In 1990, Cousin Charles Raymond came to visit me in The Haight Ashbury with an armload of floppy discs. “We’re going to put Wordstar on your computer,” he said, “And I’m going to teach you Harvard Graphics and how to program in DOS and Basic.”
Wordstar I understood. I was writing articles before the turn of the century, and the term Word Processor was the big buzz. CR showed me how to use <ctrl> and <alt> + [whatever] to format lines, paragraphs, bold, etc. Harvard graphics was a little tougher. But when I discovered I could manipulate photographs with it, the motivation to learn overcame my fear.
Programming was different. I told CR that if I had known algebraic thinking would be lucrative someday, I would have paid attention instead of throwing spitballs. I missed that boat. Suddenly nerds were turning up with boatloads of cash because they could type long strings of jibber-jabber without errors and arrange it in logical, efficient patterns because they had paid attention in algebra class.
My girlfriend’s brother-in-law and his lovely wife were eeking out a living in Berkeley. Just before she had triplets, Nat’s software, a DOS/Apple converter called Tip-Top, hit big time. They raised those 3 boys in comfort.
Another fin de siècle ushered in another new era. In the Gay 90s it was electricity and light bulbs. In the post-cold war ‘90s, the dharma came to the householders along with the personal computer. Young millennials grew strong thumbs playing Pokémon. Their Gen X brothers and sisters wrote code. We Boomers entered our 40s with the first glimpse of the vampire Lestat’s warning, “Immortality is not for everyone. After 200 years or so, things change so much we can’t stand it.” Anne Rice was a visionary.
Piriformis Syndrome: the anatomy of a pain in the butt 