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[ Line of Sight ]
DATE: October 23, 2003

Still Life With Computer

I'm not a complete computer neophyte. I first started using a computer regularly in college, and for me that's 1987. I had a Vector computer. Never heard of it? Don't worry, neither has anyone else. I'm pretty sure I had the only one. Ever. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate. You can read more about Vectors at Old-Computers.com.)

This may be hard for you younger readers to even understand, but Vector wasn't a brand of PC, like Gateway or Dell. It was its own machine with its own operating system. This is from a time before it was PC vs. Mac. This is pre-Windows. This was a time when you could ask, "Is it IBM compatible?" and have that question mean something. Anyway, I digress.

Even before this, my friend Bret had had a Commodore 64 that we had played games on, and my friend Bruce had an Apple (no, not a Mac) that we, well, played games on. This was 1984 to 1985, so we played glorious games like Lode Runner and Ultima III.

We also had a very advanced computer lab in school, where we would use BASIC to create roleplaying games using If/Then statements.

But I never went the extra mile that some people did. I never opened up computers and dug around their insides, or anything like that. Despite all the games, computers were mysterious and complicated. They were magic, not machines. You could learn to do just the right things and type just the right commands and get them to do certain, predictable things, but that was it. No one really understood why they worked, they just did.

Then Macs came into my life. I remember it like it was yesterday. I'd just finished my second book (still in college) for Iron Crown Enterprises, and was trying to get a job with them after I graduated. They told me that there was an internship program open and I really wanted a spot. My boss-to-be, Coleman, said to me on the phone, "We use Macs here at ICE. You know how to use a Mac, right?" There I was in my apartment, on my big, clunky hand-me-down phone that sat on an ugly wooden end table next to an even uglier blue chair. I was standing on a carpet that was really just on the carpet side of Astroturf, shuffling my feet nervously, even before he asked me the question. Working for a game company was my dream, after all. I stared at the unfinished wooden wall that separated the room from the only other room in the apartment as I found myself saying, "Sure, of course, I know Macs."

I'd never touched a Mac in my life. I had seen one once, at a friend's house. The computer had belonged to a young cousin of his, who'd brought it over to show him. I was sure it was a toy computer, not a real one. The mouse looked like some kind of strange reverse stylus. A gimmick. A novelty. These silly mice things will never catch on.

Having had the wondrous and powerful Vector in my apartment, a huge monstrosity that roared like an aircraft engine to keep its 10K hard drive cool (honestly, I have no idea how big -- or rather how tiny -- a hard drive it had, but the fact that it had a hard drive made it cooler than the Commodore 64, I thought), I never had been to one of the campus computer labs. So I immediately phoned my friend Jon, who used them all the time, and explained my situation. "Can you show my how to use a Mac?"

He said he could, so I got ready for a crash course of what I assumed would be multiple lessons and probably a hefty manual to study. Instead, he met me at the lab, walked me over to a Mac, turned it on, and showed me how to use the mouse. He explained clicking on things to me, and showed me how to close a window, and then said, "Okay, now just click around on things and explore." He rose to leave.

I freaked out. Computers weren't something to play with, I thought to myself. This is no toy. It's super complicated. Only like three people in the world know how it really works, right? If I explore, I'll probably end up accidentally deleting something important and crashing the system. The only thing I said out loud was, "Huh?"

He assured me that I couldn't hurt anything. It was a Mac.

This was the beginning of my torrid love affair with Macs, which lasted about 10 years. Everything I knew about the computer, I knew because I'd discovered it by just messing around with the machine. While there was still plenty for me to learn by the time I got to ICE, I already knew things about the machines that I could teach them. Ironically, the first computer I was given to work on there was not a Mac. What a kick in the teeth. At the risk of completely changing metaphors, this was perhaps the first of many speed bumps in the road of my relationships with Macs.

The second came years later when I started work at TSR. This was 1994, and I was given some old 286 to use. Even in 1994, this was a joke of a machine. You could hear the little men inside the unit chiseling 1s and 0s onto stone tablets as you typed. Of course, I'd always used outdated machines. The mighty Vector was old and obsolete when I used it. Heck, it was obsolete when it was halfway down its assembly line. (Not that I'm complaining. It was totally cool to have my own computer in 1987. I don't know how I could have written all my college papers, not to mention my first two books, without it -- thanks, Dad!)

Needless to say, this machine was not what I expected from TSR. I mean, this was TSR, right? After I'd accepted the job, I'd asked for a Mac. (And if memory serves, they promised me one. This was just a harbinger of things to come, regarding TSR management, but on my first day at work, I did not have the eyes to see it. Heck, my office didn't even have a chair in it at first -- I had to steal one out of Zeb Cook's office.) So I worked on this PC "until my Mac came." It was very much like my old Vector days, actually. I had a Mac at home, though, so everything was still okay.

Meanwhile, I met Sue. Sue and her 386. Shortly after we got married, we decided it was time to get hooked up to the Internet at home. We'd already decided that it was also time to check out these crazy new CD-ROM things. It made much more sense at the time to get a CD drive for Sue's 386, so that's also the machine we hooked up to the Internet. It was running Windows 3.0.

All these things added up to one unexpected twist, however: A 386 running Windows with a CD drive suddenly meant I was a computer gamer again. A real computer gamer. Oh, sure, I was still playing games on my Mac. This was 1995, so my Mac played glorious games like Lode Runner and Ultima III.

But suddenly, I found myself faced with Ultima Underworld, Dark Forces, and more.

Mac, what Mac? That's right. My head had turned. Games dragged me away from the warm embrace of the Mac. Unfortunately, of course, I'd kept my Mac "go exploring" sensibilities. Thankfully, our friend Woody was always able to come over to help restore the damage I'd done to Sue's poor 386.

But when it came time to buy a new computer, I did the unthinkable and bought a Windows machine. But at least now Sue and I would have compatible machines, right? Well, no. See, as I was being seduced by the dark side, Sue became enchanted with the Mac they gave her at work. Yes, the Macs we'd been promised finally showed up.

I still think Macs are great. I look at them with a strange kind of longing whenever we're at a computer store. But I don't regret my traitorous switch. Not really, anyway. I've played a lot of great games and used lots of other software I couldn't have used on my Mac.

Of course, now my computer is sick. There's something wrong with the video card. I had to open up the machine and reseat the card to try to fix it. I don't know yet if it worked. It's one of those problems where I only know when something's wrong, but have no way of checking to make sure it's right. If I did fix it, I won't know until weeks from now, when I look back and say to myself, "Hey, my computer hasn't crashed for a long time." Staring into that open computer, I marveled at how simple it really all was -- a motherboard, a video card, a sound card, a hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, a DVD drive, and some cables. It's not magic. Way more than three people in the world know how it all works. Still, I've been putting off working on the problem with the card for a long, long time. Is it still a bit of that lingering fear?

Nah. Just laziness.

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