer speaks to the peripheries; carefully monitored
synapses have been dampened. I could patch them together,
a hack... I'll send a message out. But first,
I'll navigate my neurons, assess the damage
of your last kiss.
bad character
bad file name
system error
Moral:
Cyberpunks are alive and well and in my bedroom.
Copyright
2003 by Alyce Wilson
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