On a recent walk, I saw in the distance a Commodore Vic-20, perched on a rock at the side of the bike path.
I was first introduced to the VIC-20 in my 5th grade math class (ca. 1982). Our math teacher rolled it into the classroom along with a television set and we used it to play Hangman1. From that moment, I desperately wanted one. I would dream that I got one, only to wake up disappointed that it was just a dream. Finally, sometime in 1984, I think, I did get one. This blog is one of the results of my early experience with computers, the VIC-20 specifically.
Seeing it there on the bike path ahead, I was reminded of that scene in Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams, when Arthur Dent is running down a mountain in some distant world:
And suddenly he tripped again and was hurled forward by his considerable momentum. But just at the moment he was about to hit the ground astoundingly hard he saw lying directly in front of him a small navy blue tote bag that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage retrieval system at the Athens airport some ten years previously in his personal time scale, and in his astonishment he missed the ground completely2 and bobbed off into the air with his brain singing.
I did not go bobbing off into the air, but I thought that if it was a VIC-20 and it was in reasonably good shape and if it had been casually abandoned…
As I got closer it began to look like the VIC-20 was damaged. It looked as if there was a long crack along its surface. That was disappointing, but still an interesting find. I walked closer.
I should note here that I am not nor have I ever have been a user of contact lenses. I wear glasses, progressive3 lenses, pretty much all of the time. My vision isn't terrible. But I wear the glasses. Except on my morning walks when I take a break from the tyranny of the screen and the lens and allow my eyes to go uncovered, naked to the world.
The VIC-20 began to look thinner than I remembered, and less beige. Indeed, the VIC-20 began to look less like a VIC-20 and more like an elongated pizza box–which, it turned out as I finally stood before it, was exactly what it was. A pizza box from a local pizza joint not far from where I stood on the path.
For a moment, I felt the same reaction that I felt upon waking from the dream that I had gotten a VIC-20 back when I didn't have one. Standing there, I remembered all of the code I'd run through it, all of the code I'd typed in carefully from computer magazines. Copying code, yes, but learning at the same time–and learning to type as well. I remembered the standard ukase the computer would respond with to my typing infelicities: SYNTAX ERROR.
I was also reminded of the time, a few years before, that I'd had to fast ahead of a medical procedures. Circumstances made it a long fast, something like 36 hours. The morning of the procedure, I walked my youngest daughter to school. All I could think about was food. Coming down the stairs, I saw one of the staff carrying three boxes of donuts and I lamented that the gods would tease me so. But then, suddenly, the teacher wasn't holding three boxes of donuts, she was holding three large binders.
The VIC-20 on the bike path was just a mirage, like boxes of donuts. My stomach grumbled at that point and I continued on my walk, determined to get something to eat.
