I was twenty-three years old, and I was going to be Rembrandt. I made my own oil paint. From scratch. I spent my money on canvas and copal balsam and rabbitskin glue (do you really want to know?). I was earnest. I was broody. I was pungent with turpentine.

But even Rembrandt has to eat, so I took a day job as a technical illustrator with a research and engineering firm. Science needs art, and art has its necessary geeks. I had worked two years happily drawing process diagrams and cutaways of steam turbines using materials that would be more or less comprehensible to the cave painters of Lascaux. And then the department bought its first computer.

Only, we couldn't call it a computer. In 1985, Personal Computers were considered useless toys by upper management (not like the number-crunching mainframes the size of industrial refrigerators tucked away in some vault in the basement chuckling to themselves), so there was a company-wide ban on buying PCs. My boss had to call it an electronic slide-making apparatus in the budget proposal.

"Slides" as in slide shows, slide projectors and slide carousels. Huh. I suppose I might as well say "brontosaurus" as in big cranky lizard. It was a kind of photograph used in presentations. Oh, nevermind.

In them thar days, there were very high end supercomputers doing pretty impressive graphics for millions, there were personal computers that couldn't do diddly, and there was just beginning to be a middle tier of machines capable of doing business graphics - bar charts, pie charts, drawings - of a sufficiently high quality to coax big wads of money out of the pants of the corporati.

Big wads. Our first turnkey graphics system cost somewhere around $100,000. That's for software, two monitors, a passive backplane and an IBM AT (a 286-12). Oh, and furniture. The furniture came with.

Of course, most of the voodoo happened in the passive backplane. First generation IBM PC's were useless for graphics (the previous generation AGX workstations ran on Apples), so they had to be stuffed full of custom hardware to do anything clever. I toured their manufacturing facility once. It was a big warehouse full of tiny, elderly Chinese ladies hunched over soldering irons, knitting circuit boards by hand. Sara Lee assimilated by the Borg.

I wanted nothing to do with this new machine. No sir. Not me. I was a nartist, and computers were about...you know, algebra and shit. I wasn't scheduled to be trained on it. In fact, prevailing wisdom was that the best typists would make the best geeks. Ha ha!

What happened next was one of those inexplicable life experiences that make one think, "Jesus Christ, what a very inexplicable life experience!" I'd seen several of these graphics machines before while we were shopping around. This wasn't my first look at a computer, even an arty one. But somehow, once they wrangled the big beast into its pen and I watched my boss fumble with it and forget commands and generally do it all wrong, I realized I knew instinctively, precognitively and on a sub-cellular level just what that machine wanted.

I have never, before or since, itched to get my hands on something the way I wanted to play with that computer. It was like I'd stuck my finger in a socket. Like I'd been whomped over the head with a giant geek hammer. I might possibly have been shaking.

Goodbye Rembrandt, hello Turing

And then I woke up and it was twenty years later and I was a middle aged computer programmer. Spooky, huh? I won't say that I'm a good geek (I struggle with my code), but I am a good geek, respectful of the boundaries and traditions of the Order and a consistent producer of programming approaches that are stable, inventive, extensively commented and pretty messed up.

So, ummmm....?

I have a hard time explaining what was so fascinating about those early PC's. They were painfully expensive, completely useless, and nobody had the slightest idea what the point was. They were sold to Homer and Marge America for organizing her recipe collection or taking inventory of all the crap in his garage, without explaining that these pointless exercises would involve hundreds of hours of painstaking data input.

Experts predicted computers would soon be forecasting weather accurately, but would never win a game of chess against a human. See? Consistently overestimated the cleverness and underestimated the awesome power of blunt force processing cycles.

You know what I think? Do you know the difference between a game and a toy? Five-card stud is a game — it has rules and you play by them or you're cheating. A pack of cards, however, is a toy — it can play a thousand different games.

Even in those sad, brain-dead old shit-boxes you could get a sense of something quite new: a universal toy. One that could play five card stud...or write a love-letter. A toy without boundaries.

We had been lied to so many times, we geeks. We had been promised two-way wrist-radios and video phones. Rocket cars. Moving sidewalks. Vacations on the moon. Teleportation. A post-apocalyptic world where it was okay to shoplift and shoot at people. Cures. World peace. Pastel leotards with giant pointy chrome shoulder pads. The flame still burned hot in our nerdy hearts, but we were learning a life of grinding disillusionment. The bright Buck Rogers future of our dreams increasingly proved dull, tawdry, Fat Elvis.

Then here was this thing. Even our own prophets only dreamed of computers the size of bank vaults that itched to take over the world. No-one had foreseen computers the size of suitcases that itched to organize our meatloaf recipes. Here, at last, something more than we'd been promised, and less. Us-sized. Personal. We didn't expect it, we didn't know what it was good for, but we knew it was going to grow up to be something cooler than huffing soma.

And speaking of unexpected, here was me — country weasel from Podunkvillia Town — workin' in the big city OP-ER-ATING A COM-PU-TER.

God, I still love the sound of that.