That chime. That guitar chord, supposedly recorded by Stanley Jordan, with the B top note and echoing F# in there somewhere. The startup sound for the Power Mac 6100.
It echoed off the plywood floor in my room, where the carpet had been ripped up in the name of a whole-house remodel. It was my first computer. After summers and holidays spent on a borrowed Apple II in elementary school, and four years spent in the DOS version of WordPerfect 5.1, I finally owned a computer of my own, the first generation of PowerPC-driven Macs. I had to learn what an “application” meant. I had to learn the difference between what I thought of as a program and things like extensions or control panels. The first time I tried using WordPerfect 3 for Mac, I literally looked for a way to turn off WYSIWYG. Because seeing the text justify itself on both sides was confusing me.
It wasn’t an auspicious start.
I also signed up for my first online service – there was some attempt to donk around with the local BBS scene, but I splashed out for an account on eWorld – it wasn’t a true ISP, but it did do email, and thus began my first attempts to interact with the wider world. By Christmas, I’d have MacTCP installed, access to the rarely-used Apple Remote Access modem pool at school, a beta copy of Netscape, my own Vanderbilt email address and Eudora to read it with, and – for the first time – the ability to reach out to people out of town without relying on pricey long distance calls or actual postal mail.
People in the Valley these days think they’re being “disruptive” whenever they come up with a new way to use your phone instead of just pulling out cash. But this is what real disruption means. All of a sudden, the world becomes smaller. You can stay in touch with people at a distance. Five years earlier, a “long distance girlfriend” meant you would throw letters in the mail like messages in bottles into the ocean and wait to see what, if anything, ever drifted back. Or make a phone call, hope somebody was there, and hope that you could stay on the phone long enough for a conversation but not so long that the long distance bill exploded. And then, in 1994, all of a sudden? Tap tap tap, done.
But there was a lot more than that. There was all the poking and prodding needed to get a PowerMac running System 7.1.2 to perform in a reliable manner. When I got to grad school, I had to find the software to get a network connection. Then I had to figure out how to get TCP working. Then Eudora. Then things like Stuffit, or a Zip drive, or RAMDoubler, all bits and pieces of getting more out of the computer, like a hod-rodder trying to squeeze an extra 5HP out of the engine or shave another tenth of a second off the quarter-mile.
I didn’t know it, but before I’d even started grad school, I was on the path to my future. And it would have nothing to do with political science.