Orange Memories

I have an old laptop I like to fire up now and then to remind me of where my writing career began.

Laptop may actually be a generous term. It was really a brick with a hinge that allowed a small screen to be flipped up. The screen color options were orange and nothing.

There was no battery, just a long black power cord. With a whopping 164 kilobytes of total memory, a blank Word file would cripple this poor thing.

We had it set up in the boiler room in the basement of the house I grew up in.

This had the benefit of being both creepy and freezing. In the winter, the boiler would crackle and burst every twenty minutes, sending toasty goodness to the house above, while keeping the basement at levels better suited to storing meat.

Of course, nothing motivated a young scribe like the fiery specter of Satan behind your back. Both my sister and I pecked out book reports and poetry assignments at record speeds, always cognizant of the giant oven a few feet away.

Talk about old school technology. I didn't know too many kids that were intimately familiar with home heating systems that were developed around the same time as the cotton gin.

Needless to say, I actually have very fond memories of that boiler room. I've spent a great deal of procrastination time tweaking the settings on my current laptop to mimic the eerie orange glow of the old T-3100.

I keep the old machine around as a reminder of how easy it used to be to write without distraction.

A flip of the power switch and a couple of keystrokes were all it took to launch the word processor. The Internet was hard to get to because... well, it didn't exist yet.

My kids probably won't know what it's like to push buttons on a cell phone, let alone wait for a dot matrix printer to spit out a twenty page story over the course of an hour and a half.

I'm feeling extra nostalgic because my current machine is having fits tonight. Apparently, streaming music, surfing several sports sites and trying to find just the right typewriter font to make my website seem more "writerly" is too much for it's anemic processor to handle.

I guess what it's really trying to tell me is to get back to work. Distractions on the web are for work time. Let the office manager deal with another mangled motherboard (do they still even use those) when I bust it while opening ten spreadsheets at once and streaming spring training games at the same time.

Although, I do have to ask: my museum piece is thirty years old now and still boots up in about sixty seconds. Why can't I jam a wireless card in there and hack out a thousand words a night like old times?

I wonder if my wife will let me install a giant asbestos-covered cauldron of fire in the basement?