The joys of writing on a 30-year old computer

The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost contemplates computing from an earlier time:

Everything about this computer is loud: The groan of the power supply is loud. The hum of the cooling fan is loud. The whir of the hard disk is loud. The clack of the mechanical keyboard is loud. It’s so loud I can barely think, the kind of noise I usually associate with an airline cabin: whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom.

This is the experience a computer user would have had every time she booted up her Macintosh SE, a popular all-in-one computer sold by Apple from 1987 to 1990. By today’s standards the machine is a dinosaur. It boasts a nine-inch black-and-white display. Mine came with a hard disk that offers 20 megabytes of storage, but some lacked even that luxury. And the computer still would have cost a fortune: The version I have retailed for $3,900, or about $8,400 in 2019 dollars. 

That’s a lot of money. It’s one of the reasons why computers weren’t as universal three decades ago as they are today, especially at home. In 1984, when the Macintosh first appeared, about 8 percent of U.S. homes had a computer; five years later, when the computer I’m writing on was sold, that figure had risen to a whopping 15 percent. 

That made for a totally different relationship to the machine than we have today. Nobody used one every hour—many people wouldn’t boot them up for days at a time if the need didn’t arise. They were modest in power and application, clunking and grinding their way through family-budget spreadsheets, school papers, and games.

My family's first home computer was a Macintosh, which we acquired in the spring of 1985. The machine wasn't nearly as powerful as Bogost's SE: our Mac had 512k of RAM and no hard drive; everything was run from 3.5” floppy disks with 400k of storage. It was ridiculously primitive by today's standards, but its mouse-operated graphical user interface was an amazing upgrade from the Apple IIs we used at school. Friends and classmates alike would come over to my house just to marvel at the machine; we drew pictures with the MacPaint graphics software that came with the computer, played games, and drew primitive animations and created musical compositions with MacroMind's VideoWorks/MusicWorks suite. The word processing program, MacWrite, was originally only used by my father to write letters; eventually, I would start to use it to complete school assignments; which would be printed from a loud and bulky dot matrix printer.

There aren’t many programs worth running on this old machine, anyway. I installed Pyro, a popular screen saver of the era, and Klondike solitaire, as if I couldn’t distract myself with my iPhone instead. Even within the programs that made people spend money on computers, simplicity reigns. I’m writing in Microsoft Word 4.0, which was released for this platform in 1990. More sophisticated than MacWrite, Apple’s word processor, the program is still extremely basic—the only reason I chose Word was so I could open the file on my modern Mac to edit and file it. 

There’s not much to report; it’s a word processor. A window displays the text I am typing, whose fonts and paragraphs I can style in a manner that was still novel in the 1980s. Footnotes, tables, and graphics are possible, but all I really need to do is produce words in order, a cruel reality that has plagued writers for millennia. Any program of this era would have afforded me the important changes computers added: moving an insertion point with the mouse, and seeing the text on-screen in a manner reasonably commensurate with how it would appear in print or online. 

In fact, the only feature that’s missing, from a contemporary writer’s perspective, is the capacity to add hyperlinks. That idea had been around for a couple of decades by the time the Macintosh SE came out, but Tim Berners-Lee wouldn’t develop the first web browser until 1989, a year after this computer was manufactured and a year before this copy of Word was released. Of course, it doesn’t matter much, since I can’t go online with this machine (at least, not without adding a modem, and software that wouldn’t become available for another half decade or so).

Next to the overall lack of computing power compared to today's technology, the biggest difference between using a computer three decades ago and using a computer today is the lack of internet connectivity. It may have been possible to access some internet-related functions back in the 1980s, such as email, usenet groups or ftp sites, if one had the proper dial-up modem and provider; we certainly had no such connection. There was, therefore, no World Wide Web to browse, no messages to send and receive, no social media to obsessively check. The ubiquitous time suck that is today's internet connectivity - through our desktops, our laptops and our phones - simply did not exist. Quite frankly we were probably better of for it!

Even bracketing the welcome absence of the internet, with its hurtling notices and demands, the speed of this machine’s operation changes the tenor of my work. Computers used to be slow as hell. When I first got a 386 PC in the early 1990s, I would switch it on and leave the room for a while, so it could load the BIOS, then DOS, then Windows 3.1 atop it—hard disk grinding the whole time—until finally it was ready to respond to my keystrokes and mouse clicks. 

The Macintosh SE I’m writing on now boots much faster than Windows ever did, but everything here is slow too. When I open a folder, the file icons all take shape like a color squad entering formation. Loading a program like Word issues a long pause, giving me enough time to view and read the splash screen—a lost software art that provided entertainment as much as feedback. Saving a file grinds the hard disk for noticeable moments, stopping me in my tracks while the cute watch icon spins.

Honestly, I had all but forgotten about the sound of the floppy disks grinding in their drives while I opened or saved a file until I read this passage. It was an omnipresent noise: the lack of available RAM mean that whatever program I was using oftentimes had to pause while it read operating instructions off the floppy disk. Using a computer definitely a more time-consuming undertaking back then, but I doubt I even noticed. Today's computing speeds were unthinkable back then, and the slower boot-ups and the constant grinding of the disks were just part of the experience.

The high-tech industry would characterize that act as an inconvenience, probably, imposed by the primitive technology of the past. Inevitably, in the hands of engineers and investors, the machines were bound to become faster, more powerful, more influential, more ubiquitous. And indeed they did, and now they are everywhere. My laptop is always on; my tablet is ever at the ready; my smartphone is literally in my actual hand except when I’m sleeping, if indeed I ever sleep instead of staring at it.

As I flick off the power switch on the back of the Macintosh, the whine retreats in a gentle diminuendo, until it finally gives way to silence. I have accomplished a feat that is no longer possible: My computing session has ended.