A friend pointed out an article about a young man who has founded a company to sell heirloom computers: that is, computers made so well that they will be permanent possessions, things one can pass on to one’s grandchildren. He calls it the Mythic Computer Company, and if you visit his site, you can fill in a contact form so he can judge whether you are worthy of one of his computers. If you are, he will make one to your specifications.

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.”

On this day in 1815, the United States Senate formed a Committee on Finance to advise the Senate on the matter of placing the United States on a sound financial footing. The committee is expected to announce its conclusions any day now.

This video was “Media of the Day” yesterday at Wikimedia Commons.

On this day in 1892, the Allegheny Athletic Association paid Pudge Heffelfinger $500 to play in a football game, thus making professional football a Pittsburgh invention. Since the Allegheny Athletic Association was a group of sporting amateurs, this was technically cheating. According to the best research, however, cheating at sports was an earlier invention and cannot properly be credited to Pittsburgh.

On this day 75 years ago, Thomas E. Dewey was elected President of the United States. By an amusing historical irony, his victory is best remembered today for a newspaper photograph that captured the delight of defeated incumbent Harry Truman at being relieved of the burden of responsibility he had borne stoically since the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

On this day in 1415, the badly outnumbered English defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt. It was an event that would resound through the rest of English history, remembered almost exclusively for what King Henry would have said if he had had William Shakespeare as his speechwriter.

On this day in 1693, the French defeated the Piedmontese in one of the battles of the Nine Years’ War.

On this day in 1636, the Swedes defeated the Germans in one of the battles of the Thirty Years’ War.

On this day in 1602, the English and Dutch defeated the Spanish in one of the battles of the Eighty Years’ War.

The Hundred Years’ War took the day off.

On this day in 1939, for the first time in history, an American football game was shown on television. It is estimated that perhaps as many as a thousand television sets were tuned in to see Fordham defeat Waynesburg. Dr. Boli offers this information to any owners of time machines who are looking for a turning point in history that might be turned in the opposite direction, in the hope that they will have the imagination to conceive of a world without football games on television.

On this day in 1777, the city of Lancaster in Pennsylvania became the capital of the United States. On the next day, it ceased to be the capital of the United States. Thus catastrophe was narrowly averted. Nevertheless, a provision that no city shall be forced to remain capital of the United States for more than twenty-four hours was struck out of the draft of the United States Constitution in committee.

On this day in 629, the Roman emperor Heraclius entered Constantinople in triumph. He had finally accomplished what no other Roman emperor in history had been able to do: he decisively and permanently defeated the Persians, ending the war that had been going on more or less continuously for more than six centuries. Curiously, seven years later, Heraclius would lose most of the Empire to the advancing Muslim Caliphate. He was versatile, this Heraclius.