{"id":1352,"date":"2008-04-03T16:04:11","date_gmt":"2008-04-03T16:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2008-04-03T16:04:11","modified_gmt":"2008-04-03T16:04:11","slug":"back_in_the_good_old_days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2008\/04\/03\/back_in_the_good_old_days\/","title":{"rendered":"Back in the Good Old Days…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"This<\/a><\/p>\n

Man oh man… this photo of an 1983-vintage home computer desk, which I just spotted over at Boing Boing<\/a>, brings back a lot of memories. A lot<\/i> of memories. I didn’t have exactly this same set-up — I had the Atari 800XL<\/a> instead of the 800 model pictured here; my peripherals were a bit more spread out around my bedroom; and I never had a set of those groovy Burger King Jedi<\/i> glasses<\/a> — but there’s an extremely familiar vibe emanating from this image. I don’t even have to close my eyes to journey back, to once again hear Sammy Hagar blasting from my old Fisher cassette deck as I bang away at the clickety-clackety keyboard (sometimes I miss the weirdly satisfying noise and effort associated with that old keyboard; modern ones are so mushy in comparison…), working on one of my embarrassing early short stories that all seemed to be ripped-off Doctor Who<\/i> plots infused with some good old-fashioned teenage angst. The hard copies of those stories disappeared long ago, but I think there might still be electronic ghosts of them around, locked away on the dozen or so ancient five-inch floppy discs I know I’ve got somewhere in the Bennion Archives. If only I had a working five-inch drive and the know-how to capture the data to my modern PC! Embarrassing or not, I’d like to see them again…<\/p>\n

I never bothered to learn Atari BASIC<\/a>, and that mysterious activity known as hacking<\/i> held no appeal for me. I didn’t have any idea what you could do with a computer, really, beyond writing lousy adolescent fiction. It wasn’t much more than a sophisticated toy, so far as I could see. (That attitude probably wasn’t helped by the fact that you used an ordinary television for a monitor; if you got bored with whatever you were working on, you could just change the channel and watch Gilligan’s Island<\/i> or whatever. Which I guess isn’t much different from hopping online and seeing what’s shaking at Boing Boing, when you think about it…) I was savvy enough to recognize that the Atari Writer word processing program was far more convenient than the old portable typewriter I’d been using in my pre-computer days. I saved reams of paper by editing and perfecting — well, rewriting, anyway — my work before printing it out. But if someone had told me then that our entire economy and a pretty sizable chunk of our culture would one day revolve around these toys… well, people did<\/i> try to tell me all this was coming and I didn’t believe them. I thought computers would never amount to much more than fancy typewriters. Some would-be science-fiction writer I was, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Man oh man… this photo of an 1983-vintage home computer desk, which I just spotted over at Boing Boing, brings back a lot of memories. A lot of memories. I didn’t have exactly this same set-up — I had the Atari 800XL instead of the 800 model pictured here; my peripherals were a bit more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reminiscing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}