It’s 1990, and I’m in my parents’ garage, shivering in a yellow fleece hoodie—my favorite one with little cartoon lamb ears on the top—and I’m crying over a computer.
I’m four years old, and it’s been unusually cold with an especially brutal December cold snap of twenty-five below. I don’t know much about weather yet; I’ve only begun to create memories. The chill is adding to my misery. I see my breath as I sob.
I’m crying because I’ve lost something deeply important to me. It’s not a dog or a hamster, but a beige, yellowing hunk of plastic that I’ve grown to love because it hosted my first experience of being part of something larger than myself. It was named the Atari 800, as if it were forecasting a future that we could reach before the millennium arrived, though it looked nothing like the computers that ushered in the 21st Century.
The monitor is big and chunky. There is no liquid crystal display. The screen is green because blue LEDs weren’t invented yet, and—when turned on—it emits a kind of high-pitched whining sound that my young ears are specifically attuned to hear, because I’m too young to have hearing loss. I’m crouching next to its frigid form in the middle of winter because I’ve plugged in the computer and I’m trying to get it to turn on. And while the computer does turn on, all it says again and again is
<memory check>
<memory check>
<memory check>
I’m watching this computer not be able to start because it has memory loss. It’s like my beloved best friend has Alzheimer’s, and while everything is there if I could just get past the memory loss, this screen won’t let me access it. Everything I was used to for the last year is locked behind this almost tantalizingly transparent barrier. I know something is there, but it’s entirely virtual, and unlike sheetrock, I just can’t punch through.
A small part of me is upset because, in my short life thus far, I used this computer to play a popular racing game called Pole Position. But the larger part of me is inconsolable because there is something bigger about this computer that I can’t quite put words to. It connects me to this window into a future of
what the world might become. I feel, as a young person, that I have a head start on The Future. What 3 or 4 year old has access to a computer like this? Surely not everyone. And what I might be able to do with it in the future! I had plans together with this electronic companion. And now, with this memory issue, those plans are ruptured.
My dad always was about The Future. He claimed he was the second person in the United States to have a CD player.
He had hundreds of CDs, specially ordered from England, with experimental sounds and underground appeal. When he wanted speakers that were too expensive, he figured out the mathematics behind their specific sounds and built his own. Our living room bristled with sonic gear from Japan, and this rooted
my first real experiences of the world as being from sound. Even though we were landlocked as a family, and far too poor to travel outside of the country, he had found a way to bring the far and foreign into our everyday lives, and through this, I felt I could feel The Future before it arrived on our shores.
When I looked at this array of equipment, this part of my childhood, I can see my Dad’s Futurist ideals take form. But suddenly this computer, which I loved, could no longer turn on. I felt like a part of my childhood had failed, as if all of the CDs and speakers stopped working, and I could never hear any of those sounds again. It felt that, along with the memory check, I was having trouble accessing my memories, too. Because they were not created entirely in my brain, but alongside a machine.
This sudden surprising loss feels closer to the experience of my favorite climbing tree, as if the climbing tree had suddenly been boarded up, and I could no longer access its limbs.
Because I was so little, I didn’t think of a computer as having programs you could buy multiple copies of at the store, or that there were more copies of this computer in the world. I thought of this computer as having a single soul that was being extinguished before my eyes.
We talk about dogs and cats and parents at this age as being a child’s first sense of loss, but this tiny box was broken because my dad let his best friend borrow the computer for six months, and they kept it in their garage. I don’t know what happened, but I suspect that the varying weather conditions created condensation inside the machine, damaging the memory chips.
As I finally sat down, cross-legged on the freezing concrete, I tried to be tough. I dried my tears on my lamb-hoodie sleeves and tried to understand the world in a way that made sense to my tiny brain. I looked up at the other items in the garage. One big item was my parents’ tiny Geo Metro, another Japanese brand, sitting in this one-car garage, off of Denver’s bustling Colorado Boulevard, so loud that I could hear it in my dreams. What would happen to this car? Would it also, someday, stop working? Would the soul in this machine be lost as well? What is the life of a machine, and how does it compare to us as humans? Do people cry over the loss of their cars? Does it hurt when a machine dies?
Today, I know how we could have recovered the computer. We could have found a computer store and bought a piece of replacement memory, called RAM, or Random Access Memory, but we didn’t fix the computer. It was old. It was “past its time”. Instead of resuscitating it and the memories stored with it, we got a new one. I wanted to give it a burial, but digging a hole that deep into freezing Colorado soil was not an option that year. Instead, the object was disappeared. I never saw it again.