April 07, 2003

I am trying to immerse myself in creation. Despite the sound of the phrase, that is not a Helpful Hint from Mr. Bova (see far left, and down a bit), it's me being fed up with wanting to have written, but not doing any actual writing. So I've been focusing. Getting down with the craft: picking names that don't sound like soap-opera characters, hacking out the crap, killing the poodles. Researching the backgroundish bits: nanotechnology, neurochemistry, quantum computing, Romantic poets and Gothic cathedrals.

The little Puter (see left again, a bit lower) helps immensely. I snagged a 256 MB Compact Flash card for it off of eBay, so now it carries the manuscript plus the research.

Back in 1989, my first computer was a GRiDCase 1520. It had a blazing 80286 processor that ran at around 12MHz. It had 2 megabytes of RAM, a 20 megabyte hard drive, and a speedy-quick 2400 baud modem. My particular model featured a 4-color CGA gas plasma display, which was a very cool orange. The computer was sheathed in a black magnesium case, and it weighed twelve pounds. Its gas plasma display actually grew too hot to touch at times. The display had a dimmer switch: dimming it meant that you might get 15 minutes of battery life. With the screen in full-on egg-frying mode, battery life was five to ten minutes. Or, you could shell out $300 and get an eight-pound extended battery that gave you 50 minutes' worth of juice...maybe. I knew where the wall outlets were in every classroom I sat in.

The GRiD was built like a tank. You could knock it off your desk while it was running--like I did--and it wouldn't notice. Inside, it had a little g-shock meter, so the techs could tell if it had been subjected to more than eight gs' worth of impact force. It was such a fab-looking piece of hardware that it was used in the movie Aliens--the computer that the android, Ash, used to remote pilot the drop ship down to save Ripley and the Marines was a 1520. They also used 1520s to control the automatic perimeter guns...when you see the orange readouts counting down the ammo as the guns shatter screeching aliens into molecular acid goo, that's my machine. The perimeter gun peripherals, it turned out, were only available in Europe, so I made do with a groovy little Diconix 150, a portable, battery-powered dot-matrix printer made by Kodak. It was ingenius: the batteries went into a little hatch in the platten, which spun around them as the paper tractor-fed through the printer.

New, the GRiD cost around $3500. Today, I've got a computer that weighs 10 pounds less and runs at 15 times the speed, with more than ten times the storage capacity in a RAM cartridge the size of a matchbook. It also has well over ten times the battery life, plus a modem that is 24 times faster and a full-color screen. In 1998, this device cost less than two-thirds the price of the GRiD. Now that it's obsolete, I picked one up for one tenth the price of the GRiD.

Charitable fool that I am, I gave my GRiD and the little printer that went with it to my then-girlfriend's journalist roommate when I left Mexico. I've regretted it ever since, but at the time--when I had an urgent need to flee the situation immediately--lugging 15 pounds of hardware back to the States, in addition to my newer Packard Bell craptop, wasn't appealing. The craptop died a month after I got back, which was not entirely unexpected: I was in the appliance section of a Mexico City supermarket (they sell everything in suopermarkets down there), and I saw a stove with the exact same Packard Bell logo on it. Apparently, the company is one of those multi-armed international corporate monstrosities that makes everything they possibly can, including baby food and nuclear weapons.

Ysterday, while unpacking one of the ever-multiplying supply of unpacked boxes from September's move to Peapod, I came across two more bits of old technology, each dating from 1981: the Tomytronic Tron and the Coleco Galaxian tabletop arcade games. This was what kids whose parents wouldn't give them Colecovision did for fun when they couldn't hang out with their friends whose parents did give them Colecovision. I had forgotten about these little brightly-colored gameboxes.

I popped in some C-cells, and the tinny, monophonic beeping noises threw me back 22 years, when I used to play these games long into the night under my bedsheets, the beeps and blats muffled with a pillow. Both games use a multicolored LED display, and of the two, Tron is the most impressive. It's based on the movie, of course, and manages to present light cycles, discs, and that bit of the movie where Bruce Boxleitner has to bust up the Master Control Program. This is all done using the same LED technology that's used in digital clocks, only instead of number sections, the illuminated bits are tiny parts of light cycles, flying discs, little Trons and Sarks. The designers had a 1.5" by 2" space to work in, so each illuminated bit serves multiple purposes: the curved tops of the light cycles are also the zipping discs, and the little wheels and chassis also form the barriers that trail out behind the cycles as they zip around. It's all very clever, and it still works. The bright-blue of the LED display is perfect for a game about bright-blue heroes inside of a computer.

Galaxian uses the same LED technology to create both the original Galaxian arcade game and its progenitor, Space Invaders (which you can play, right now, here). But bright-blue isn't a Galaxian color, so they put red and yellow lenses over sections of the game screen.

Today, I can climb into a 60-ton mech and blow stuff up in 6.1 Dolby surround sound.

But it's not really the same. Twenty years from now, 30-year olds who use fully immersive holographic video displays will find a dusty box of video games, all stored on the old CD-ROM format and, if they're lucky, they'll have packratted a clunky 2-gigahertz machine away somewhere. They'll play a few rounds of flat-screen nostalgia, remembering how it provided a break from the war that summer, and how cool it was.

And twenty years from now, hopefully, I'll find the little Jornada 820 tucked away in a drawer somewhere, and remember how I wrote my first novel on it.

That won't happen unless I get back to it, but the snow (friggin' snow!) has put me into a bit of a winter mood, so I'll probably just waste more time, looking at online bits of my technological childhood, and finding out which parts of it are still available on eBay.