Tag: the-80s

February 1st, 2024

Daily writing prompt
Write about your first computer.
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INTERTEC SUPERBRAIN (WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

Big, with a tiny, dark screen that showed yellowish-green letters when you typed. It took old black floppy disks, large square things that were literally “floppy”, as in bendable, and it sat on the desk in the living room of the first apartment I shared with my boyfriend in Chapel Hill. I remember it through a veil of umber colors, a reflection of that apartment’s wooden floor and the old-money aura fashionable in the Reagan era. You can see it in the lighting of some movies in the eighties, like Once Upon a Time in America and The Verdict.

To get to USENET or some other site, we plugged it into the phone outlet and typed in a few lengthy commands, probably in DOS. There would be a horrible, almost indescribable scraping noise before we connected. Being online was a tenuous state of being. Interference on the line would result in random characters (#^&#!) appearing in the middle of whatever you were typing, so your perfectly reasonable Usenet post about the inroads Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was making on US political discourse would appear to be peppered with profanity. This, perhaps, is what laid the groundwork for the future tenor of online discussion.

On days when there was a lot of “noise” in the ether, it did no good to complain to the phone company because we weren’t supposed to be using the phone outlets to go online. Or at least, that’s what my software engineer boyfriend told me. It was never clear to me what the phone company would do about it. I just know that in those days, “The Phone Company” was still enough of a monolith that we didn’t want to mess with it.

Also, it was important to remember not to answer the phone if it rang while we were online because that would knock us off entirely.

Our poor Superbrain didn’t last long before it was replaced with a 1984 Mac. I don’t know what happened to it. Probably discarded when we moved to a new apartment . Maybe it got dismantled for parts, but I’d like to imagine it as still intact and in a museum somewhere.
January 1st, 2024

Sun threw a dinner that night in Chinatown so we went. We stopped at home so I could change to my little black dress, then we walked to the Powell Street trolly and rode it to Clay.

It feels smug to ride something people consider a tourist attraction. The Powell Street cable car goes past many hotels — the Francis Drake, the St. Francis-Westin (where I stayed in 1973). We found our seats in the middle of a trio of funny, loud tourists from Little Rock Arkansas. They were right out of Designing Woman, two pretty young things with carefully hot-ironed hair and a plump, blonde good old girl. They all giggled a lot, and exclaimed over the cable cars. The conductor assumed a long-suffering air when he learned that their tickets had expired and just stood there intoning, “you need to pay me, ladies” while the good old girl ruffled through her singles in an obvious attempt to pay him.

The dinner was at the Celadon on the corner of Stockton and Clay. Pretty ritzy. There were about ten of us, Jennifer, with bouffanted hair, Lisa, the office manager with dark hair, two French guests, an Italian man, a hard-of-hearing man and his wife, (they wore hearing aids and had barely perceptible accents, a slight slurring of consonants) and a husband and wife with their little girl. We all sat at a huge wheel of a table and the courses were placed on a lazy Susan in the middle. White wine, Szechuan beef, sweet and sour chicken, crispy duck. I had no idea I could eat so much.

The topic of the conversation tonight was the fact that Tim has — at last! — frozen the code on Tops Terminal. I know only that this means at least one stage of the product is finished. It was hard not to feel proud of him, listening to everyone discuss the product, and know he is relieved to have so much behind him.

The party broke up at about nine and we rode another cable car back. This time there weren’t any obvious tourists. The car was almost empty, and the conductor scolded every passenger as they got on except for Tim and me. He said he liked the way we signaled.

Tops Terminal, where Tim worked at that time, was a division of Sun. It was, I think, through Tim’s acquaintance with John Gilmore (whose employee number at Sun was five) that we’d moved to the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley culture was still new, and I was simply an onlooker by way of my relationship with Tim. I wish I could remember more about what the conversation was like at the Celadon. A weird evangelism permeated hi-tech at that time. “But there’s an opening at (fill in start-up here)“ was the most frequent response when one of Tim’s cronies discovered I worked at LOCUS, followed by a troubled silence when I revealed my undergraduate degree was in English and I had no interest in learning to write code.

I recall nothing like that at the Celadon, only that I felt very adult in my little black dress and heels and proud of the fuss they were making over Tim. I looked across the table at the little girl with her parents and wondered what she would remember about it.

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December 29th, 2023

This morning I did not get up in time. I kept having such fascinating dreams that I would go back to sleep to see how they ended. Never returned to the same one, though. I only barely remember a couple of them. One was about a burglar in an attic and another had me talking to Alice Walker while she lay in a hospital bed.

It was one of those vague, gray days at work that are common in between issues. Since the next issue is Locus’ 20th anniversary, Charlie wants to publish a list of the original subscribers when Locus came out in 1968. I typed the names in from the card catalogue Charlie (or his wife) had put together two decades ago. Quite a distinguished list — Robert Silverberg, of course, A.C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, George Scithers, Chelsea Yarbro…

He wants the rest divided up into those who still have subs, those who have died, those who are still active in fandom, and those who aren’t much of anything. I spent most of my time working on this and his CD file. Charlie wasn’t there much of the day because he and Shelly had to go to Sacramento to check the issue.

How long ago “two decades ago” seemed to me back then, and how short a time it seems now.

Perhaps this was when I found the photos of Charlie and his first wife in Locus’ “morgue,” — black and white shots of them picnicing with friends, lounging on the grass in a Boston park. She was pretty and slender, Charlie stout, crew-cut, clean-shaven and serious. I looked at these with the slightly disbelieving curiousity of a twenty-something examining a youthful photo of an “old person.” (Charlie was fifty-one in 1988.)

1968? That was a lifetime ago! I was TEN that year.

I wish I could remember what I was typing these lists into — Wordstar? More likely it was Dbase, the first database I ever used, or tried to use. I remember it as nightnarishly clunky and non-intuititve.

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December 26th, 2023

I didn’t want to repeat the mistake I made last week in taking nothing but a pair of picture magazines, Vogue and House & Garden, to the laundromat so I walked down to Tro Harper and bought a good, thick book, a Dickens I haven’t read yet, Dombey and Son. I’ve finished the first five chapters, and I’ll probably chew my way through the rest of the book this week.

Like my shopping, my laundry is done far away. I use the laundromat across the street from where Tim’s sister used to live on 21st Street.

In the laundromat everyone around me speaks Spanish and I feel like a bright yellow dot. When I go to the grocery store next door to get detergent, the clerks speak Spanish until I walk up, and they chirp in perfect English “dollar ninety-five.”

Today, when I went into the back of the grocery to see if they had crawfish for sale, the old gentleman behind the deli counter said “que lindo pelo,” and patted his head. I smiled and thanked him . As I left, I could hear him saying “que lindo, que lindo” and explaining something to the lady that worked with him. Everyone likes my hair.

I was young, I was pretty and, once a month, I went through the long, stinging ordeal of having my hair razored down into a perfectly arced buzzcut and then peroxided to a whitish blonde with blue lights. At the time, I was slender enough that the result made me look delicate and exotic rather than butch. Add a black angora turtle neck, a leather bolero jacket, tight black jeans, gold hoop earrings, lots of eyeliner, and bright red lipstick, and I ready to club South of Market. I got into at least one place for free by allowing the bouncer to run his hand over my head.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Tag: the-80s