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This took an enormous amount of work. To make the tower case fit in the most convenient place, I had to saw a slot in one of the shelves. Then there was the business of getting the cantankerous SCSI chain working for long enough to transfer the 30 or 40 thousand files to fresh new magnetic fields. Of course, then came the oligatory double INIT conflict that couldn't be sorted out without dozens of reboots. Last of all, I had to upgrade to Microsoft Word 5.1 from 4.0, since 4.0 will not run on a PowerPC. Word 5.1 (which came out in 1992) is not PowerPC native, but it's the last version of Microsoft Word that I have the patience to use. Anyone who has ever suffered through Word 6.0X on a Macintosh knows exactly what I mean.
Then there were was the World Wide Web. We didn't have internet access yet (except via a long distance call to Red Light, which I did briefly in order to check my email), but I could still show off all the web pages that were stored locally on the hard drive. With that 225 MHz clock speed, with those millions o' colours, and with that subwoofer, my stone-age ancestors were amazed.
Manipulating reality with a scanner and Photoshop was another little display of magic welcoming my parents abruptly into the present.
Then we took a tour of various multimedia CD titles. They were so whiz bang as to be preposterous, especially an atlas program that allowed you to zip around the world as if aboard a space ship, to the dark mellow sounds of ambient jazz. Shades of MIDI.
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Yesterday Don came in 3rd place in his age group in a Staunton foot race. Now he's bursting with sudden visions of grandeur. He still hasn't taken off the outfit he'd won the race in. And he hardly ever puts down the little plastic trophy that was his prize. In its own nauseating way, his pride is actually kind of touching. All he talks about is running and his rosy future as a great and respected athelete.
I can understand his pride. His life up until now has been a non-stop series of failures linked by long phases of psychosis-flavoured apathy. For him to suddenly receive accolades for superior performance sets the present in a lofty position overlooking the past. He has reason to be proud. But to seriously suggest, as he did today, that we be sure to establish a museum in his honour if he should suddenly die, is still laughably grandiose.