This Note from NickS yesterday excavates where he first heard about Google in 1998.
That got me thinking back to talking with folks in the library here at Swarthmore around the same time about this amazing new search engine that actually gave you useful results, and how we were all really impressed with it. At that point the alternative search engines were not about search, they were curated directories tied to the crude economy of online advertising that existed through the first dot-com boom.
I’ve been mulling over that time period a bit more lately because I’m going to teach a new iteration of my course on the history of digital media and online culture next year. I’m realizing that this is now profoundly historical, that the way computers and the Internet worked in the wider society between about 1984 and 2005 is deeply removed from the present world.
I was profoundly invested in online culture at that time and yet I feel like I’m recalling a dream when I try to pull up the details.
In fact, here’s the striking thing: trying to remember how I produced work, made culture, worked in social networks, on the computers I owned then or was provided in my workplace is both materially and intellectually harder to recall and appraise than my use of a typewriter in high school and through to my fourth year as an undergraduate.
I was talking with students in a class about the concept of path-dependency and I turned to a classic example of it, which is the QWERTY design of a typewriter keyboard. I mentioned that one explanation of the design is trying to keep the keys from jamming, but that this is largely a myth, though there’s still a bit of an argument going on among historians of technology.
If the myth has been convincing to those of us who remember using typewriters, it’s partly because key jamming itself was a real thing: it happened, we all have visceral memories of it. Just as we can all smell Liquid Paper and remember what happened if we typed too fast before it dried. Or remember using a correcting typewriter, an electric typewriter, and particular models of manual typewriters. When I first started teaching at Swarthmore 30 years ago, the department office had a good-quality electric typewriter on a side desk for the faculty to use in those cases where we had to submit forms or letters that required a type-written submission rather than something printed from a computer, even on a laser printer, though the office when I first arrived had a dot-matrix printer instead. (Much as there would be, and still are, processes that require submission through a fax machine.)
Typewriting papers in college for many people meant that a rough draft had to be written in long-hand—what we now require in terms of revision out of a belief that revision intrinsically produces better-quality writing was a material necessity. I was a fast enough home-row typist (my mother made me take a typing course during high school) that I generally composed papers right there on the typewriter, but that sometimes meant I had to yank a half-written page out and start over because there was too much to correct. The profound material transformation of writing with a word processor was also an intellectual transformation that I think affected writing profoundly—a point that is to my mind surprisingly underexplored by scholars, though Matthew Kirschenbaum’s book Track Changes is a great contribution to that history.
The thing is that my memories of that technology for composing and submitting written work are intensely specific. I remember being tested on my typing speed on a typewriter as late as 1990 at the two temp agencies I worked for during graduate school. I remember the sound of my different typewriters, the look of them, the smell of them. I remember what typewriting meant in terms of how students and professors interacted, right down to the lame excuses students could sometimes offer for unsubmitted work but also what lurked behind those excuses, which was that photocopying was also expensive and that much of the time the typewritten work was all that you had, that you really could lose all that work in a single bad instant if you dropped it in a puddle or had your bag stolen. I remember pain-stakingly measuring the margins on a senior thesis so that I knew I was in compliance: the college library could and did send people back and tell them “type it again, we won’t accept this”, which was pure agony.
And yet, despite all of what I did on computers and with computers between 1985 and 2005, the material specificity of what I did takes real effort to recall. There’s nothing Proustian about it, no smell that sends me reeling back into a profoundly sensory memory. Personal names sometimes get me thinking; sometimes it’s addresses like alt.society.generation-x or GEnie or Brainstorms. But it’s always hazy. I can sort of remember the machines: the Mac, the Compaq, the Mac in the faculty office, the…Dell? Was that it?
I found a box of old computer games a while back. The maps were a delight and the manuals too. And then I suddenly remembered almost in a sweat, that the reason I had all the manuals wasn’t nostalgia, it was that you had to input phrases from the manuals as a security check, to prove you hadn’t pirated the program. I’d completely forgotten what had been for a while a basic part of the materiality of being a legitimate owner of computer games. I remembered that I’d had a game that I suddenly couldn’t play any more because I’d lost the manual.
Those vivid memories are not available to me on command the way typewriter memories are. I’m not sure if that’s because work processes through computing lacked a kind of visceral physicality or if it’s because of the relentless way that new computers replaced old computers and Moore’s Law obsoleted what we did. But I suspect sometimes too it is that the corporate enclosure of the Internet after 2005 and the ubiquitization of computing made most of what came before both quaint and irrelevant to an ongoing present. I remember there was a colleague upstairs who steadfastly refused to use email. When the administration sent out an email, the departmental administrative assistant had to print it out and put it in his mailbox. That seems impossible to imagine now.
The typewritten world was a world where many people did not have to be good at using a typewriter. Bosses had secretaries, but even ordinary folks could sometimes pay for someone to type out a hand-written document. Or you could hunt-and-peck in those few cases where you just had to do it. It was ok.
The computing world, especially in its full corporatization, has swallowed up all the world, become a requirement. And yet for all of its ubiquity, its specific histories of usage and practice melt into air again and again. I don’t know if that is ominous or encouraging.
Image credit: "When was the last time you used Liquid Paper? Or typed a form? The Internet changed everything." by Wayan Vota is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
This is fascinating as a window into another mind. I'm a decade younger at least, but I have vivid memories of the computers and places I used in that era. Like Alta Vista, the search engine that I used before Google, and which really did pioneer extensive indexing combined with sophisticated search algorithms. Or the Bates College library computer lab Mac SEs that I used.
This hit home with me, Tim. As you know, I hand write my fiction drafts into notebooks, and I do it because there feels like a direct connection between my body and my imagination as I write. Later in the day, I go back and revise from the notebook into my laptop. The minute the words change from my hand to computer text, they begin to feel less immediate and less mine. I did learn to compose on the computer, eventually, for my academic writing, but never for this other, more intensely personal writing. Thinking back to all the computers I’ve had since my first Apple doorstop, none of them seem as real to me as the decision to choose one kind of pen over another, or finding the paper I like best to write on. All those desktops and laptops have disappeared from my consciousness; it takes a lot to recall any of them. Not as much my paper notebooks, filled with the evidence of my internal voice, externalized into a distinctive script.