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.
Pam Troy 