(From fabric to Facebook. Sometime progress isn’t.)
I finally bought a new laptop (a computer, not an abdomen). And everything went just fine until I got cocky and tried to use it (not the abdomen, the computer).
I remember the first time I saw it (the computer). It beckoned to me from an online ad. It was thin, fast, smart, tactile, responsive, and had a mute button – half of me wanted to buy it, the other half wanted to date it. It was awesome, or sweet, or all that, or def, or non-epic fail, or the shizzle, or whatever phrase we’re using this week to represent the concept “good.” It was love at first sight, albeit a very sick, virtual, Oedipal, man-attracted-to-motherboard kind of love.
Until recently, I’d been immune to the urge to upgrade laptops. After all, I don’t play graphics-intensive games where the goal is to create graphic intensive-care victims. I don’t travel, I’m not an online social media junkie, and when I hear “algorithm,” I think oxymoron. (Al Gore doesn’t have rhythm.) Plus, my credit rating hovers somewhere between “house pet” and “Greece.”
See, I was entirely happy with my “old” laptop. It lets me type, though it doesn’t care much for my way cool grammar shizzle, or my speling, or my, like, literary style and stuff. It occasionally lets me win at Solitaire (but not Scrabble). It correctly performs complex mathematical calculations for me, as far as I know. It lets me drag colorful rectangles and circles from one place on the screen to another until they’re perfectly left-aligned, a disturbingly comforting exercise, I’ll admit, though completely useless from a business or social perspective.
Best of all, it lets me put it in my car and take it places, so I can be “working remotely” from anywhere. “Working remotely” is a complicated tax concept that essentially describes the act of paying exceptionally manipulative people to stay home and not work. “Working remotely” translates, roughly, as “not even remotely working.”
Historical Sidebar: Members of Congress refer to this handy little “money for nothing” trick as “getting to know our constituents.”
But, like many things in the life of someone who builds websites for a living, the “computer upgrade” decision wasn’t really up to me. Since I build websites for a living, I am effectively under the control of a global mega-power who, for legal reasons, I’ll refer to as MicroSauce. MicroSauce is an American company that makes software updates. That’s it. That’s their whole job – to release updates, version upgrades, and something called Service Packs.
(MicroSauce never says “bug fix.” They say “Service Pack.” And when you call them for support, they never say “Hello.” They say “I am having one or more help deskness for getting your MicroSauce to bliss.” I don’t know why that is. But half of me wants to date it.)
Now, I suppose that, if your entire corporate strategy is to sell updates to stuff, you have to figure out ways to keep updating stuff. And MicroSauce is very, very good at updating stuff. On any given day, they may release ten, fifteen updates, sometimes for stuff made by other companies, including food. Sometimes they’ll release an update to stuff that you’re updating, while you’re updating it, generating a system overload guaranteed to turn any defenseless computer into a whimpering idiot, reminiscent of James Mason during the closing scenes from “Lolita.” (Note: this may result in what is known as a “dual boot,” which is when you kick your computer off the back deck, then run down the deck steps so you can kick it again.)
But the real genius behind MicroSauce is their notorious ability to release software updates that condescendingly snort at your computer’s hardware. No matter what kind of pumped PC you own, it’s never enough for the next MicroSauce upgrade. It’s uncanny. Somehow, they find out. Somehow, they know.
(MicroSauce is also notorious for releasing upgrades that contain confusing messages like this: To finish, click ‘Continue.’ Pardon me? If I have to continue, then we’re not really finished yet, are we, Rinpoche?)
And since the cool tools I use to build websites are made by MicroSauce, I have to follow their cool tool rules. I have to comply with their “hardware requirements.” And so, recently, when MicroSauce released the latest updated Service Pack to upgrade my Service Pack’s upgraded update, my old computer simply could no longer keep up with the cyber-Joneses.
So, as they say in the hive-mind of the Star Trek Borg collective, and in the IRS, “Resistance is futile.” I had to upgrade my “ancient” computer.
According to the internet, the first computing device was something called the Jacquard Loom, an amazing device invented in 1801 by a European man named Joseph Loom.
Historical Sidebar: Joseph’s middle name was “Marie,” but apparently that happens a lot in Europe.
The Jacquard Loom was a relatively primitive device which, like my old computer, didn’t support RAM upgrades or federally-funded condom distribution in kindergartens. (On the other hand, my computer can’t make a quilt.) But what this revolutionary new loom did do was use punch cards to control individual warp yarns. Prior to this breakthrough, I suppose, gangs of rogue warp yarns just roamed the streets of Europe, sleeping in parks, holding up misspelled signs and demanding that corporations stop making all those nasty profits. I suppose Medieval tailors were forever running about, trying to manage great thundering herds of warp yarns, a futile effort which led directly to the invention of nudity.
Historical Sidebar: Ultimately, of course, warp yarns faced total extinction, along with dodos, dinosaurs, and Henry VIII’s wives. The last extant warp was memorialized in “The Warp of 1812,” a famous symphonic fresco by Charles Marie Dickens.
As it turned out, Madame or Monsieur Jacquard had not really invented the punch card system at all. He or she had only improved on an earlier invention, dreamed up around 1745 by one Jacques de Vaucanson, a flash-in-the-pan citizen immortalized by his coinage of the term “binary” (literal translation: “having two naries”). It was a very simple system: a hole meant Yes, no hole meant No. This system still works today, except in southern Florida elections.
But Joseph or Marie was a man or woman of action, and they collectively contacted a Vatican “fixer” named Tony the Nose, a campaign bundler who had a penchant for conflict resolution and a gift for negotiation. And a boat.
And the rest is history. The punch card-based machinery in the factories of Jacquard Loom, Inc., allowed an “ordinary” workman to produce the most beautiful patterns, quickly and consistently. It was an overnight success. Soon, people all over Europe were not naked, mostly.
But before Joseph Marie’s wife, Harold, could invent insider trading and file for an IPO, the plant had to shut down, because France was not a right-to-work etat.
Historical Sidebar: Many years later, another pre-computer innovator, Charles “Warp” Babbage, used the punch card idea to store programs in his “Analytical engine,” which he named after his goldfish, Google. And Google, of course, led to the internet, which was invented by Al Gore, driven into a ditch by George W. Bush, and miraculously saved by Barack Obama.