wherein: tetracontakaidigon posts stuff sometimes

Adventures in Computing, part 1 November 9, 2008

Since nobody ever mentions them, here is a friendly service announcement: I have title text on practically all the images here. It’s probably not that funny, but it is occasionally informative.

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wherein I blog about playing with compy and computers. making a new category because I like doing this. titled from Kraftwerk song from which the riff to the Coldplay song Talk was stolen.

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Fifteen years ago the world was a different place November 9, 2008

I have a screenshot you may be amused by, as I was, but I also have a long and rambling story.

Back in the day, as I want to begin by saying ironically, there were computers, but they are not the computers we use now. I type this on a ThinkPad T42, maybe four years old; it’s about half the size and slightly less than the weight of a textbook, it’s balanced on my lap as I type, and it doesn’t even have to be attached to the wall. There are two gigabytes of RAM, 160 gigabytes of hard drive in four partitions, and I think the processor’s something like 1.6 GHz. It has a wireless, broadband connection to the internet, and loads pages as fast as I can think. It runs kubuntu, an open source operating system, and right now none of the software successfully installed on it was bought from a store. I say this not to show off, but to get across a point-this is the future of computing. At least, the present, and it’s pretty sweet. The future can only be better. I remember the computer I had before this. It was new around 1999, and my parents, who are technologically inclined, gave their young daughter a computer as a huge, amazing present one year. Its power supply died a few years ago, and I now use all 20GB of the hard drive to back up the music on my iPod. But anyway. Back then, there was a glass CRT monitor on my desk, in the textbook-comparison scale I just made up probably equal to about four or five of them. There was the actual computer bit, on the floor next to my desk, another four textbooks. There were speakers, and a keyboard and mouse, on the desk. There was a tangle of wires going to the computer, and another three or four attached to a power strip. It was Barbie themed, because I was six or seven years old then. (where are they now? The computer other than the hard disk, and the monitor, I don’t know. I use the (USB) keyboard for Frets on Fire and it kind of sucks. I used to carry around the speakers for whenever I perceived a need to blast music, but they seem to have died, as of two weeks ago, so I don’t know.) Remember the “It is now safe to turn off your computer” messages? When turning off a computer in Win98 it used to happen. I think there was a slightly different message Win95 computers had. I remember amber words on a black screen, after which you turned off the monitor and computer, separately via power buttons. The computer would stop humming and CRT screens make a noise when you turn them off. It felt like I was killing something alive when I turned it off. It scared the living shit out of me. I’ve since gotten over that, mostly. Now, turning off a computer doesn’t frighten me so much as the thought of being cut off from my friends without it. I think that’s mostly because the shutoff of this fan, and spinning down of this hard disk, are so much quieter than turning off the old computers. It’s still creepy turning one of them off. EDIT: looked for images of the shutdown screen and they remind me of it and are frightening. So maybe I haven’t gotten over it.

Second point of the story-the computers, back then, did have games. Myst, the eventual point of this story, is a particularly nice one. Read about it on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst My father tells me about playing it, remembers beating it. There’s a story about how I, at a tender young age, ravaged some of his discs for the sequel, Riven, with a permanent marker, so he could never finish the game. It took five CD-ROMs to play the game, or maybe six. He’s still disappointed by that. I made up for it last year by getting him a DVD-ROM set of all five games in the series. (Five games! A tenth-anniversary edition, too! On one DVD-ROM. How does this happen?) I borrowed from him a mousepad (I had the kind with a rubber ball inside, not an optical one. I haven’t even used a mouse except for the school computers in years.) with the Channelwood Age on it, a scene from the game. Myst was this computer thing that I kind of knew about and was kind of important as computers go, but in elementary school computers weren’t something we talked about.

To tie things together: Myst had been installed on my computer, the Barbie one. I played it once or twice, could hardly find any of the linking books, and the music frightened me back then too (I was and continue to be very good at immersing myself in unreal worlds, and it was lonely there. I was also easily scared, yes…) But it was beautiful. I occasionally reference the concepts in the game in what I say and write and think. I’ve read the backstory books. Recently, it came up as part of a crossword puzzle my physics teacher was doing in class. In the face of apathy and dissent from my classmates, I maintain that Myst is not a game set on an island, but on a series of islands in different ages. But I found the CD-ROM that it had installed onto the Barbie PC with, and tried to run that in WINE. Because I have fond memories. Because I want to try to beat the game, this time, with Dad’s help. Because it’s a part of pop culture, nerdy pop culture, the internet and my world. Because I’d kind of like to know what exactly’s been influencing me and I thought it might be fun, and because I am procrastinating.

The disc says on it, “for Windows 3.1 and 95.” install.exe ran under WINE. I got the full-screen window with the color gradient in the background and the installer in the front finding a place on my metaphorical C drive in Windows, just like I remember for installing things back then. It tries to install Quicktime next, and I laugh because I have Quicktime installed, in an ages-too-advanced form, and wonder if that will work with it, if it will be overwritten with an older form, if it will screw up iTunes to run it. iTunes has enough problems already. It hangs when trying to find other versions of Quicktime, and I kill the process. It says Myst is installed, but I don’t see it in my Wine menu. I browse the C: drive until I find myst.exe and run that.

Here is the amusing screenshot I said there would be.

Sigh.

I’ll try the DVD-ROM install discs next, I guess, or look for something analogous to FreeCiv in the software installer. So much for the future.