Networks Without Networks

1/10

Emulation Fever

Over the last few days I’ve been crazy for emulation—that is, simulating old, busted computers on my sweet modern laptop. I’ve been booting up fake machines and tearing them down, one after the other, and not doing much besides. Machines I’ve only heard of, arcade games I never played, and programs I never used. Software about which I was always curious. And old favorites like MacWrite.

MacWrite on a Macintosh Plus

Hour after hour, this terrible fever. What the hell am I doing? I kept asking myself. Why am I forcing a fine new machine to pretend it is a half-dozen old, useless machines?

Eventually I realized: This might be about my friend Tom dying. At least I think so. I am not good at identifying my own motives. It usually takes me at least ten days and a number of snacks to go from feeling something to being able to articulate what I felt. Indeed, I got the news ten days ago, in an email from my friend Jim.

2/10

“Really sad news”

“Really sad news” was the subject. Tom died at 73, after an illness. Here is a picture of him from 1999. He is the one on your left.

Imagine having, in your confused adolescence, the friendship of an older, avuncular man who is into computers, a world-traveling photographer who would occasionally head out to, like, videotape the Dalai Lama for a few weeks, then come back and listen to every word you said while you sat on his porch. A generous, kind person who spoke openly about love and faith and treated people with respect.

We had fallen out of touch.

It was good to have known him.

3/10

The Amiga 1000

(What is it good for?)

I always knew Tom. He rented a room from my grandparents. When I was 12, my parents succumbed to my begging and bought me an Amiga computer. By coincidence Tom had one too. Amigas were in the air because we lived near its manufacturer, Commodore computer, in Pennsylvania.

The Amiga looked like this:

An early version of the Amiga Workbench, its graphical user interface.

And it was oddly good at animating things.

A little-remembered precursor to Adobe Flash — Aegis Animator, 1985, by Jim Kent. Animation made on October 26, 2014.

But the Amiga had a problem. The IBM PC was for business; you used it to track stocks and type up reports. The Apple Macintosh was for fancy business, for work done in art galleries or loft apartments. You might use it to publish a newsletter for gourmets who were also physicists.

Debbie Harry’s face being live-manipulated by Andy Warhol in 1985 at the Amiga Launch event. YouTube Video.

And the Amiga was for…well. It was originally conceived as a videogame console, then the game industry faltered—this was in 1984, when Atari had produced so many excess videogames that it had to bury them in the desert to get rid of them. Commodore bought the Amiga designs in the hopes of competing with the Macintosh.

But Commodore was best known for its “bitty boxes,” cheap, popular machines like the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 that sold at Sears. Could it compete?

Amiga 1000 being its beautiful self.

The Amiga launch event was held in 1985 at Lincoln Center in New York City. A tall man named Robert Pariseau (head of software) emceed, in tuxedo and tremendous ponytail. They enlisted the Amiga to make pie charts, forced it to speak and “multi-task,” and made it become an IBM PC to run a spreadsheet.

To conclude the night Andy Warhol, in his wig and brightly-colored glasses, came on stage along with Debbie Harry. He used the Amiga to snap a photo of Debbie Harry’s face and began to manipulate it live, using a mouse. Debbie Harry sat passively with her eternal pout, but Warhol had fun messing with her hair on the screen. This was a mistake, because both Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol were almost obscenely beautiful. The lovely little machine, juxtaposed with two people who actively epitomized sophistication, couldn’t hold its own. The whole thing just seems weird.

That was the launch. Now they had to sell it to the masses. Here Commodore transformed confusion into bafflement.

“As our TV screen is filled with the computer screen on which appears a wide-eyed fetus,” wrote the New York Times in 1985, describing the first Amiga commercial, “the voiceover delivers practically its only line in the 60-second commercial: ‘Re-experience the mind unbounded.’”

No one knew what they were doing, so they retreated to gibberish. But it never got better. Consider this video from 1987. Take the two-and-a-half minutes to watch it. Let it inside. Be with me in 1987.

So. That’s the Amiga. It found niches—it was big in Europe, a favorite of hackers and programmers alike; it was beloved of video producers like my friend Tom. But it never became a true global platform. Microsoft Windows 3 came out in 1990, the beginning of a barely-challenged 20-year ascendancy; Commodore was out of business by 1994.

Like all also-ran underdogs the Amiga inspired a maniacal affection in its users that took decades to exhaust. Here’s an Amiga user in 2000 or later (his screenshot of “OS 3.9” can be used to date the video). Note that he is singing the same song from the 1987 video.

It was fun while it lasted.

4/10

Networks

Without

Networks

In 1987 my father and I went to the Amiga users’ group meetings in nearby Downingtown. These were held in a basement of a computer store with wood paneling. At the users’ group you could buy floppy disks for a few bucks, and on them would be items downloaded from local bulletin board systems. Hardly anyone had modems, so this was how files were transmitted. Tom would be at the user group meeting sometimes. Or he’d pick me up and drive me over if my father was busy.

A 1975 invitation to the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, which birthed the modern home computer industry.

This is how a network comes together. You bought something and then you wanted to understand it, so you went out and found other people. You found them via posters in hallways, or word of mouth, or by purchasing a magazine that caught your eye and then reading the ads in the back.

You’d go to a party and browse through the host’s record collection, chat about the album, and maybe decide to go see a concert together—or in some cases you’d start a band.

Another example: Steve Wozniak built the Apple I computer because he knew the people at the Homebrew Computer Club would think it was cool. He wanted to blow their minds, and he did. A lot of times when people talk about Apple, Inc.—one of the largest social and corporate structures in the world, larger than many governments—they talk about design, manufacturing, and vertical integration. But the main driver for Apple’s early excellence was that Wozniak wanted to look cool in his little nerd network. He’d show his work to friends and they’d show him what they were working on. Without that, nothing that followed.

Commodore considered buying Apple back when Apple was in a garage. Steve Jobs was interested in selling. It fell through.

5/10

The Nodal

Porch

A year after the Amiga showed up—I was 13—my life started to go backwards. Not forever, just for a while. My dad left, money was tight. My clothes were the ones my dad left behind, old blouse-like Oxfords in the days of Hobie Cat surfwear. I was already big and weird, and now I was something else. I think my slide perplexed my peers; if anything they bullied me less. I heard them murmuring as I wandered down the hall.

I was a ghost and I had haunts: I vanished into the computer. I had that box of BBS floppies. One after another I’d insert them into the computer and examine every file, thousands of files all told. That was how I pieced together the world. Second-hand books and BBS disks and trips to the library. I felt very alone but I’ve since learned that it was a normal American childhood, one millions of people experienced.

Often—how often I don’t remember—I’d go over to Tom’s. I’d share my techniques for rotating text in Deluxe Paint, show him what I’d gleaned from my disks. He always had a few spare computers around for generating title sequences in videos, and later for editing, and he’d let me practice with his videocameras. And he would listen to me.

Like I said: Avuncular. He wasn’t a father figure. Or a mother figure. He was just a kind ear when I needed as many kind ears as I could find. I don’t remember what I said; I just remember being heard. That’s the secret to building a network. People want to be heard. God, life, history, science, books, computers. The regular conversations of anxious kids. His students would show up, impossibly sophisticated 19-year-old men and women, and I’d listen to them talk as the sun went down. For years. A world passed over that porch and I got to watch and participate even though I was still a boy.

I constantly apologized for being there, for being so young and probably annoying, and people would just laugh at me. But no one put me in my place. People touched me, hugged me, told me about books to read and movies to watch. I was not a ghost.

DPaint V Animation

When I graduated from high school I went by to sit on the porch and Tom gave me a little brown teddy bear. You need to remember, he said, to be a kid. To stay in touch with that part of yourself. I did not do this.

6/10

General Instructions on

How to Emulate

Emulating is a nerdy hobby that takes an enormous amount of time. If you enjoy reading manuals for spreadsheet programs from 1983, you’ll love software emulation. (If your eyes glaze over at the thought, just scroll along your way.)

You typically need four things to emulate an old computer:

The emulator software. This lets your computer pretend it is a different kind of computer. It can range from commercial tools like VMWare Fusion which allows you to emulate a Windows PC on a Mac, to things like MAME, which pretends to be every kind of arcade machine, or VICE, which emulates the early Commodore computers. You can also buy emulators, like Amiga Forever or C64 Forever. Buying things means it’s all done for you and you can ignore the steps that follow. The ROM files. There’s a liminal kind of software called the BIOS, for Basic Input/Output System. This is the nervous system of a computer; it’s what’s already installed even before a computer starts to load its operating system. For most systems some enterprising nerd has pulled the ROMS out of hardware and given them a name like KXK1CFJ.ROM. These files are almost always copyrighted, so to find them you have to Google around for things like “mac plus ROM” and wade through a lot of weird hedging language to find what you need. Just look for phrases like: “You cannot download this file unless you own a ColecoVision Model X Grobbler Frog Controller” followed by a big blue link to the file you cannot download, that you must never download. The entire world of emulation is filled with references to very specific things that you should not seek out, that you must never Google, that you should definitely not obtain. An operating system. Once you have the emulator and the ROM it’s like you actually own a new, old, computer—but it lacks for an operating system. Want to experience System 6.08 for your Mac? Workbench 2 for the Amiga? Microsoft DOS 6.22? You’ll likely make a fake hard drive. Then you actually install the real, authentic operating system onto the fake hard drive. Sometimes you will need to “insert” fake “floppy disks” into the fake “floppy drive” in order to install the real operating system onto the fake “hard drive” on the fake “computer.” (This is accomplished by clicking buttons.) Then you’ll “reboot.” It’s all very weird. Software. You might luck out and find a virtual hard drive pre-loaded with hundreds of applications; then you can download that whole bad boy and just coast. I’ve got one for the Mac, it’s 542 megabytes of joy. Want to use Photoshop 1.0 in black and white with German-language menus? No? Well, I do. More likely you will need to download virtual disks. You can find these by searching around for the word “abandonware” plus the name of the operating system you like. Sometimes you will find lovingly tended sites like Macintosh Garden. There are also the TOSEC collections, which have tens of thousands of archived computer programs to choose from; just about every Amiga program is available. In general, abandonware websites are badly categorized nightmares that require you to click five affiliate links to download a 20 kilobyte DOS file—or hyper-categorized massive sets of tens of thousands of disks created by obsessive completists. Either way, whoa.

The world of retro-computing is scattered, chaotic, murky, and legally suspect—although major progress is being made by the Internet Archive, among other organizations, at bringing old software into the light. To my knowledge, no one has ever been prosecuted for downloading twenty-year-old word processing software.

Good luck.

7/10

Reunion

Last week my friend Jim emailed:

And all the Amiga memories. Man oh man. We’d trade equipment and software. He had a name for it: let’s “play ‘puters” he’d say. That’s Tom too. We were always hitting each other up for software. Wrote many a long serial number down for him.

In 2002, Jim and Tom and I got together and went down to an Amiga festival at a hotel in Maryland. It was—even by the standards of nerd events—well, it was rough. Men had Amiga logos woven into their beards. People with ailments sold disks out of worn cardboard boxes. I had expected it to be like an alumni weekend, a chance to get together and chat about old times. But these people were angry. I remember driving back and feeling stupefied. How could all that sweetness have leached from the world? I blamed Microsoft Windows.

But that was wrong. In truth, there was nothing to blame. Companies come and companies go and things turn out differently than you’d hope.

That’s the last long stretch of time I spent with Tom.

I don’t know why I drifted. He never took to email. I wanted distance from my family, from my childhood. I still know his phone number by heart. At least once a month I’d think of calling. Of going down for a visit.

We kept very loose tabs on each other through our mutual friend Jim. Using that oldest of networks, people talking about each other.

8/10

Selections from

My Week of

Emulations

Here is a late-1970s vintage

Xerox Alto running Bravo