Part of my contemplation of the history of hacking and computing is motivated by my own personal experience of it. I reminisced on this when talking about the things my dad passed down to me about computing and hacking in the intro of the last podcast.
Mur Lafferty, a good friend and yet another podcaster1, posted her inaugural article for her column at Suicide Girls. WARNING: If you go cruise around the site, beyond just the article link, Suicide Girls contains material of an adult nature. Mur’s article is totally safe for work and her boss at SG says the ads and other content should also be safe for work, if a bit racy.
She isn’t speaking to computing or hacking but she describes a very clear way of marking time in our lives by the experiences we have. In her case, her geeky recollections of playing the various incarnations of Nintento’s Mario Kart franchise. That’s the common element, to me, the experience. Through her narrative, you get a vivid sense of what these experiences meant to her, both embedded in her life and the broader sense of her life at that time.
When I think about the time I spent dialing into BBSes, first learning BASIC, hacking around with Pascal during Summer session at college, and even more recent milestones, it as much about the whole sense of my life at those times as about the particular activity. Without verbally jumping up and down on them like I just have, she deftly puts her finger on these threads of experience.
I look forward to her future essays for SG and expect them to be equally geeky, perhaps even things to which I can draw parallels in my hackerly experience, too.
[1] More a commentary on the fact that almost all of my personal friends these days are podcasters, not any commentary on any specific one, such as Mur in this case.
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