The death of a computer pulls its whole lifetime down with it. I am still haunted by the loss of almost four years of keystrokes and favorites, music and photos – vaporized, corrupted, devoured by some nameless virus that the techs at the help desk couldn’t hack out.
Common wisdom would have me equate this experience to the supposed cleansing properties of fire – how natural devastation maintains a balance and offers the chance for new life. But a computer crash is not a forest fire – it is a house fire of modern intellectual and social life. Digital letters, photos, resumes, music, videos – all things we accumulate with the vague thought they make us who we are, and some day we’ll sift through it and make sense of ourselves. But what do you do when that source of self is gone?
I can actually examine my life through crashes and corrupted discs and see the dust of lost files and virtual documents as I excavate my short postmodern life. My first ‘computer’ was really just a pile of 5-inch floppy discs. They were followed by a monstrous hand-me-down PC with a 512 megabyte hard drive and a monitor that displayed DOS prompts in jack-o-lantern orange text. I quickly abandoned the modem-less behemoth and went back to the pile of discs and university computer labs, though I upgraded to the ‘durable’ and ‘advanced’ 3-inch discs. After about four more years of this I finally got myself a used IBM laptop – with color display, CD ROM, and a dial-up modem. I had officially entered the computer age – in 2001.
The IBM boasted a 2.4 gigabyte hard drive and about 128k of RAM. I was in heaven. Along with a 56k dial-up that ran about 12kps, there was nothing standing between me and the world. But this feeling was short-lived. Hungry for more than the little machine could handle, I upgraded from Windows 95 to ME so I could run newer software, and pushing for more than I should have hoped for, I botched an install of XP and the little box rolled up its blue screen.
It could have been revived, but why? I had seen the limits of the five-year-old machine and those limits were crushed under the need for speed and memory. Well, that and my complete lack of operating system know-how. But I had a premonition about me, a techie neophyte, trying to put XP on an old machine, so I wrote all my files to a CD before the operation. The computer was dead, but my files were safe.
After the IBM died I dropped a couple chunks of my post-undergraduate paychecks into my first ever new computer. I had three requirements for my new processor-based friend: a good memory, strong, and a good sense of humor – because those paychecks weren’t very big. With the help of the local Best Buy I came home with a 40 gigabyte HP Pavilion and stepped into a new world: USB, CD/DVD RW, wireless Internet. These were things I scarcely imagined, and I thanked the techno gods for feeding such wonders to the lowest brackets of computer consumers.
For close to four years my HP, Sriracha, never let me down. I dropped it on concrete, shattering pieces of plastic, but not its functions. It spent a year with me in the dust and exposure of Afghanistan, never failing to write more photo files or play a bootleg DVD. For me it became invincible, a Swiss account for my most precious images and observations of life. This is what modern technology can do for us.
Then came a black Wednesday. For no reason, Sriracha refused to boot. I panicked, tried again and again. The tech at the help desk tried everything he knew, and then asked me for my system-restore discs. It was over. The Sriracha I knew was gone.
He handed me back the same box that I had brought in, but it would never be the same. The same scratches and stickers were there, but when I turned it on, it looked at me with blank eyes. “Hello, would you like to register me now or later?” Keystrokes and clicks that would have brought me to the friends, places and sensations that composed my life only mocked my mortality with empty folders and Alzheimer-like introductions. There was no proof of what I had done and who I had become since I started saving files on the HP – the time intervening simply no longer existed. In fact I had the sensation that time as we construct it is no more stable or real than files on a hard drive.
Since the crash, I’ve given Sriracha back its old name and set up my folders in the same way, to the best of my memory. And even though I’m mimicking the same method of storing photos and documents, I’m trying to remember that it is not the memories that we save on discs that make us who we are, but the memories we carry and access in our minds and share not through the Internet, but through human contact. Our minds have to be the primary place where we keep the memories that are dear to us – everything else is just back-up files.
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Computer memories are just fleeting dreams
Daily Emerald
October 9, 2007
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