Hello, World!
When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I took a computer class after school. I don’t remember the grade exactly, but I do remember I was a year younger than the cutoff age, so I needed special permission.
We (I think there were three of us) dialed into a DEC VAX mainframe at Franklin & Marshall College less than a mile away from our terminal at school. That lone terminal in my school’s first computer room was just a keyboard attached to a printer, and when you typed the word “RUN”, it would clatter letters across a wide, flowing accordion of green-bar paper that chugged through on tracks of plastic teeth. The first program they taught us to write printed the words, “Hello, World!”
I’ve watched the internet grow up, from an earnest and quirky friend at the outset, to that loud, drunken stranger at the party who won’t leave you alone. The guy who follows you home, passes out on your nightstand, and talks at you from breakfast until bedtime while you’re trying to live your life. No one signed up for that.
I want this space to feel like a throwback, for me and for anyone reading. I’ll post about the music I’m making and listening to, about art, about ideas I have and feel like sharing, and other interesting stuff that happens. Or more likely, I’ll post nothing at all. But today is day one, so as computer tradition has it, I say, “Hello, World!”
Image of that lovely yellow DECwriter courtesy of: User LPfi on the Swedish Wikipedia (on Commons: LPfi), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
