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9-9-99
Thursday, September 9 1999
9-9-99
Hey, let's review:
4-4-44
My father was in England, and, like many American troops, was being trained to seize Western Europe from the Nazis.
5-5-55
My mother was about to graduate from high school in the Boston suburbs. Her father, Clarence DeMar, was the biggest living hero, living or dead, of the Boston Marathon.
6-6-66
My brother was one year old, and my parents lived in Chicago. My father was a professor at the University of Chicago and my mother was a substitute teacher in the Chicago school system. I wasn't around for any of this stuff.
7-7-77
I was nine years old and living where my parents still live, five miles south of Staunton, Virginia. I was probably playing every day in the stream when I wasn't tinkering with my Raleigh one speed bicycle. Intel's top-of-the-line processor was the eight bit 8085, which ran at 2 MHz and addressed 64 K of RAM, but I'd never heard of it. I had an island in Folly Mills Creek named Coualum, and in my childish fantasies it was presided over by an ancient patriarch named Mozart, who had learned to communicate with animals. Mozart believed in the sanctity of nature and he protected the vast tracts of wilderness on Coualum with a superpower fleet of aircraft carriers (as represented by plastic models bought at a Staunton drug store). I had an early version of the World Wide Web working on a peg board which received its data via antennas made of dried ragweed stalks.
8-8-88
I was 20 years old and my girlfriend was the cellist Lisa Joy Powley from King of Prussia Pennsylvania, my first true love. I hitch hiked from Staunton to Pennsylvania to visit her that summer. Back in those days I obsessively maintained a handwritten diary. That August, the volume (there were over 20) was called Morrison Set, named after some obscure Paleontologist. Practically all I did that summer was write in my diary, every single day. I drew little pictures in the corners, poetry in other places and figured out imaginative ways to represent the year "1988." In those days I had a Commodore 128 computer. It ran at 2 MHz, had an advanced form of BASIC and contained 128 K of RAM.
9-9-99
Now I'm 31, practically married to a girl from Down River Detroit, and I've sold my soul to corporate America. I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised back in 1977 to learn what I'm doing today. In my childishly futuristic fantasies, I believed in a networked world, a place where questions could be asked and answered across a network. Now here I am in the future, and my job is to make that system work. The computer I use at work is a 350 MHz Pentium II with 128 Megs of RAM. The computer I use at home is a 400 MHz AMD K6 with 192 Megs or RAM.
I ordered a Psion Series 5mx palmtop computer from Amazon.com today. It fits in my pocket, has a touch-typable keyboard, and 16 Megs of RAM. I'll never have to wonder about where I'll type again.
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