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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan 7 17:25:15 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: chapter-17
25 YEARS IN AN AFTERNOON
#17 in the second online CAA series
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Eureka, CA; 1,117 miles.
December 20, 1986
NOTE: This week's column is dedicated to GEnie users T.HOOBYAR and RAY-ROLLS,
who in different ways asked the question that this answers.
"You reeka," I want to shout at the guy beside me -- a greasy specimen of
street life who has elected to spend this sunny Saturday in the library
devouring a book of "The Family Circus" cartoons instead of shuffling around
outside with palm outstretched. He's not smoking cigarettes or carrying a boom
box, but the effect is the same: by not bathing, he has created a sphere of
negative influence that defines his personal space. Unable to retaliate with
the gentle pattering of my keyboard, I move discreetly away... but not far
enough. He points at the computer and asks something in that dull voice you
associate with gaping mouths and vacant stares. I nod pleasantly and turn back
to the screen, trying to look preoccupied but feeling guilty. No matter -- he
shrugs and immerses himself again in the 2-dimensional world of Jeffy, Barfy,
and friends.
Two largish women walk behind me and I hear them pause -- I smell the
onslaught of heavy perfumes. From mission to brothel in an instant: I'm
dizzy; my nose reels. And now -- can this be? -- they are bending to breathe
on my neck and read the screen over my shoulder! They murmur their delight,
the sound mingling with the susurration of clothing and the jangling of heavy
baubles. Still more scents weave drunkenly through the redolent chemical
background: lipstick, hair spray, fabric softener, skin lotions, deodorant, a
dozen aggressive aromatic attempts at femininity. Uh-oh. That sentence did
it. I hear a startled rustle and quick steps... when I turn to watch the
retreating bra-constricted pink and green backs I catch the hissed words,
"rudest goddamn person I ever saw in my life."
Well, so it goes. I came in here to write, ladies and gentlemen, not to
put on an electronic strip-tease show. I'm off duty today, OK?
Small-town libraries do tend to be strange intellectual backwaters, don't
they? Always a few years behind the times, a bit worn, they offer faded frozen
snapshots of a dynamic world; even my own books, once the echoes of high-tech
passion, look dull and serious in their library bindings (when I'm lucky enough
to find them). Despite current periodicals on the shelves, this place has an
intellectual mustiness about it -- a cross between grandma's attic and memories
of grade school. A man wants Consumer Reports articles on typewriters and sits
to read, trying not to stare too obviously at my machine. Two guys carry
armloads of books, talking loudly enough to make it clear that they want their
quasi-erudite discussion of jazz to be overheard. A ruddy, grizzled sort
sleeps, drooling a thin saliva stalactite toward a copy of VOLCANO! pinned
helplessly under folded flannel-shirted arms. A 10-year-old browses the card
catalog for anything he can find on engineering as a profession; his sister,
competing, seeks printed dreams about becoming a world-famous veterinarian.
Card catalogs? In 1986?
There's no news this week. We're still in Eureka fighting deadlines -- so
instead of inventing adventures and rhapsodizing further about the lifestyles
of new friends, I want to try something a little different. On the assumption
that some of you occasionally wonder how a once-promising micro-techie ended up
on the streets, I'm going to take you back... back... way back...
* * *
(Change was always the answer. Over the years I have tweaked my
environment, designed new machines, rearranged furniture, started companies,
found new lovers, modified my consciousness, created new filing systems, and
moved time and again -- all for the sake of change. Knowing that, the
following will make more sense.)
* * *
Electronics was passion, obsession, raison d'etre. My identity lay in my
basement laboratory; my happiness was a function of acrid solder smoke,
blinking lights, clicking relays, and that sweet mysterious crackle of
shortwave radio. When I was 9, I had a contest with my friend Rusty, a
chemistry fanatic: we each had one week to write down all the words we knew
(or could find) in our respective fields. Pentode. Grid-leak. Crystal.
Nixie. Hollerith. Ah, those were the days: early 60's in Louisville,
Kentucky.
Actually, they were dismal days, but I didn't realize it yet. Year after
year I tolerated the time-waste of school, accepting patriotic brainwashing and
sanitized history, superficial science and anachronistic literature selections
-- living not for girls, grades, and sports but for electronics and science
fairs and dreams of future laboratories. I was a social outcast, naturally,
for my adventure was measured in volts, not milligrams of adrenalin. When
neighborhood bullies soaked me with squirt guns one day, I ran home and
attached a battery-powered 14,000-volt supply (like a cattle prod) to a pair of
squirt guns mounted side-by-side on a wooden stock... with salt water as the
conductive ammo. As long as both streams hit someone before degenerating into
droplets -- WHAM! Instant panic. My relationship with the neighbors subtly
changed.
Ah, technology.
I finally made it to the international science fair, a holy grail of
sorts, with a homemade speech synthesizer. Having failed in the purely
electronic approaches after three years of frustrating work (tape loops, LC
tank circuits, discrete transistor filters...), I built a working acoustic
model of the vocal tract based upon X-rays of my own head. It even had a
voice-change problem.
Graduation, anticlimactic and vaguely embarrassing, occured in 1969 --
when I was 16. I was academically ordinary, ranked in the middle of my class.
There was such a gulf between learning and school that I didn't really care,
and doubtless responded with less than adequate concern to my parents' repeated
accusations that I was not working up to my potential. It was an old story by
then.
But college! At last! I arrived at Rose Polytechnic Institute wide-eyed,
heavy-laden with gadgetry and school supplies, ready to plunge into every
cliche of college life I had ever seen in the movies. Philosophical bull
sessions, scientific investigations of beer and other interesting substances,
the mysteries of girls unveiled, haze-crazy fraternities, brilliant and
slightly mad profs, all-night test-cramming sessions, eccentric nerds,
emotional moments of discovery, tinkering with huge computing machines, and
through it all that magical rarified air of academia, of KNOWLEDGE. Oooh... I
got goose bumps all over my alma mater just imagining the richness and
camaraderie of college life.
But engineering school turned out to be like going to art school and
learning to paint by numbers. The infinitely interrelated universe was
segmented rudely into "subjects," taught in isolation, out of context --
despite the fact that humans are associative systems and generalists at heart.
"Remember this, and this, and this; don't worry, Steve, it will all fit
together someday." Nonsense! But there was something more insidious still:
the primary motivation for learning was not curiosity, but fear of failure.
That had the effect of reducing the educational process to a succession of
panic-stricken study sessions -- formalized obsessive-compulsive rituals
intended to ward off the dangers of C's, D's, and those terrifying F's.
Learning became secondary, an incidental spinoff of studying.
I nursed a growing terror that the school would channel my latent
creativity into the narrow confines of a crank-turning profession: I wanted
tools, not habits. If I were to work hard enough to succeed, I knew I would
change in frightening ways.
Besides... it was 1970 and getting high was more fun than studying. It
even promoted that sweet illusion of wisdom, making it easy to feel good about
donning a headband and quitting school halfway through freshman year. Before I
knew it, I was on the road -- waving my thumb from interstate shoulders and
living out of a blue backpack emblazoned with the icon of peace.
Cynics will shout "aha!" and draw immediate parallels. But wait... the
real education was yet to begin. I was just cutting the cord (and soldering a
connector on the end just in case).
I quickly tired of penniless drifting and began sampling jobs. I grew tan
and strong as a deckhand on barges in Illinois and Minnesota; I briefly tried
the dehumanizing factory life. I worked in a department store for a month and
installed telephone central office equipment on Army bases. I finally decided
that maybe I needed a degree after all, but having cut the cord I now had to go
for it on my own. How else? I joined the Air Force, believing the inspired
fiction of a quota-oriented Georgia recruiter.
It took but a few months to discover that I was not to be in research,
this was not to be a great adventure, and there would be no free education.
Stationed in Idaho, trained rodent-like and charged with the task of swapping
black boxes in F-111's, I huddled on the frozen flightline in my parka and
rankled. The bastards! Forced by circumstances to display respect for the men
who least deserved it, confined to an intellectual straitjacket and supervised
even in the private world of my dorm room, I knew confrontation was imminent.
He was an 8-striper, a lifer, a pompous baboon with power. I was a
misfit, earning both his respect and contempt with my confusing combination of
technology and anti-war sentiments. When I heard rumors of his extended
inspection visits to my room, I built an intervalometer camera system that
would record, on film and tape, anything that went on for 15 minutes after my
door opened. Evidence mounted quickly: he was going through my files and my
mail -- commenting to his sidekick that "one way or another I'm gonna get this
#%{body}amp;!* court-martialed, even if I have to plant a few surprises in here."
I moved fast. The films impressed the commander; the sergeant lost his
job and a stripe. But victory was short-lived. Pressure mounted from all
sides -- surprise inspections, harrassment, disappearance of my cat, orders to
get rid of my ham station and all the other "junk" in my room (I was building a
music synthesizer). Within 3 weeks I had orders to go to Guam in an unrelated
career field, and I quickly understood that it was a death sentence. The
baboon gloated; there were too many of 'em to fight. I saw my opening:
simulating a "schizoid personality disorder with passive- aggressive trends"
yielded an honorable return to civilian life within three months -- a year and
a half after I signed up.
Ah, technology.
Field engineer, Singer Business Machines: a year's education in how not
to design computers. In a Louisville apartment my techno- passions reached a
new peak: by mid-1974 I had designed an 8008-based computer system laughingly
called BEHEMOTH (for Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical, Mechanical, Optical,
and Thermal Hardware). I started a small moonlight company called Cybertronics
to support my habit, hustling integrated circuits and related hardware, doling
out plastic- bagged goodies imported from Silicon Valley to the growing
population of microprocessor junkies in those exciting early days of personal
computers. What the machines lacked in capability they made up in class: card
cages full of wirewrap boards, blinking front panels and massive power
supplies, teletype machines, graphics with 8-bit DACs, hand-coded monitors and
line editors...
Cybertronics became my full-time support. 1K static RAMs went down to
$8.00 each, then to an unbelievable $3.50. The 8080 made a splash at $360 and
I managed to find some I could sell for $250. The excitement was tangible; I
devoured EDN and Electronics Magazine as most 22-year-olds would devour
Penthouse -- often staying up all night when some project was too exciting to
put down. Universities could take a lesson from this: learning follows from
passionate interest as surely as pregnancy from fertilization.
And so was born an engineering firm. Word got out that some guy was
designing with micros right there in Louisville, and within a few years I was
building custom industrial control systems for Corning, Seagrams, Honeywell,
and Robinson-Nugent -- working out of a local industrial park and branching
out... growing... selling the new generation of computer KITS (what's this
world coming to? any bozo can have a computer now...) and pushing chips by
mail order. All the signs bespoke imminent wealth, but something was terribly
wrong.
My all-nighters, when they happened, no longer had anything to do with
passion. They had to do with fear -- of deadlines, of customers, of disaster.
One had to do with tracking the ravages of an embezzling secretary; another
with an ultimatum from a client. I began to ache for change, for my favorite
toys had turned into business equipment. Even BEHEMOTH was tainted, plastered
with tax charts and mailing list information. Yes, it was time for major
change.
I cannibalized the company, escaped the lease, and moved alone to a
cavernous Victorian house. There, through the mid-70's, I continued
consulting and began writing -- soon discovering the delightful fact that the
manipulation of words (an old hobby) could be both fun and profitable. Burned
out on doing anything with computers besides using them as tools, I withdrew
further and further from industry, covering my retreat with technical articles
in trade journals and hobby magazines. Somewhere in there my live-in
girlfriend and I got pregnant, so we unthinkingly married and moved to
Columbus, Ohio -- where a high-paying software engineering job promised to
fatten my bank account at last and buy me the space to do some REAL writing.
We signed a 30-year mortgage on a 3-bedroom ranch house in suburbia -- an
acre along the mighty Scioto River. A girl-child was born. I commuted to work
in a Honda station wagon. And in the cold, gray Ohio winter of 1980 I
panicked, recoiling violently from the mediocrity that had settled around me.
My old computers were cobweb- shrouded, host to terrible skittering denizens
that made a mockery of my most cherished dreams. Imprisoned, frightened of the
scope of the next change yet even more frightened of not making it, I quit both
job and marriage, finding myself a lone homeowner in Genericsville, USA --
paying $2,500 a month in expenses and debt service.
I dusted off the word processor and began. For three years I wrote a book
a year, filling in the gaps with articles about artificial intelligence,
robotics, online searching, microprocessors, and anything else I could con
someone into paying me to write. My favorite book, CREATIVE DESIGN WITH
MICROCOMPUTERS (Prentice-Hall), was a complete distillation of the Cybertronics
era, carrying the exuberant message that "art without engineering is dreaming;
engineering without art is calculating."
But the energy began to fade... again. Freelance writing was a license to
be a generalist, a way to deduct every expense and charge money for
key-tapping, but still... something was wrong. I had turned another hobby into
a business. I was working my ass off to barely pay for a house I didn't like
in a city I didn't like in a state I didn't like. Every change I had made
seemed only a new trap, each prettier and more subtle than the last. What I
REALLY needed was a lifestyle that would combine all my passions: a slowly
recovering interest in computers, the endless delights of gizmology, the
still-mysterious magic of ham radio, the visceral joys of cycling, romance with
all it implies, travel and adventure, the transcendence of the well-turned
phrase, meeting wizards and other interesting people, the fun of public
visibility, and most of all CHANGE -- constant change -- weaving through my
life as naturally as breath. What to do?
Luckily, it was 1983. CompuServe was right down the street, the Radio
Shack Model 100 had just been released, and a local 65-year-old named Robby was
riding around on an Avatar recumbent bicycle. How could I miss the
implications? The idea struck the afternoon I met Robby; 12 hours later I
planted a FOR SALE sign in my front yard. For six months I lived on garage
sales while building the system and then pedaled away from Columbus: free at
last, grinning at the loud crash of assets and liabilities tangling in my wake
and settling out to roughly zero.
All I owned was either on my bicycle or connected to it via modem.
For 9,760 miles I traveled, collecting experiences ranging from the
passionate to the terrifying. The road became my equivalent of livingroom
walls; the network was my neighborhood. Another book was born -- Computing
Across America (coming in February) -- and I finally escaped the stigma of
"technical writer." I reveled in change; I celebrated it, wrote about it,
encouraged it in everyone I met. I had found my lifestyle of choice, and told
people I would travel forever.
It took a year and a half to burn out.
The visit back to Ohio was to have been only that -- a way to restructure
my base office, finish the book, and earn a little consulting money before
returning to the road. But what was the hurry? I found an almost
embarassingly high-paying job, stopped thinking about the bike, and let myself
enjoy the unfamiliar illusion of financial comfort. But Ohio winters have a
way of touching everyting with gray misery, and as I sat at my desk pondering
the implications of my newfound yuppiedom one afternoon, I knew what had to be
done. Fingering my yellow tie and squirming my toes uncomfortably in new
leather shoes, I remembered the freedom, the country roads mottled with sun and
shade, the smiling eyes of new friends, the energy of endless beginnings, the
taste of beer after 100 miles, the views from mountaintops, the sand on my
feet, the road, the road, the love of my life. I looked down at the
interactive videodisc PROLOG software I had been writing and found a rough
sketch of a recumbent bicycle, blurred by a tear in my eye.
Yup.
And so we come to the present. You know what happened: I spent 8 months
designing and building the new system, this collection of processors and
control circuitry which has turned my entire career into an exquisitely mad
self-parody. Seeking to address all the problems discovered on the first trip,
I modified everything -- to the point of finding a winsome and willing
traveling companion to warm my tent and share this next phase of my chronically
unsettled life. I moved to GEnie. And here we are, parked for a month in
Eureka to put out financial fires that never would have happened if I'd simply
been content to stay chained to that cushy Ohio desk.
We're also laughing a lot, which never would have happened either.
Merry Christmas, friends in Dataspace...
-- Steve