New System, New Me

My mom loves to tell the story that one of the reasons they were able to start sleeping through the night when I was a few years old was because I would get up in the middle of the night, put a Sesame Street tape in the VHS player, and put myself to bed when it was over. When they were confused about how to use the VHS player, they would inevitably ask their kid for advice.

This dynamic only escalated over time.

Rob wrote a piece last week about the ritual he undergoes when buying a new PC, but ritual requires repetition. I’ve owned PCs over the years, but my relationship with PCs is mostly defined by large gaps in-between when I last owned one. It wouldn’t occur to run an old game and see how it runs on the new PC, because that requires me knowing how it originally ran.

My dad loved to buy new tech, but it was always on me to figure out how it worked while he would stand over my shoulder. We were, for example, one of the first to have a computer in my neighborhood. I can’t tell you what brand the machine was, other than it was a 486 66 machine that ran DOS. (We later owned a Compaq, but I’m fairly sure it was the machine after this?)  

Once we had the PC, my dad wanted to buy some software for it. There was a CompUSA near us at the time, but this was a different store. Despite my best attempts to jog my memory, I can’t remember it! But when we walked in, there was a massive standee for Doom II: Hell on Earth, and my dad could tell my eyes were drawn to it. For whatever reason, he decided to buy it, too.

That game was so fucking cool, and was unlike anything I’d played on a console. This was an era where whole genres of games didn’t even exist there. A shooter was like witnessing God for the first time, and I later had a similar revelation when Command & Conquer came out. 

This was the computer where I figured out how to do line-by-line memory management, so I could play games like Dark Forces. I’d write down the exact order of operations on a sticky note.

Some years later, Windows 3.1 was available and my dad eventually picked up a copy. I’m sure the installation process was supposed to be straightforward, but Windows 3.1 came out in the early 90s and I was not even 10 years old. The result of one of my first fights with my dad, as we tried to figure out the instruction manual. Bickering and tears later, we’d installed Windows.