That chime. \u00a0That guitar chord, supposedly recorded by Stanley Jordan, with the B top note and echoing F# in there somewhere. \u00a0The startup sound for the Power Mac 6100.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0I had to learn what an \u201capplication\u201d meant. \u00a0I had to learn the difference between what I thought of as a program and things like extensions or control panels. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t an auspicious start.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t a true ISP, but it did do email, and thus began my first attempts to interact with the wider world. \u00a0By Christmas, I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
People in the Valley these days think they\u2019re being \u201cdisruptive\u201d whenever they come up with a new way to use your phone instead of just pulling out cash. \u00a0But 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 \u201clong distance girlfriend\u201d 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. \u00a0Or 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? \u00a0Tap tap tap, done.<\/p>\n
But there was a lot more than that. \u00a0There was all the poking and prodding needed to get a PowerMac running System 7.1.2 to perform in a reliable manner. \u00a0When 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. \u00a0Then 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.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t know it, but before I\u2019d even started grad school, I was on the path to my future. \u00a0And it would have nothing to do with political science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That chime. \u00a0That guitar chord, supposedly recorded by Stanley Jordan, with the B top note and echoing F# in there somewhere. \u00a0The 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 … <\/p>\n