The end of my generation - and a list
Oct. 25th, 2017 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteHow does a person figure out what "generation" they're in? I think the only way is in retrospect. You need to be there when it begins, and live long enough to see how it's going to end. Well, enough time has passed that I can see the borders of mine.
My generation is the one that grew up with a particular thing in the house: A box full of electronics, heavy enough that it had to sit on a desk or the floor, with wires connecting it to a big rectangular viewing screen and a big rectangular keyboard made of physical buttons. It could connect to the internet, but poorly, and only with wires.
The end of my generation came with the rise of the smartphone. The computer is now considered the more serious and nerdy version of the smartphone, not the other way around. If there's a computer in the house it's almost always a laptop, or a sleek, sealed appliance, and it lives and breathes high-speed internet. It's not its own universe any more, but a gateway to another one. For the new generation, a computer without an internet connection is a broken computer.
The big box of isolated electronics was a critical part of my childhood development -- intellectually, socially, artistically, even emotionally. Now I am in middle-age, and those boxes are almost all gone, buried in landfills or smashed apart to recycle their guts. They linger as museum oddities, or nostalgic set decoration. No generation before mine had a chance to grow up in the home computer era, and no generation after mine will have it either.
Perhaps there are earlier examples in the long history of humanity where technological progress moved so fast that a generation found itself obsolete when it reached middle age ... but I can't think of any just now.
Today that kind of speed is a given. The generational borders feel narrower every year. Or perhaps that's just me, slowing down, and paying less attention. But, it seems to me that there's a gulf of experience between the first kids to wait in line for the Harry Potter movies, the first kids to play Guitar Hero, the first kids to like Justin Bieber, the first kids to dance Gangnam Style, and the first kids to play Pokemon Go, even though to me, they're all just kids. I wonder how they'll define their borders, in 20 years?
Anyway, in the 1980's, it was all about that big box of electronics, whether you had one at home or messed with one at school. As the box grew in versatility over the years, so did my creative ambition. Looking back, I'm surprised at all different ways I found to use it. For my own amusement I made a list of creative activities, describing the first time I used a computer for each activity. After I made the list I was surprised how much of it happened before the age of 20.
Writing:
1985, Age 9. I started keeping a regular journal, typed into a word-processing document using a program called 'PFS Write'.
Programming:
1988, Age 12. Sick of doing long-division homework, I wrote a program that did it for me, drawing each step on the screen. I handed the printout of the completed homework and the code to my teacher, who was a bit disoriented but gave me a few extra-credit points anyway.
Interface design, for software:
1989, Age 13. I wrote a map editor for a game called Ultima II, in a combination of Applesoft Basic and machine language, using a crude interface with a 2D grid view and a half-page of commands mapped to keyboard keys.
Music composition:
1989, Age 13. I'd pirated a program called "Music Construction Set" from a family friend. It displayed classical music notation and would play whatever you entered. After listening obsessively to the included music, I tried my hand at a short composition. It was only 20 seconds long but it had enough structure to be called music.
Game design and programming:
1989, Age 13. I'd done a lot of game hackery before this, but the first all-original game I wrote was a text adventure called "Escape From The Sewer". The language was AppleSoft BASIC, the structure was crude and full of GOTO statements, and the plot was an avalanche of gross-outs and poop jokes. Of course!
Transcribing and dictation:
1989, Age 13. As soon as word got around that I could type reasonably well, I got my first job: Transcribing the contacts list - names and addresses - out of a book and into a spreadsheet for a local ice cream shop. The pay was 5 cents per address, which at about 20-30 seconds each, was between 6 and 9 dollars per hour. Very good in 1988.
Accounting:
1990, Age 14. I was obsessed with buying a hard drive for my shiny new Apple IIgs. The fanciest one was called a "Vulcan Drive", and it cost a fortune to a kid like me. I didn't have the discipline to save my allowance money for the entire two years it would take, but I tried, by tracking my budget in a spreadsheet. I think I managed something like 40 dollars before I went nuts and blew it all on candy.
Collaborative Writing:
1991, Age 15. The local bulletin board (the Omni BBS) had a round-robin story going for months, and my friends and I dominated it. It was loaded with violence, monsters, music references, dumb sci-fi tropes, and juvenile and sexist bathroom humor. It made no sense and we thought it was hilarious. It went on for nearly a hundred pages.
Video editing and direction, visual effects, storyboarding:
1992, Age 16. I hit all of these at once with a short story called "A Story" that my friend Andy and I put together. We created a series of illustrations on the Apple IIgs using "Deluxepaint 2", including a very badly animated title screen. Then we plugged the video output of the computer directly into a VCR, and walked through the slide show while giving live narration into a microphone. The result was about as bad as you'd expect.
Electrical engineering:
1992, Age 16. My sister's boyfriend Michael wanted to build some good custom speakers. He had a couple of wooden boxes, and he needed to buy components that matched their acoustic properties. He found the relevant equations in a book, and together we transcribed the equation into a computer program and I wrote an interface for it: Put in the dimensions of the box and you got speaker sizes and crossover component values. Not the most sophisticated engineering, but it counts.
Graphic design:
1993, Age 17. Graphic Arts class. I used Illustrator and Photoshop to design several t-shirts, then printed the designs onto a transparency, which I used to create a silkscreen, which I used to make a bunch of shirts. The shirts have all corroded away, except for my favorite - a halftone drawing of Pippi Longstocking dancing a hornpipe with the word ANGST splashed across her in red.
Collaborative game design and programming:
1993, Age 17. This deserves its own category because team development of software is a very different experience from writing software alone. Me and two of my best friends formed a programming cabal and we tried to create a twisted version of Super Mario Brothers, called Super Merryo Trolls.
Music mixing:
1994, Age 18. I'd been obsessed with the movies Aliens and The Abyss for years, and as soon as I had a PC with enough storage space and a 16-bit audio card, I collected a bunch of sound samples from those two movies, and tried my hand at making "industrial music" out of them. The result was pretty good. Two tracks, which I called "Loader Fight" and "Medical Disaster", made it onto an industrial compilation album called "Battery Sentinel".
Trip planning:
1994, Age 18. Coordinating the Sierra City camping trip with my friends. MapQuest had just come online, and I used it to grab screen shots of maps, which I marked up in a paint program to create driving directions. We managed the equipment and scheduling over email, and dumped everything into a Word document.
Presentations:
1994, Age 18. I never had to make presentations in an official capacity until I had my first "real" programming job. That was a summer-long internship position where I was given a straightforward problem, and at the end of the summer I had to present my solution to the problem. It was my first use of PowerPoint. A few months later I did something more my style.
Photo retouching:
1998, Age 22. First year at UCSC. I had a 35mm film camera, and took pictures of all my new friends. Very few people had their pictures on the internet at this time, so it was a novelty to scan them in and put them up. One of my friends was overweight and self-conscious about it. In several of the pictures I meticulously cut her body down the center, starting at the neck, and moved the left half slightly over the right half. The effect was subtle and I never told anyone I did it.
Choreography:
1998, Age 24. I was playing Frank on stage in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Frank's performance has to sync up with a movie that's being projected behind him, and there are a few points where timing is critical. For example, people judge the skill of the person in that role on how perfectly they can hit the "-pation" part of the word "ancticipation" in the script, which comes after an interminable delay where there are no cues to help the actor out and the audience is shouting random lines back and forth at each other. I was really paranoid that I wouldn't hit my mark.
So I wrote a Windows program that would display a countdown - 4, 3, 2, 1, X - on the screen of a computer, and placed one up near the projection booth in the back of the auditorium, facing the stage. When the movie started I climbed back there and hit the key to start the program. The screen was completely blank except for three specific times in the movie, when it displayed the countdown. Kind of pathetic. But it counts!
3D modeling and rendering:
1998, Age 24. Cabrillo College Shakespeare class project. I recreated most of the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream, using 3D Studio Max to construct and light a theater stage, and populate it with 2D cutout characters I scanned from the class textbook and altered in Photoshop. Rendering a single frame on my home computer took 5 minutes. Once I had the idea, I got obsessed with it and spent about three weeks working on it at night between classes and work. I survived mostly on chocolate-covered espresso beans.
(This was 3 years after "Toy Story" came out, and I was just one guy with no budget. It looks like crap now, but back then it really surprised people.)
Sound design:
1998, Age 24. Shakespeare class project again. I recorded 2/3 of the sound effects for the movie into a handheld recorder, and stole the remaining 1/3 from pirated sound-effect collections. I combined these into a multi-track audio program called Cool Edit Pro, then applied reverb and echo to place them in the theater and match them with the camera position at each shot.
Singing practice:
2000, Age 26. I wanted to record myself singing, but the environment was too loud. So I took my laptop and locked it in the trunk of my car, then ran a microphone wire up through the access hatch in the back seat. I drove down to a local park, then sat in the front seat of the car and practiced my singing, trying to match up with a song I was playing on my headphones. Back home on the big machine I took the various takes and lined them up, and visually compared them to the original song.
Most of what I learned was, "I need to pay more attention to my pitch."
Mapmaking:
2004, Age 30. There are countless earlier examples where I used the computer to map something that only existed in a computer. In Alaska, I used a crude GPS receiver hooked to a laptop to drive around the town of Valdez and make a map of wifi hotspots. The local cops saw my van cruising around and were immediately suspicious, and ordered me back to the RV park, because they were in a panic about terrorist attempts to disrupt the oil refinery.
This "first" may not count anyway, because it's the only one where I used a laptop, instead of a huge desk-bound box.
Interface design, for hardware:
2007, Age 33. I used Solidworks 3D modeling software to design an enclosure with switches and lights, for a bicycle-mounted electronics project. Used a 3D printer to construct five sides of the box from ABS plastic, then a laser cutter to make the lid.
Electronic Circuit Design:
2007, Age 33. As part of my bicycle-mounted electronics project I designed a circuit board that would hold all the connectors and drop-in components I needed. It was windows-only so I ran it in an emulator. Can't remember the name of the program...
Not sure what the point of that was. I've been in a list-y mood lately, I guess!
My generation is the one that grew up with a particular thing in the house: A box full of electronics, heavy enough that it had to sit on a desk or the floor, with wires connecting it to a big rectangular viewing screen and a big rectangular keyboard made of physical buttons. It could connect to the internet, but poorly, and only with wires.
The end of my generation came with the rise of the smartphone. The computer is now considered the more serious and nerdy version of the smartphone, not the other way around. If there's a computer in the house it's almost always a laptop, or a sleek, sealed appliance, and it lives and breathes high-speed internet. It's not its own universe any more, but a gateway to another one. For the new generation, a computer without an internet connection is a broken computer.
The big box of isolated electronics was a critical part of my childhood development -- intellectually, socially, artistically, even emotionally. Now I am in middle-age, and those boxes are almost all gone, buried in landfills or smashed apart to recycle their guts. They linger as museum oddities, or nostalgic set decoration. No generation before mine had a chance to grow up in the home computer era, and no generation after mine will have it either.
Perhaps there are earlier examples in the long history of humanity where technological progress moved so fast that a generation found itself obsolete when it reached middle age ... but I can't think of any just now.
Today that kind of speed is a given. The generational borders feel narrower every year. Or perhaps that's just me, slowing down, and paying less attention. But, it seems to me that there's a gulf of experience between the first kids to wait in line for the Harry Potter movies, the first kids to play Guitar Hero, the first kids to like Justin Bieber, the first kids to dance Gangnam Style, and the first kids to play Pokemon Go, even though to me, they're all just kids. I wonder how they'll define their borders, in 20 years?
Anyway, in the 1980's, it was all about that big box of electronics, whether you had one at home or messed with one at school. As the box grew in versatility over the years, so did my creative ambition. Looking back, I'm surprised at all different ways I found to use it. For my own amusement I made a list of creative activities, describing the first time I used a computer for each activity. After I made the list I was surprised how much of it happened before the age of 20.
Writing:
1985, Age 9. I started keeping a regular journal, typed into a word-processing document using a program called 'PFS Write'.
Programming:
1988, Age 12. Sick of doing long-division homework, I wrote a program that did it for me, drawing each step on the screen. I handed the printout of the completed homework and the code to my teacher, who was a bit disoriented but gave me a few extra-credit points anyway.
Interface design, for software:
1989, Age 13. I wrote a map editor for a game called Ultima II, in a combination of Applesoft Basic and machine language, using a crude interface with a 2D grid view and a half-page of commands mapped to keyboard keys.
Music composition:
1989, Age 13. I'd pirated a program called "Music Construction Set" from a family friend. It displayed classical music notation and would play whatever you entered. After listening obsessively to the included music, I tried my hand at a short composition. It was only 20 seconds long but it had enough structure to be called music.
Game design and programming:
1989, Age 13. I'd done a lot of game hackery before this, but the first all-original game I wrote was a text adventure called "Escape From The Sewer". The language was AppleSoft BASIC, the structure was crude and full of GOTO statements, and the plot was an avalanche of gross-outs and poop jokes. Of course!
Transcribing and dictation:
1989, Age 13. As soon as word got around that I could type reasonably well, I got my first job: Transcribing the contacts list - names and addresses - out of a book and into a spreadsheet for a local ice cream shop. The pay was 5 cents per address, which at about 20-30 seconds each, was between 6 and 9 dollars per hour. Very good in 1988.
Accounting:
1990, Age 14. I was obsessed with buying a hard drive for my shiny new Apple IIgs. The fanciest one was called a "Vulcan Drive", and it cost a fortune to a kid like me. I didn't have the discipline to save my allowance money for the entire two years it would take, but I tried, by tracking my budget in a spreadsheet. I think I managed something like 40 dollars before I went nuts and blew it all on candy.
Collaborative Writing:
1991, Age 15. The local bulletin board (the Omni BBS) had a round-robin story going for months, and my friends and I dominated it. It was loaded with violence, monsters, music references, dumb sci-fi tropes, and juvenile and sexist bathroom humor. It made no sense and we thought it was hilarious. It went on for nearly a hundred pages.
Video editing and direction, visual effects, storyboarding:
1992, Age 16. I hit all of these at once with a short story called "A Story" that my friend Andy and I put together. We created a series of illustrations on the Apple IIgs using "Deluxepaint 2", including a very badly animated title screen. Then we plugged the video output of the computer directly into a VCR, and walked through the slide show while giving live narration into a microphone. The result was about as bad as you'd expect.
Electrical engineering:
1992, Age 16. My sister's boyfriend Michael wanted to build some good custom speakers. He had a couple of wooden boxes, and he needed to buy components that matched their acoustic properties. He found the relevant equations in a book, and together we transcribed the equation into a computer program and I wrote an interface for it: Put in the dimensions of the box and you got speaker sizes and crossover component values. Not the most sophisticated engineering, but it counts.
Graphic design:
1993, Age 17. Graphic Arts class. I used Illustrator and Photoshop to design several t-shirts, then printed the designs onto a transparency, which I used to create a silkscreen, which I used to make a bunch of shirts. The shirts have all corroded away, except for my favorite - a halftone drawing of Pippi Longstocking dancing a hornpipe with the word ANGST splashed across her in red.
Collaborative game design and programming:
1993, Age 17. This deserves its own category because team development of software is a very different experience from writing software alone. Me and two of my best friends formed a programming cabal and we tried to create a twisted version of Super Mario Brothers, called Super Merryo Trolls.
Music mixing:
1994, Age 18. I'd been obsessed with the movies Aliens and The Abyss for years, and as soon as I had a PC with enough storage space and a 16-bit audio card, I collected a bunch of sound samples from those two movies, and tried my hand at making "industrial music" out of them. The result was pretty good. Two tracks, which I called "Loader Fight" and "Medical Disaster", made it onto an industrial compilation album called "Battery Sentinel".
Trip planning:
1994, Age 18. Coordinating the Sierra City camping trip with my friends. MapQuest had just come online, and I used it to grab screen shots of maps, which I marked up in a paint program to create driving directions. We managed the equipment and scheduling over email, and dumped everything into a Word document.
Presentations:
1994, Age 18. I never had to make presentations in an official capacity until I had my first "real" programming job. That was a summer-long internship position where I was given a straightforward problem, and at the end of the summer I had to present my solution to the problem. It was my first use of PowerPoint. A few months later I did something more my style.
Photo retouching:
1998, Age 22. First year at UCSC. I had a 35mm film camera, and took pictures of all my new friends. Very few people had their pictures on the internet at this time, so it was a novelty to scan them in and put them up. One of my friends was overweight and self-conscious about it. In several of the pictures I meticulously cut her body down the center, starting at the neck, and moved the left half slightly over the right half. The effect was subtle and I never told anyone I did it.
Choreography:
1998, Age 24. I was playing Frank on stage in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Frank's performance has to sync up with a movie that's being projected behind him, and there are a few points where timing is critical. For example, people judge the skill of the person in that role on how perfectly they can hit the "-pation" part of the word "ancticipation" in the script, which comes after an interminable delay where there are no cues to help the actor out and the audience is shouting random lines back and forth at each other. I was really paranoid that I wouldn't hit my mark.
So I wrote a Windows program that would display a countdown - 4, 3, 2, 1, X - on the screen of a computer, and placed one up near the projection booth in the back of the auditorium, facing the stage. When the movie started I climbed back there and hit the key to start the program. The screen was completely blank except for three specific times in the movie, when it displayed the countdown. Kind of pathetic. But it counts!
3D modeling and rendering:
1998, Age 24. Cabrillo College Shakespeare class project. I recreated most of the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream, using 3D Studio Max to construct and light a theater stage, and populate it with 2D cutout characters I scanned from the class textbook and altered in Photoshop. Rendering a single frame on my home computer took 5 minutes. Once I had the idea, I got obsessed with it and spent about three weeks working on it at night between classes and work. I survived mostly on chocolate-covered espresso beans.
(This was 3 years after "Toy Story" came out, and I was just one guy with no budget. It looks like crap now, but back then it really surprised people.)
Sound design:
1998, Age 24. Shakespeare class project again. I recorded 2/3 of the sound effects for the movie into a handheld recorder, and stole the remaining 1/3 from pirated sound-effect collections. I combined these into a multi-track audio program called Cool Edit Pro, then applied reverb and echo to place them in the theater and match them with the camera position at each shot.
Singing practice:
2000, Age 26. I wanted to record myself singing, but the environment was too loud. So I took my laptop and locked it in the trunk of my car, then ran a microphone wire up through the access hatch in the back seat. I drove down to a local park, then sat in the front seat of the car and practiced my singing, trying to match up with a song I was playing on my headphones. Back home on the big machine I took the various takes and lined them up, and visually compared them to the original song.
Most of what I learned was, "I need to pay more attention to my pitch."
Mapmaking:
2004, Age 30. There are countless earlier examples where I used the computer to map something that only existed in a computer. In Alaska, I used a crude GPS receiver hooked to a laptop to drive around the town of Valdez and make a map of wifi hotspots. The local cops saw my van cruising around and were immediately suspicious, and ordered me back to the RV park, because they were in a panic about terrorist attempts to disrupt the oil refinery.
This "first" may not count anyway, because it's the only one where I used a laptop, instead of a huge desk-bound box.
Interface design, for hardware:
2007, Age 33. I used Solidworks 3D modeling software to design an enclosure with switches and lights, for a bicycle-mounted electronics project. Used a 3D printer to construct five sides of the box from ABS plastic, then a laser cutter to make the lid.
Electronic Circuit Design:
2007, Age 33. As part of my bicycle-mounted electronics project I designed a circuit board that would hold all the connectors and drop-in components I needed. It was windows-only so I ran it in an emulator. Can't remember the name of the program...
Not sure what the point of that was. I've been in a list-y mood lately, I guess!
