How Far We've Come

My Kobo Bookstore

I was playing around in 86Box yesterday, and something occurred to me about getting on the Information Superhighway: I don't need to try to install a DOS driver for the NE2000 Ethernet card, I don't need to install WinPKT, I don't need to remember to do it before I type in WIN.COM, I don't need to screw around with Trumpet Winsock 1.0a and hope I get it right, and I don't need to have any more browsers on my computer (save for the glorious Mozilla Firefox, even though it's nothing like what I fell in love with years ago anymore), and I don't need to know if I'm running in Real Mode, Protected (Standard) Mode, or Virtual (386 Enhanced) Mode for access. I just need to make sure the telephone lines at my house are doing their freaking job for once and that I'm connected to WiFi (or Ethernet, if I'm at my desk). The above screenshot was taken at my dock setup, the computer itself was running Microsoft Word with one of my "Writer's Block Shorts" (just my way of making myself write every day) and, in 86Box, PFS:WindowWorks Word Processor running on Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on MS-DOS 6.22 running on an emulated Am486DX at 33MHz.

It occurred to me the other day that I might be getting old, even though I'm not thirty yet, but moving on!

The reason I'm writing this is because, in The Golden Record, the society Azathoth comes from is akin to what most science fiction would still call futuristic, even for today. Seth comes from a time when getting on the internet involved making sure nobody was on the telephone (in most cases, at least. We've all heard of dial-up, right?) while most of us live in a time where Covid-19 is either ending or about to end and the reasons to leave our homes are dwindling. The society that Azathoth comes from has already mastered faster-than-light travel, no further explanation is needed, even if it makes us look like cavemen who've just learned that getting bonked on the head with a club is painful (I know the Neanderthals were more intelligent than that, I'm not good at humor). The reason for the story being written in that way partially hails back to my younger self. I was always invested in anything 90s and the portrayals of the future that were around were fascinating beyond belief, even if I was born a month before the millennium. Remind me to post a story about SheepShaver, Mac OS 7, and a Hackintosh when I was in ninth grade.

Explaining myself a little bit further, I consider myself to be (somewhat) a student of history and a Cold War Enthusiast, which is a double-edged sword, living in the Southeast US- it causes headaches, to say the least, but it does give me context for the present in so many situations that arise, even if I'm not always right about things the first time. Most of what happens, I solely believe to be the fault of egotists wanting to be right (to put it nicely), though what I do know to be right is that, to a degree, everything is subjective, and nothing has a one-size-fits-all context, no matter what you want to say about it. I remember seeing a… very illuminating graphic on Facebook one day, as shown to the right. Of course, this is, at best, highly oversimplified, and of course, I found it while I was scrolling through Facebook waiting for something to finish downloading (it was a few years ago, so I couldn't tell you all of the details if I tried, beyond it was several gigabytes over a DSL connection), but I think it illustrates my point… fairly-well. I'm sure there are better ways that it could be articulated and better people to do it than me, but I'm typing this while waiting on someone and I do not claim to be a professor, doctor, or anything of that matter. I just know what I'm talking about most of the time.

To sum up what I'm trying to say, generally, the context behind the present is in the past, and while I know that, to most people, context doesn't seem important, in reality, it is very important.