December 19, 2002
I Blame it on the Betamax
I blame it on the betamax. You see, when I was three or four years old and lived out in the country, my parents got a betamax machine. My sister and I were prohibited from touching the betamax. I think my parents were afraid we would break it. Of course I accosted it whenever my parents were gone. They kept a collection of National Geographic tapes recorded off the TV. I would put them in and watch them over and over operating the machine with as much grace as my little fingers could muster. I remember once when my dad put the Betamax on pause while he checked on the donkey we kept out in the field. The machine started playing again after being on pause for a few minutes. He could not understand why. I thought about it and figured that if the read-head kept moving over the same piece of tape for too long it would wear it out and eventually break it. I tried to explain this to my dad but he did not seem to understand me. I think I was too young to make myself understood.
When we moved to the city my dad got an Atari computer. I used to play 'Load Runner' on it. At first I had to ask him each time to load the game for me. I paid attention to the commands he typed in to get the machine to load off the audiocassettes though and eventually was able to do it myself. One day he exchanged the Atari for a Commodore computer. He loaded a new program on the Commodore called Basic. Basic made a lot of sense, but never seemed to be very good for anything other than making fun shapes move around the screen. The Commodore had an expansion board that stuck out the back and extended its memory to the maximum 64 Kilobytes. I did not know what a Kilobyte was but I knew that board made it possible for my Basic programs to get bigger.
When I was eleven a friend of my dad's got a computer called a Macintosh. He did not know what to do with it so he gave it to my dad to hold in his apartment in exchange for lessons. I used to make pictures on the Macintosh and print them out of the ImageWriter that was attached to the computer. I liked making very dark images so the paper would be saturated with ink. I liked the way the ink smelled. We moved to the US from Colombia that year, my sister my mom and I. My dad stayed behind, as did the Macintosh. My parents were separated and filing for divorce.
In the US we were too poor to have a computer. I did not get to play with one until I got into the 7th grade and took the computer class in my Junior High School. You were supposed to be in the 8th grade to take the computer class but I had done my entire math early and was able to convince the teacher to take me in. They had Commodores in that class. I was glad to see a familiar face so far from home. These Commodores were newer and faster. We were supposed to be learning Basic but since most of it was catch-up from what I had taught myself I mostly played. For my final project I wrote a program, which made it look like the computer was dialing a modem out and had managed to log into a government mainframe. My teacher fell for it. I had to show her how it worked, how it did nothing more than paint pretty screens and spit out messages with intervals in between. I thought I might fool a classmate or two but had not expected the teacher would think the dialup was real, I mean we did not have any modems. I started to question the value of my education that year. She did not invite me back to the class for the 8th grade.
I started work at a Little Caesars Pizza when I turned 14. They were not supposed to hire me until I turned 14 and a half so they paid me under the table. By now my mom had a steady job at just about minimum wage and we did not live in subsidized housing anymore. My sister volunteered at a hospital. They did not pay her, so the money I made washing dishes was needed to help pay the rent. About half of my check went to help with rent, the rest went to music tapes and into savings. I had a few hundred dollars saved from that job when I quit. I got a job as an intern during the summer through a school program. The internship paid very little but kept me too busy to spend the money I made. By the end of that summer I had enough cash saved up to buy my own Macintosh Plus and a 40MB Hard Drive. The Macintosh II was out but I knew it would take at least another year to save that much money and a Plus would do me fine. The next year I worked as a bag boy at a local Safeway. They broke all kinds of child work laws there, keeping me at work until midnight on school nights and not giving me the proper break times. I came home from school, did as much homework as I could and then went to work. I still made time to work on my computer after work and before bed. Young people have an amazing amount of energy.
By the time I graduated I had made enough money to replace the aging 40GB hard drive with a brand new 80MB model and to upgrade the RAM in my computer to the maximum 10MB. I installed the RAM myself. I was very proud of that. When I think back on it I am very lucky I did not electrocute myself. The Macintosh Plus has a monitor built in you see, and monitors have capacitors that can keep a charge for days. A deadly charge. A monitor capacitor discharged itself on me while I was in college. Knocked all 215 pounds of me right on the floor. My last thoughts as I passed out were 'oh shit, I am the only one with keys to this room, I hope someone finds me'. I was very lucky my Mac did not try to kill me when I put the RAM in. My Mac would never try to kill me. Lisa liked me.
In college nothing made sense. I did not go to parties. I did not know how. When by some lucky accident I ended up at a social gathering a bong or dope pipe would eventually come out and I would leave. Why would people gather to inhibit their minds from working? It made no sense. My Mac made sense. Lisa always made sense. She was predictable. I knew that if something went wrong it was because I did something wrong. Something I could figure out and correct. Lisa did not like my first girlfriend. She would start acting up. Locking up and being weird whenever my girlfriend tried to touch her. I eventually had to start hanging out at my girlfriend's apartment rather than my own. That did not last very long. My girlfriend's apartment felt weird. Her roommates were these earth hippies who did drugs and grew organic foods out behind their dorm. I came back. That year I renamed my Mac to an androgynous name: Paco. Paco stood by me through college. Whatever happened, I knew Paco would be there for me, perfectly patient and understanding.
I studied computers and film in college. I love computers and I love films. I worked at the school's computer center all 5 years I was there. At the end of it they had to make up a new position for me. I had become too good at taking care of the computers to spend time behind the desk telling people how to underline. When I broke up with my second girlfriend I was devastated. I started spending nights at the computer center (by now they had trusted me with a key so I could come in while the center was closed). I would sit in my little cave in the back among all the carcasses of the computers I was repairing or assembling. The computers took my mind off my heart. I was learning a lot faster now. I mainly learned how much I did not know. That year I asked the school's Systems Administrator to teach me UNIX. He refused to give me an account on any of the Schools UNIX computers. I think he was afraid I would make trouble. He was right. I asked my boss at the computer center to help me get an account. He would not. I asked my teacher to help me. She could not. I asked her Dean to help me. He talked to the head of computing resources, who talked to the director of Computing who talked to the Sysadmin. The Sysadmin brought an old UNIX workstation out of the basement and put it on a desk for me, away from any network cables. He had to heat the hard drive up to get it to spin. He said he could not remember any of the administrative passwords on this dinosaur and that I would have to make do with a guest account that was locked out of most of the system. I only learned so much from the guest account and had to hack the administrative passwords out to go further. It is probably best that they did not start me on a real system. This little box proved a safe little sandbox for me to play in. I crashed it a lot, which was fine because I was the only one trying to use it. I learned all I could from it and turned it off. That year I figured out how to get onto one of the school's administrative systems. I did not want to harm anything so I was careful with it. I learned to force it to dial out to another computer, one at the University of Washington. From there I would use the Internet to connect to a computer at the University of Minnesota. This was my new playground. I used a set of anonymous accounts to move around the Internet.
When I graduated from college I became a Systems Administrator. I had taken an oath in college never to become a Sysadmin. I took this oath when saw the school's Sysadmin emerge from his caves deep below the computing building pale and sick from too many days of not seeing daylight. I broke my oath, but for a special reason. I work at a company that makes films with computers. My last year in college I made films with computers and films about computers. I feel right at home. My co-workers are great and so is the pay.
Last year I bought a new home computer, a Power Macintosh 7300. Its name is Opus. The Macintosh G3 was out but I knew it would take at least another year to save that much money and a 7300 would do me fine. I keep Paco snug and safe in his original box in my garage. I still have his original hard drive and all the software I bought, borrowed or stole for him. Someday I will get married, and after the honeymoon I will take Paco out of his box, insert the system disk, boot him and introduce him to my new wife. She will probably think I am crazy, but it is best she know about my loves early to avoid any jealousy.
I was recently trying to describe what I do to someone who had never heard of a Systems Administrator. The best description I could think of was 'Computer Husbandry'. She knew a lot about horses and this made sense to her. I spend a lot of time thinking about why I do what I do. The best answer I can think of is 'I am good with things with buttons'. I have lived among machines with buttons on them all my life. One of my first machines was this Betamax that would show me all kinds of wonderful movies. I blame it on the Betamax.
