take your pills Grandpa
I experienced an episode of feeling unreal: My Parents told me about their recent effort in sorting their storage space, and found our old scanner. Compared to the size and number of functions of the Wife's office scanner, this predecessor device feels like a stone tablet. It came with an SCSI card1. While my brain replayed the memories left of installing the card, i remembered how arcane the process must seem to people half my age. Parallel and Serial Ports, SCSI and IDE, when installing a Hard Dsik or RAM was more than just physically connecting the device to the bus, you had to announce the new presence to the system. When playing a game could mean to load a piece of code beforehand, that rearranged recourses. The turbo button on the housing, the clicking and clacking, the glow of the monitor … due to the lack of comparable devices in our everyday life, using the computer had a sense of communion, it certainly did once the machine got hooked up to the internet.
The device a lot of people are carrying around in their pockets are fare more sophisticated than what i build and maintained back when the scanner helped with my homework, grabbing material for all the zines my brother and i dreamed up—and never printed—, and to help circulate rules for whatever P&P RPG that was played at the moment.
It made me question, if my memories are more noise than signal—which is probably true to a degree—, or if it is what happens to everyone once in a while, we look down the paths taken, and can't believe how far our footprints reach into the past, and how far «in the future» have come.
meanwhile: My colleague is a heavy breather, and i typed this in the hope of being able to distract myself from the unelenting noise…
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Small Computer System Interface // wikipedia.org↩