My life in computers

[imomus]

I bought this Amstrad, my first personal computer, in 1987 at John Lewis on the King's Road, London, using an advance from my music publisher. I think it cost about £700. I used my 'word processor' to process words in my little 'canary cage' room nearby. I crunched out the lyrics to albums like 'Tender Pervert' and 'Don't Stop The Night'. The winking green cursor also blipped out texts for a Taschen book about Pierre et Gilles, an embarrassing fan letter to Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, and love letters to the (lesbian, as it turned out) head of the theatre section at the ICA. The screen was black, the letters were green. You could play some pointless 'educational' game which involved a vector 'turtle'. The real revelation, though, was just the fact that you could have a page of text on the screen, and cut and paste it around. Suddenly editing seemed like the most futuristic thing in the world. You looked at the world afresh. 'What if we cut that building and pasted in another instead?'



My second computer was basically a music sequencer. There was an Atari ST series computer in all the recording studios I was using in the late 80s, thanks to its built-in MIDI ports and solid sequencing programs like C-LAB's 'Creator / Notator'. I figured that if I bought one, and a sampler, mixer, effects unit and DAT player, I would never have to rent a recording studio again. So from 1990 I sequenced music at home, saving time and money in the studio, and by 1993 I'd stopped using studios altogether. ('Timelord' is my first home-recorded album.) My Atari could also emulate a Mac thanks to a little plug-in ROM gadget called 'the GEM'. The poor thing plunged into a deep identity crisis because when I wasn't sequencing music I was forcing it to dress up as a Mac the whole time. It was on the Atari (running Apple System 6.07) that I first accessed the internet -- well, Compuserve -- in 1993. I remember showing it proudly to Don Watson, a journalist friend, in my cow-wallpapered front room on Cleveland Street, London W1. We went into some sort of gay chatroom together, said hello to somebody, and ran away. That was about the extent of my internet experience at that point. It was all a bit scary and hardcore.



In 1993 I splashed out on my first real Apple, a Duo Dock 230. You simply can't imagine how far into the future it seemed to catapult me! A laptop that slotted into a desktop! A colour screen! A CD-ROM Drive! I remember it sitting, fresh from the box, on the table in that cow wallpapered room. It had the smell and the look of a NASA project. It cost me £2000, but that was a small price to pay for space technology. I remember taking the laptop part to Japan, flying Hellcats missions on the plane (there's something weird about crashing a virtual plane when you're flying on a real one) and bonding with my A&R man at Nippon Columbia instantly. He was such a Mac fanatic they called him 'Maccy' at the label. On my Duo dock I wrote pseudo-Japanese albums like The Poison Girlfriend's 'Shyness', and my own 'Philosophy of Momus'. I wrote letters to the British High Commission in Dacca, Bangladesh telling them of 'a delicate situation' with a young girl called Shazna. I showed people my two prize possessions, a CD-ROM called 'Alice' by Kuniyoshi Kaneko and another called 'Rodney's Wonder Window' by Rodney Allan Greenblatt. (Later I visited Rodney's dollhouse loft in New York with Kahimi Karie. It was as virtual as his ROM. I'd been there before.) I didn't use the Mac for music -- the Atari still worked better for that -- but I got it onto the 'real' internet and was soon e mailing... with just one person, a woman called Regina, a journalist working at a New York advertising agency, who told me all about the trials and tribulations of her marriage.



After that it's all a blur, a series of vanilla-manilla boxes whose names and capabilities aren't worth remembering. Now it all gets soft and mushy: what I recall are web things. software things, body functions, incidentals. The debut of my website in 1995. Netscape Mosaic, Navigator, the Blam CD-ROMs, everything flashing like crazy, 'desktop publishing' and 'the multimedia PC', Wired, Doom, irrational exuberance and the 'long boom', digital flesh, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.orientals, alt.fan.momus, online sex, ICQ, successfully begging girls to send digital photos of themselves unsuccessfully supping condensed milk, the death of the desktop, the arrival of Safari, flatscreen monitors and wifi, the iMac and the iBook, Bugdom, blogging, mp3, the return of Steve Jobs, funky funky yuppie machines designed by Jonathan Ive, Babypink, FF FF FF right up to the now now now, and me so umbilically attached to my G4 iBook that I sit on the loo peeing and ICQing with some girl in Hong Kong at the same time, unaware of how deliciously unfeasible the whole thing is. Just sew the damn thing into my body now and be done with it!

Comments

[tump.livejournal.com]

1979 - my first, a TRS-80. Mainly used to run the Scripsit word processing program. Probably could not have worked as a writer without it, as I hate retyping.

1980 - Apple II. Four colors, woo! Couldn't find a word processor that made me as happy as scripsit, but found solace in the silly games.

1980 again - Couldn't bear the typewriter at the office any longer, but my boss wouldn't buy even a cheap computer. Bought a cheap Commodore 64 to have WP available at work. And more silly games.

1986 - Apple loyalty keeps me away from Atari and Amiga, though I am aware that these machines are both marvels, the Atari for audio, the Amiga for video.

Aching first for the Lisa and then for the Mac, settle for the more-affordable Apple IIgs ($1000 sans monitor). Mine has the "Woz" signature scrawled on the front, which may yet become highly collectible, though there's one on ebay right now, with monitor, for $30. Overall, too much like the Apple II to introduce any new excitement to my life.

1992 - CrimeBeat, a magazine that attempts to upscale the "True Crime" genre, takes me on as production editor after its been operating for about a year. Money is short.

I bring our entire digital prepress operation in-house, setting up a network that connects a IIcx, the editor's own Mac II, and the graphic department's spanking new then-top-of-the-line Quadra system, which plays a rich low reedy chord at startup. Since the hardware costs considerably less than what we were paying for prepress services outside, we manage to squeeze out a few more issues than we otherwise would have, before Crimebeat collapses noisily.

I wind up, though, with a Macintosh IIcx out of the deal. New Joy, especially from Hypertext. Monks with Macs!

1995 - My sister is having a great deal of trouble installing a cd-rom plus sound card package in her PC. I am recruited to install it, and successfully do so. Along the way, I manage to fry her floppy drive. The replacement costs $10.00. With the PC cracked open, I realize that I could assemble one of these things.

1995 - I need to replace a floppy drive in the IIcx. The cost: $200. Instead, I build a 486 PC for a little more than that. Scary struggle to get it all working, but I manage.

1997 - Somehow wind up switching from magazine editor in NYC to telephone tech support for Internet dial-up in L.A. on the PC platform. Like the work better, don't like L.A. or management of the firm for which I work. It is, after all, a "call center."

1997 to 2003 - I've assembled perhaps a dozen PCs for myself and for friends and relatives. Each one is easier than the last as parts become more uniformly "componentized" and idiot-proofed. My tech support job is shipped overseas, as are most jobs that my tech experience would qualify me for (not to mention the vast competition for tech jobs since the tech bubble collapsed). Now an ex-techie as well as an ex-writer.

2004 - Interviewed for a job at the Apple store in New York's "fashionable SoHo" (SOuth of HOuston Street) district. Excited at the prospect of purchasing a Mac with an employee discount.

Receive the most politely-worded rejection I have ever seen. Strongly suspect that I was bypassed due to my advanced age, as it is a very young store; the week I am rejected the NY Times carries a piece about this same store as a "hot pickup spot." I decide, with firm resolve, that Apple sucks.

[tump.livejournal.com]

Here's the soundtrack for the above post (http://www.openspeech.org/gates.mp3)

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha. $30,000. Right.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Well, at least the rejection letter was politely worded. Would have been wiser of them to suggest another branch where you could be of use to them.

[tump.livejournal.com]

She is a model and singer-songwriter named Kana. You may wish to visit her US shrine:

http://www.openspeech.org/wonderland

Systems that have not been personally touched by Bill Gates may have "issues" at that site so it may be better to simply watch her perform her 'hit' "Hebi Ichigo" [Snake Strawberry] (http://www.openspeech.org/wonderland/kana.wmv)

This link still insists on the Gates touch, by demanding Windows Media Player, which is available for Mac here (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=windowsmedia)

[tump.livejournal.com]

Apple owns only a handful of stores nationwide, so that does not seem practical. They only re-entered the retail business in 2001, to the dismay of the majority of dealers that are not Apple-owned, who have long complained of the very narrow margins allowed them by Apple.

As a practical matter, it makes sense for Apple to project a youthful image in its stores to fully exploit its hot consumer product, the IPod.

The Times article fits so snugly with their strategy that I am sure the piece was cooked up in Apple's PR department, probably in exchange for some Apple favor, like access to behind-the-scenes info on an upcoming Pixar film for a future Times entertainment piece (I know Pixar isn't Apple but it would take 1 minute of Steve Jobs' day to arrange such an exchange, and that is more and more how publishing works, across all levels).

Sounding bitter, aren't I?