The Aerie
So here I am, sitting in my fave café, the Blue Moon, connected to my
webserver over an SSH session, updating (finally) my web journal. No
big deal, right? I'm on a wireless laptop, or a cybercafe connection.
Nope.
I'm on my Palm Tungsten W.
Now, for the non-nerd set, this may be as meaningless as an argument
over which is dumber, Ferengi misogyny or Betazed marriage ceremonies.
And the nerd crowd is saying 'Oh, I am SO impressed, be still my
beating heart.' in the Comic-Book Guy's voice. And the engineers are
saying 'Why don't you just write up your journal in Notepad and upload
it later?'
To all of these I say 'Feh!' And again, 'Feh!'
Because I just think this is cool. So there!
Maybe I'm just an old fogey, doomed to be awed by the everyday
miracles Those Darned Kids take for granted.
I was in the U of MN bookstore once twenty years ago, standing in the
checkout line. Beside me was an impulse-buy bin full of cheap $5
calculators.
This old codger was staring into the bin with misty eyes.
"These used to cost thousands of dollars," he said in a daze, "Now...
they give them away in cereal boxes."
And I could tell that he had worked on them back then, when a pocket
calculator filled a hot room with the smell of dust baking on hundreds
of vacuum tubes.
He had not only labored to pose the question 'What is 2 + 2?', he had
written the program to generate the answer and punched it laboriously
into a stack of paper cards, which he submitted for batch execution
sometime late in the evening.
And now, here it was, all that effort and innovation, encapsulated in
a piece of colored plastic temporarily fished out of the waste stream.
And here I am, staggered to be using a wireless terminal the size of a
Pop-Tart, remembering boot toggle switches, 110-baud papertape
teletypes, and keybounce algorithms for a breadboard calculator.
So pardon me if I show my age.
I just think this is cool.
Now if I can just figure out how to send a Control-D...
[1]Last
Posted by Albatross at October 22, 2003 12:00 AM