The Death of the Inner Techie

The first computers I owned, starting with an Apple II+, required a particular mindset. That II+ came with all sorts of manuals, including access to the operating system and BASIC, meaning that you could talk to the computer either in machine language or via your own homebrewed spaghetti code. BASIC was notoriously capable of working despite one’s crudity on laying down the code, and the best practices of programming never crossed one’s field of vision. Remember, there weren’t a lot of programs out there when PCs first came out, and half the fun of computer ownership was writing your own, however elementary.

On top of that, before long you were going to have to open the box. You were going to install more memory maybe (the II+ came with 48K of RAM), floppy disk drives, maybe even eventually a hard disk (my first, 40 whole megabytes, was an add-on to my Apple II GS). There were sound devices and modems that had to be put into the open board slots. There was a belief, probably true, that chips got unseated, and that it was a good idea if something wasn’t working right to open the box and press everything down firmly to fix the problem. There were just basic chip replacements as such, come to think of it. Opening the box required the ritual of, as the first step as you stared down into the circuit board abyss, to touch the internal power source to dispel any static electricity, which they warned would burn out your computer in the blink of an eye.

I had computer tools in my desk drawer until a few years ago, when I realized that I was no longer opening people’s computers in the office for whatever reason I had been so doing back when I did it regularly. I wasn’t a tech guy, I was an editor. Why was I opening people’s boxes and tinkering in there? I have no idea, but I did do it and I did fix stuff. A tiny, multiple head screwdriver was what the well-dressed tech-minded employee had to wear, if he or she wanted to keep things humming.

There was more than simple need behind this ability to program and to tinker with the hardware. I was doing it for other people—I wrote or helped design extensive DJ programs that are still running our business, and I operated inside the hardware of other people’s computers as well as my own—which means that there were plenty of people who didn’t program and who didn’t tinker, who just wanted the damned things to work. Reading the Jobs bio, one is reminded that Apple’s success was built, starting with the Mac, on selling to those people. And now, of course, Apple is at the forefront of the closed machine with its new retinal display MacBook (which Wired advises us is not the world’s greatest idea in many respects I’m not addressing here). But all my Apple devices are closed these days. And I can’t remember the last time I had to do anything remotely resembling programming, except when I’ve played around with Excel formulas for planning Round Robins, which I did more as a mental exercise than a real need.

What’s happened? Have I changed? Has the world changed?

I know for a fact that nowadays I want a computer, or comparable device in the computersphere, not to require me to do anything but work it. I don’t want to have to set it up, I don’t want to have to think much about maintaining it, and I don’t want to fix it. I just want to do stuff on it. I’m very seriously pondering acquiring an Air because I want something seriously portable but also capable of intense writing (which the iPad isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, even with my Bluetooth keyboard). The Air is closed. You can’t get in there for anything. You can’t change the battery. You can’t even stick a disk into it. A couple of years ago a bunch of us gathered around a friend who was going to change his own Gen 3 iPod battery, which we considered a miracle of ingenuity akin to inventing the light bulb. That may be the last time I was a part of anything remotely impressive on the tech side, absent folks I know who are actual computer technicians of one stripe or another, hard or soft.

My guess is that it is the world that has changed. In the 80s there were a bunch of us who had the spark of interest to go under the hood, and we helped get things started, but as soon as computers didn’t need us there anymore, they shut us out. By the same token, we went back to whatever it was that we were doing before we had to figure out how to debug a thousand lines of BASIC or some scripting language or other that was being tossed around. People who say that “kids nowadays know all about technology” know nothing about a) kids nowadays and b) technology. Aside from whatever some kids learn in their computer science classes, knowledge akin to what they learn in any of their other classes, whatever that means, we do not now have a generation of tech savants. We just have a generation of people who have been raised on devices that were not around when their parents were being raised. Those devices are, if anything, easier to operate now than their analogs were in their parents’ day. In other words, kids today have it easy as far as tech is concerned. Certainly easier than we did. How many kids today have ever had to adjust a set of rabbit-ear antennas just right in order to watch Star Trek in their dorm room? How many kids today know how to adjust the horizontal hold? Bah! Kids today! Get off my lawn!!!

Tech has changed so much. The whiz bang wonder is going away. Or maybe more correctly, a lot of us remain whiz banged, but the complexity behind the whiz bang has gone away. You just turn the stuff on and it works as advertised. And the funny thing is, I don’t think I long for the good old days. I’m perfectly happy not to need my little screwdrivers, my BASIC skills, or my ability to tie tin foil onto my rabbit ears.

I gave away my IIGS to O’C last year. I wonder if he has any little screwdrivers.
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