Posts by Dr. Boli
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: After what I have been through, I have a right to speak out. After the things I have suffered, to remain silent would be simple dereliction of duty to my fellow human beings. It would be nothing short of irresponsible for me to fail to warn the world. No one ought to suffer what I have suffered when the means of preventing such suffering could be so easily made available. Our great nation must surely have the manufacturing capacity to produce enough posable James Buchanan action figures to render it unnecessary for any other soul to be put through what I have endured. Instructions for the poses could be distributed in a smartphone app automatically downloaded by every mobile operating system, so that citizens would be prepared in case the worst should come to pass. Posters could be placed in subway stations and post offices and pachinko parlors and other places of public resort to show what the danger looks like and the five warning signs to be observed in the neck hairs of otherwise normal persons. Schoolchildren could be taught mnemonic rhymes, such as “If it’s blurry, make a slurry,” or “Always drink before you blink.” Most importantly, mental-health professionals must be taught the difference between a well-informed citizen and a delusional nut case with no grip on reality, because no one ought to suffer what I have suffered. —Sincerely, The Man with the Fax Machine on His Head.
NUTRITION HINTS.
Vegetables are important in every meal. If you are invited to a fancy dinner and find the menu deficient in vegetables, you can skip the appetizer and eat the floral centerpiece.
If your doctor says you are not getting enough minerals in your diet, try eating Venezuela, which Wikipedia says is very rich in minerals.
Before you eat any packaged snack food, read the list of ingredients from beginning to end. By the time you have finished, you will probably be too depressed to eat the contents of the package. Success!
Books about a fiber-rich diet are themselves rich in fiber.
BRINGING BACK THE AGE OF MYTH.
Are heirloom computers possible? Within certain assumptions, they probably are. The case of the prototype is a gorgeous piece of woodworking, and all the components are chosen for long service and the ability to be repaired or replaced when they fail.
Keegan McNamara, the creator of Mythic Computer—which is to say the conceiver of the idea, the carver of the wood, the solderer of the components—is 25 years old, and his eclectic education is probably similar to what most very clever 25-year-olds get these days. His company site has a motto from Virgil at the bottom, probably sourced from the Internet somewhere—we would guess that he does not read Latin himself. He talks easily about Shinto spirits. He took a course in guitar-making in college, which may have taught him some of his woodworking skills. He looks up etymologies of English words and is very impressed by their Proto-Indo-European roots. His education, in other words, is a bit of this and a bit of that, but not really moored in a tradition.
The people who write about him are much more unmoored. And it is fascinating to see what this lack of mooring does to them. It places everything outside their own experience in the age of myth. Norse gods, rotary-dial telephones, Shinto spirits, steam locomotives, handcrafted tools—they are all in the same category of things before my time. Thus the name Mythic Computer: it is a return to the mythical age when Vulcan forged rotary-dial telephones to last forever.
Sometimes this lack of mooring in any one tradition causes strange categorical overlaps. The subhead of one of the articles on the Mythic Computer tells us this:
Computers used to be made out of wood, endlessly customizable, and totally personal. Now they’re all metal rectangles. Can one guy in his LA house help bring the old way back?
Now, if you are older than 25, you may be asking yourself: When were computers made out of wood? The first Macintosh was not made out of wood. The IBM PC was not made out of wood. Dr. Boli’s own first computer, an Atari 800, was not made out of wood. The Altair was not made out of wood. The Whirlwind was not made out of wood. Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine was not made out of wood. In fact, the Difference Engine, as Mr. Babbage intended it to be built, was a metal rectangle.
But we can see what has happened here. The IBM PC and a cabinet by Thomas Chippendale are both from the Age of Myth—the time, that is, before the writer was even born. They are in the same category, and they must be fundamentally similar.
We have the impression that Mr. McNamara himself is a lot brighter than most of the people who write about him (you really ought to read his essay on the origins of the Mythic Computer, in which he hits many nails right on the head), but even he seems limited by a point of view that regards the whole period before his birth as more or less the same. For the operating system, he very sensibly chose a robust version of Linux, because, as he says, “in order to make something last forever, just build it using stuff that has lasted forever.” Linux came into the world in 1991, which gives us a terminus post quem for “forever.”
At any rate, what Mr. McNamara has built is a text editor in a wooden box—something like an AlphaSmart, but with much more expensive parts. And it is a glorious thing. It is worth whatever price he puts on it, because it is a work of art. In writing about it, Dr. Boli does not at all mean to imply that creating a computer made by hand is a silly thing to do. He simply uses it as an occasion to examine certain otherwise unexamined assumptions that seem to be prevalent among our bright young people, “young” meaning “born within the past hundred years or so.”
Advertisement.
NO TYPING IN HERE.
A little background may be necessary. Our story begins with the IBM PC-AT.
Dr. Boli never liked the IBM PC when it was new, and he does not like it any better now that it is an antique. He never liked the DOS operating system. He does not miss the good old days of having to write a little program, in effect, just to move a file, and he is not about to wax rhapsodic over the joys of monospaced green text on a black screen.
But the IBM PC-AT had one advantage that its successors cannot boast: it came with the best computer keyboard in the world, the famous Model M. What made it the best was the “buckling spring” in each keyswitch, which—without going deeply into the mechanics of it—causes a click that you can hear and feel at the exact moment when the contact is made and the signal is sent to the computer. No other keyswitch does that. The purpose of the design is to make typing quick and accurate by making it instinctive.
You can still get a lineal descendant of that keyboard. A group of refugees from IBM bought the design and the tooling and still makes keyboards with buckling springs in a little town in Kentucky called Lexington, where keyboard-making is the main traditional craft of the hardy mountain folk. Dr. Boli does most of his writing on one of these keyboards when he writes directly on a computer, and he will even mention the company’s name: Unicomp, which is exactly the name Dr. Boli would invent if he were writing a comic novel about a group of former IBM employees who founded their own company. Unicomp has updated the plastic housing in its “New Model M” (although you can still get the “Classic” if you’re a purist), but the springs still buckle under those keys.
“Mechanical keyboards” are a big fad right now, and most of them use a different kind of switch. In fact there is a bewildering variety of switches in mechanical keyboards, but the ones that work most like the Model M have switches that click almost at the point of electrical contact. Dr. Boli did some research into these alternatives when his keyboard started screaming.
Dr. Boli is not gentle with keyboards. He learned to type on a mechanical typewriter, and any computer keyboard that cannot take the light but percussive strokes that make a typewriter go will not survive long on his desk. The Model M took years of writing thousands of words a day, but even it finally succumbed and began to scream. That is, it began to repeat the letter E continuously, line after line of “eeeeeeeeeeee,” which is not the sophisticated kind of literature the readers have come to expect from this Magazine. E is Dr. Boli’s favorite letter, the one he uses more often than any other, but he is not quite so stuck on it as all that.
Well, a keyboard that had taken so much percussion with so little complaint was entitled to a nervous breakdown after so many years. Dr. Boli had one of the backup keyboards brought from storage, but it was an inferior rubber-dome keyboard, not fit for a good typist to use for a long time. Here was an opportunity to see what other people said about keyboards, and whether there was anything else worth trying in the great universe of keyboards.
It turns out that the Internet is full of advice about keyboards, and site after site says the same thing: keyboards with audible feedback are best for typing, and you can’t use them in an office. Apparently American offices have all become Trappist monasteries in the past couple of decades, because the sound of typing is considered too offensive to tolerate. It should be pointed out that this is not a typewriter sound, like the sound you young people remember from old movies about newspaper reporters; it is a click, not a smack or a thump or a kaboom. But over and over, the same advice:
“Clicky switches aren’t normally well-suited to office environments…”
“…the clicking sound can be annoying or distracting for co-workers…”
“Orange switches are tactile, but barely make any sound, making them better-suited to office environments…”
“Although you may like the click sound, using a mechanical keyboard with clicky switches at the office or in a library may not be a good idea, as they are loud and may irritate those around you.”
“All Linear switches have quieter keystrokes, which ensure you don’t get called into the HR office often or get rebuked by your co-workers.”
Called into the HR office! Dr. Boli began imagining a job interview. “So can you explain why you left your previous job?” “Well, I was fired for typing. But I won’t do that again.”
Is silence really so universal in the modern office?
Well, here Dr. Boli has to admit that he has wandered into some modern offices—admittedly as a visitor. Modern offices have characteristic sounds. The endless drone of the top-40 station on the loudspeaker. The hiss of the espresso machine. The bellow of the vice president chewing out the temporary administrative assistant. The crash of breaking down silos.
All these are louder than the sound of typing. So what makes typing such an offensive sound?
Dr. Boli will open that question to the audience. He has his own hypothesis. The sound of typing is offensive because anyone who is typing is getting measurable work done, and that is an offense against orthodoxy, which says that time in the office must be spent optimizing performance, differentiating behaviors, focusing on the mission, being vulnerable, demonstrating agility, impacting collective growth, embracing change, and being cultural transformation stewards. The sound of quantifiable work being accomplished is therefore an implied threat to overturn the establishment.
Meanwhile, Dr. Boli is typing this article on an exact replacement for his late Unicomp keyboard, and he has not heard the neighbors complaining yet.
CHAPTER TWO.
From an unpublished science-fiction novel by
Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle.
“Oh yeah?” said Drox Hathaweg, the morose but appealing telepathic half-human half-V’qil space pirate sitting next to them. “Well, wait till you see what happens in chapter three.”
Advertisement.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
