I was born in 1981. Growing up during the Cold War, I rarely saw actual computers as a small child. There were Commodore 64s, my own VIC-20 and various game consoles, but apart from the occasional 286 and 386 running DOS and Windows 3.11, I didn't come into direct contact with computers. On TV, computers were portrayed as bulky terminals with green glowing letters and 5.25" floppy disks. I can still recall fragments of "V" and "Magnum, P.I". Then of course there's the awesome text-based interface in "Alien"*. Somewhere in my mind, those images got stuck. To me, those terminals were the real deal, not like the entertainment machines I was used to. They represented the mysterious power of the computer, the machines that held all the promise of the future. They could also be scary, like Skynet in "Terminator", which only made them more fascinating.
The computer terminal "mother" from "Alien" (1979)
It wasn't until circa 1994 that I started to learn how to use computers, using the 386 machines at school. Windows 3.11 was puzzling, even though I was 13 years old and an had extensive experience with video games, I had almost no experience at all of PCs. In late 1995, I bought my first real computer, a 486 with a 33 Mhz SX processor and 16 MB of RAM. The hard drive held about five hundred megabytes or so. This machine was hardly state of the art when I bought it, but it had Windows 95 and soon I was using it to connect to the Internet. The melody of the 33.6K modem dialling and then initiating the connection is something I will never forget.
Strangely enough, one of my strongest memories is how the 3.5" floppy disks felt. Picking up brand-new black disk without a label, I would admire the subtle texture of the surface, the hard edges, how thin it was compared to its length and width, how the metal cover would snap in place if you slid it back manually to expose the opening to the magnetic media inside. The form was just as fascinating as the function of it.
Many years later, coincidence made me start experimenting with the somewhat obscure operating system FreeSCO on that same old 486 that I had bought in 1995, by then it had been reduced to a mere plaything for years. As I sat there staring at the interface, typing in commands at a text prompt, I felt like I had come home. Finally, I could relive my childhood memories, and learn something in the process. Tinkering with Windows had become tedious (even the then-new XP failed to inspire any enthusiasm in me), FreeSCO brought back the joy in computers, and the beauty I remembered.
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| The command-line on my current computer |
From there on, it didn't take long for me to get started with Linux. Today, I type this on a Ubuntu** machine. While I have accepted that a graphical GUI is quite necessary for many tasks, I still use the command-line every day. Over the years, I've tinkered with UNIX versions and bought arcane old machines simply for their aesthetical appeal. In this blog, I will try to convey the beauty I see in them. I guess I'm a computer archaeologist of a sorts. While others may want to admire ancient vases or pre-historic jewellery, I love to look at obscure machines and outdated operating systems. Not because I admire their function, but because I adore their form. Perhaps this make some sense to you, perhaps not. Then again, that's the whole point of art, not everyone will appreciate it.
/ Tony
* I think I watched "Alien" when I was ten years old. It wasn't a very bright decision at the time since it terrified me beyond sense and reason, but today I love that movie. A few years ago, I decided to re-watch it. Immediately afterwards, I felt so inspired that I sat down in an entirely darkened room and just played around with a command-line for quite a while. Of course, I made sure it was in full-screen mode and that the letters were green, on a black background.
** Ubuntu is an operating system based on Linux
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