As I type this blog entry, I'm wiping the sweat off my forehead. It's a typical Midwestern August, warm and humid. I don't have air conditioning in the office; the apartment's layout makes keeping the entire apartment cool close to impossible. The a/c we do have is a room unit, cooling off the bedroom so that my wife and I can sleep without drowning in a pool of sweat. So I sit in the office, sweating and typing, taking in as much coolish air from the tiny fan in here as possible. It's not too bad; in fact, it's almost homey.
I wished I had the little fan when I first walked into my dorm room twenty years ago today. I remember the heat even then; the dorm building itself was very warm except in the stairwell. When I first received my dorm room assignment, I hadn't given much thought to cooling the room. I had lived in my grandparents' uncooled attic for the previous six years; anything was an improvement. The dorm itself, a 50's-style minimalist concrete bunker, held in heat like a kiln, and my bunk bed happened to be about a foot below an plaster-covered (and probably asbestos) pipe that added to the warmth. To say it was as hot as hell in that dorm room is an insult to hell. And that's where I started on the road to adulthood.
Given, it was my start on the road to adulthood. No student is a grownup in college, no matter how restrained or mature they appear to be. I certainly wasn't, and I showed it early on. Within three weeks, my roommate, a nice guy from a small town in rural Illinois, ran away, begging the resident hall director to reassign him to the non-psycho section of the floor. He was apparently genuine in his pleas: the resident hall did not replace him, so I had my dorm room all to myself for the remainder of my freshman year. Had I the social skills and good looks to attract the ladies, this would have been heaven on earth, but since I was an out of it dweeb, I spent most nights doodling on the computer in my underwear.
(Oh yes, there was a computer in my dorm room, that lovely year of 1989. Provided by the university, it boasted a monochrome monitor, a floppy drive, and enough memory to download entire kilobytes of whatever you wanted. It wasn't my first time on a computer (that would have been a TRS-80 back in '79; can you imagine home computers and disco existing at the same time? Wowzers.), but it was my first brush with the Internet. I fell madly in love.)
I can say, without hint of exaggeration, without that computer in my dorm room, I would have had far fewer friends in college (and adulthood) than I ended up with. Within that little box were nerds, freaks, geeks, outsiders, techies, Trekkies, and other social reprobates of all shapes and sizes, all connecting with each other in the form of ASCII characters on the green screen. It was an amazing little world that was opened up to me, this local network of people just as weird (but not quite) as me. It took folks some time to get used to the likes of me, but many did.
It blows my mind today that the server I logged on to could only handle 36 students at a time. We had internet access, but indirectly through another, larger university. (Posters to usenet groups had addresses that looked like this: bradley!bucc2!***@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu) The World Wide Web didn't exist; it could take hours to download one badly-altered nude photo of Madonna; the majority of students didn't have an e-mail address; many students at my school still typed their assignments with... typewriters. By the time I graduated five years later, none of that was true. Think about that. Do you think technology evolved that fast for the typical college student between, say, 1925 and 1930? Or 1971 and 1976? It was as if we had climbed into a slow-moving car that suddenly sped up to a hundred miles per hour. And it's only accelerated since. When I look at my computer, my cell phone, my iPod, 1989 seems much further back than it really is. And it really isn't that different: for example, as I finish this blog entry, I'm sweating in my underwear in front of my computer. Some things never change.
Well written, my old friend. well written indeed!
I remember when I heard from you a couple of years later and you told me to find out if my U had access to The Internet. I rattled off the various pre-web-webs (gopher? archie?), but had no idea what this Internet was you spoke of. We had no idea the rate of change we were in for, in a way that few generations before had experienced, I think.
Posted by: AlexJB | 20 August 2009 at 02:29 AM
I remember coding my papers when I was a freshman, and then I moved into some sort of IBM based word processor in was it sisson, and then to the Mac's in heuser. It was a heady 5 years of school for me. I didn't live in the Dorm of the Future, but I know exactly what you are talking about the damn place was a sweat box plain and simple.
Posted by: eighmie | 20 August 2009 at 07:28 AM
The word processor was Word Perfect. My last year at Bradley, they made the big step up to Windows, and such wonders of the world as a spreadsheet (Quattro Pro) with a GUI. I spent many idle late-night hours at the helpdesk playing mine sweeper.
Jerry and I wrote a report in HTML, but the only browsers available then ran on the Sun stations in the CS labs.
Posted by: Myke | 25 August 2009 at 11:21 AM