Over the past two years or so I've become increasingly bothered by the value my society places on technology. As I see fellow passengers on my bus rides holding more devices and fewer books, or people trying to walk down the street while typing something into a phone, or yet another advertisement for yet another portable computer, I find myself thinking about my own relationship to technology: what I think it can do, and why I embrace it in some of its forms while being disgusted by it in others. The one thing I can say with any degree of confidence is that it's complicated, and so rather than try to boil it down to anything definitive, I'll be writing a series of notes on the topic, beginning with a personal narrative and then trying to extract some general observations.

My relationship with technology goes back a long time, personally and historically. My first computer was a Texas Instruments 99/4A, which I got as an unexpected Christmas present, probably in 1983. The RF adaptor that let it display on the television was broken, and not understanding this, I stared for hours at the snow on channel 3 waiting for something to emerge. I had played a few video games on display models at stores, and that's probably what I expected to do with the computer. I'm not sure it occurred to me that the games were an expression of a complicated system of logical devices and instructions, until something broke and I was forced to consider things from an internal perspective.

Once we got the computer working I played my fair share of video games, but we only had a couple of them, and I started working my way through a book of BASIC programs. There was no way to save the programs so I was forced to write them out each time I wanted to run them. Gradually the exercise became less about typing as I started thinking about what the programs were doing. BASIC doesn't have a lot of complexity, but in many respects the instructions are close to what the microprocessor actually has to do, so it's a good way to learn fundamental principles of computer operation that more abstract languages obscure by design.

Around that time I met my best friend Jason, who was similarly fascinated by computers and how they worked. While other kids were stomping on angry mushrooms we wrote our own games. We were particularly interested in using computers to communicate with each other and with other nerds. We tied our parents' phone lines up for hours with our 2400 baud modems connecting to paleolithic networks called bulletin boards or BBSes. People could post notes and files publicly or send messages to other users. Information would filter slowly from one BBS to another, and we found documents that described how to build sound cards and other pieces of hardware. Not very many people even knew these networks existed, and the whole enterprise was new and exciting and a bit secret, as I imagine basic physics and chemistry were back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By the time I got to high school we were hearing rumors about something called the Internet. One of the BBSes we used was intermittently connected to it, so we were able to send email to anywhere in the world, though the turnaround was at least a day. That was still a lot faster than "snail mail", though its usefulness was limited by the fact that no one we knew outside of our little group used it. We eventually found out that my high school had a computer that was connected to the Internet all the time, so we could connect with modems and use it directly. There wasn't a lot out there, it wasn't linked up extensively, and everything was limited to text. The connection was too slow to send graphics anyway.

High school was also when I discovered Linux. I liked the idea of a system where I could see everything that was under the hood and tinker with it. There wasn't a lot of software, and pretty much everything required getting under the hood and tinkering. Tasks that would have been simple and streamlined under a commercial OS usually required a number of steps. The documentation was good, but it required a lot of searching, and good search engines were just a gleam in the computer industry's eyes back then.

I suppose I'm a bit nostalgic for the days when I had time and patience to tinker with things I didn't understand completely. I still get to do quite a bit of it in my work, which I'll discuss later, but there's almost always a goal these days, and if something someone else built happens to work well enough that's usually good enough for me. That change in attitude is undoubtedly a function of getting older and acquiring goals and responsibilities. There may be an analogous maturation process with technologies, progressing from questions about how things work, to how to apply them, to what one can use them for. Science to engineering to marketing, I suppose. But as I grow older my interests seem to have regressed. I loathe marketing, put up with engineering, and would really prefer to spend most of my time observing.