Rosa & the Kernel
Sometimes I feel sorry for them, all the people who lived and died before computers; but especially before the WorldWideWeb, the internet: a couple generations and more ago, six decades back, we were coming into computers, there was a huge IBM mainframe at my first Navy tour after commissioned Ensign Weller, at Newport, RI, TDY waiting for the next class of my next school to start in Georgia; Newport, where I spent the month observing and learning about their new pride and joy, and how it was used, and writing a "term paper" about it for the commanding officer, a Navy captain, by then the second four-striper 0-6 I had worked closely with and found the Navy's senior officers human and kind, not the stern Adversary I had feared from a distance my first days at OCS.
Before I continue, there are lots of asides, including that the lieutenant commander in charge of the IBM was not so kind, I forget his name, he seemed jealous and resentful of my unrestricted access to his charge, his Baby. And Lieutenant Adair, who took pity on me a Southerner who, that cold, icy, snowy January 1958, daily walked on the side of the road in the melting snow a mile each way, between BOQ and TDY station with neither rubber overshoes nor overcoat, soaking and whitening with salt my shiny black shoes before I arrived for work each morning. Seeing this, LT Adair took me to dinner once, for kindness but actually because he realized I knew nothing yet, had arrived directly from OCS with about ten dollars for the month and not realizing that, now an officer, I would no longer be fed free by the Navy in the General Mess, and so buying an avocado at the grocery every other day and having half of it for lunch with free salt seven days a week that month. LT Adair arrived on PCS a couple weeks after I arrived TDY, and immediately was sent away for a month TDY to Chicago before assuming his new duties at Newport, so lent me his car to use while he was away, a red and white 1955 Buick Century four door hardtop with red and white interior,
sealing forever my already lifetime love of Buick cars. A Naval Academy graduate who may have been intending to finish his obligated service and leave, also sold me his heavy wool Navy overcoat, for ten dollars, and his Navy sword. Upon retiring twenty years later, I gave them both to Joe, the overcoat sans shoulder-boards.
Oh, but computers, eh, and the internet.
Five years later, in a computer class at the University of Michigan, I learned to write a program, type the related IBM punch cards and, having made a get-in-line appointment with the university's mainframe, tested and proved my program to the professor's satisfaction for a passing grade. Fifteen years further downstream, I learned how to use the new "personal computers" and bought an
Apple IIe, paid $3200 for my first one, nothing but the best, 128 kb, twin drives for floppy discs, one drive for software discs, the other for data discs, before Windows. Some three decades later, wanting a working one on which to run old floppy discs, I paid $5 for an identical IIe on EBay, almost brand new unused.
Which does in fact bring my musing to the WWW, the internet. Thirty years or so ago we began to hear, read, about an upcoming marvel that would put at our fingertips, instant access, via our home computer, to everything even remotely imaginable. I did not really believe it, but shortly thereafter, my mind was blown when Tass away at college in Virginia began telling me about exchanging emails with Jeremy in England, as in "e-mail? what's that?" And then being totally blown away when the president of her college in Virginia, in her graduation address that Spring 1994 morning, told of going online to directly access for her graduation address, information from a college library in New England. In short order it all came to pass and I was raiding "online" whatever that meant, the Vatican library in Rome for documents I'd heard of and dreamed of seeing but thought would never happen. So now I'm thinking about and starting really to feel sorry for George Washington. And myself for having to spend so much time in the university library at Gainesville, and in that carrel at Ann Arbor.
Because now, and in some ways I envy the generation of my great-great grandchildren but will return briefly to them, the entire works, short stories, poems and novels of William Faulkner (it was Falkner, William himself later added the "u") are available online, to download and read free on demand, including enlarging the the print, the type size, for better and faster reading than in the little pocketbook gifted to me. Yesterday, while in a waiting room anxious for the doctor, I read "Barn Burning" and "The Tall Men" about the worst we can be, both subhuman that we once called "white trash" and the incredible stupidity of government and rule by bureaucracy; then shifted back to Absalom, Absalom! to find out why Aunt Rosa Coldfield packed up and blasted back to Jefferson to abide spinster lifelong in a huff of moral outrage:
"her Cassandra an ancient stiffjointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April’s compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry; would not have had to be blown back to town on the initial blast of that horror and outrage to eat of gall and wormwood stolen through paling fences at dawn."
Yes, it's all there, twisted, strange, repetitive, contradictory, the WWW as promised, offering the most godawful as well as best and godblest forty million related and irrelevant links imaginable at the tap of a key and the blink of an eye.
Breakfast eaten, second cup of coffee sipped and down. A good night's sleep and ready for almost whatever the morning can bring.
T
Ah, I meant to return to generations hence: perhaps another time then. But it was going to be about my gratitude for having lived in this generation, with marvels that George Washington could never have imagined, and in the America I have known and loved, rather than in the fearsome America that will be for them two, three, four generations beyond me, even with the marvels that they will have far beyond anything I could ask or imagine. My country, 'tis of thee ...
“Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?"
Before I continue, there are lots of asides, including that the lieutenant commander in charge of the IBM was not so kind, I forget his name, he seemed jealous and resentful of my unrestricted access to his charge, his Baby. And Lieutenant Adair, who took pity on me a Southerner who, that cold, icy, snowy January 1958, daily walked on the side of the road in the melting snow a mile each way, between BOQ and TDY station with neither rubber overshoes nor overcoat, soaking and whitening with salt my shiny black shoes before I arrived for work each morning. Seeing this, LT Adair took me to dinner once, for kindness but actually because he realized I knew nothing yet, had arrived directly from OCS with about ten dollars for the month and not realizing that, now an officer, I would no longer be fed free by the Navy in the General Mess, and so buying an avocado at the grocery every other day and having half of it for lunch with free salt seven days a week that month. LT Adair arrived on PCS a couple weeks after I arrived TDY, and immediately was sent away for a month TDY to Chicago before assuming his new duties at Newport, so lent me his car to use while he was away, a red and white 1955 Buick Century four door hardtop with red and white interior,
sealing forever my already lifetime love of Buick cars. A Naval Academy graduate who may have been intending to finish his obligated service and leave, also sold me his heavy wool Navy overcoat, for ten dollars, and his Navy sword. Upon retiring twenty years later, I gave them both to Joe, the overcoat sans shoulder-boards.
Oh, but computers, eh, and the internet.
Five years later, in a computer class at the University of Michigan, I learned to write a program, type the related IBM punch cards and, having made a get-in-line appointment with the university's mainframe, tested and proved my program to the professor's satisfaction for a passing grade. Fifteen years further downstream, I learned how to use the new "personal computers" and bought an
Apple IIe, paid $3200 for my first one, nothing but the best, 128 kb, twin drives for floppy discs, one drive for software discs, the other for data discs, before Windows. Some three decades later, wanting a working one on which to run old floppy discs, I paid $5 for an identical IIe on EBay, almost brand new unused.
Which does in fact bring my musing to the WWW, the internet. Thirty years or so ago we began to hear, read, about an upcoming marvel that would put at our fingertips, instant access, via our home computer, to everything even remotely imaginable. I did not really believe it, but shortly thereafter, my mind was blown when Tass away at college in Virginia began telling me about exchanging emails with Jeremy in England, as in "e-mail? what's that?" And then being totally blown away when the president of her college in Virginia, in her graduation address that Spring 1994 morning, told of going online to directly access for her graduation address, information from a college library in New England. In short order it all came to pass and I was raiding "online" whatever that meant, the Vatican library in Rome for documents I'd heard of and dreamed of seeing but thought would never happen. So now I'm thinking about and starting really to feel sorry for George Washington. And myself for having to spend so much time in the university library at Gainesville, and in that carrel at Ann Arbor.
Because now, and in some ways I envy the generation of my great-great grandchildren but will return briefly to them, the entire works, short stories, poems and novels of William Faulkner (it was Falkner, William himself later added the "u") are available online, to download and read free on demand, including enlarging the the print, the type size, for better and faster reading than in the little pocketbook gifted to me. Yesterday, while in a waiting room anxious for the doctor, I read "Barn Burning" and "The Tall Men" about the worst we can be, both subhuman that we once called "white trash" and the incredible stupidity of government and rule by bureaucracy; then shifted back to Absalom, Absalom! to find out why Aunt Rosa Coldfield packed up and blasted back to Jefferson to abide spinster lifelong in a huff of moral outrage:
"her Cassandra an ancient stiffjointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April’s compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry; would not have had to be blown back to town on the initial blast of that horror and outrage to eat of gall and wormwood stolen through paling fences at dawn."
Yes, it's all there, twisted, strange, repetitive, contradictory, the WWW as promised, offering the most godawful as well as best and godblest forty million related and irrelevant links imaginable at the tap of a key and the blink of an eye.
Breakfast eaten, second cup of coffee sipped and down. A good night's sleep and ready for almost whatever the morning can bring.
T
Ah, I meant to return to generations hence: perhaps another time then. But it was going to be about my gratitude for having lived in this generation, with marvels that George Washington could never have imagined, and in the America I have known and loved, rather than in the fearsome America that will be for them two, three, four generations beyond me, even with the marvels that they will have far beyond anything I could ask or imagine. My country, 'tis of thee ...
“Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?"