Migration complete

  

     On Saturday, May 11, 1985 — nearly 40 years ago — I picked up my first computer, a Kaypro 2X. It was considered portable at 22 pounds, and had a handle by which it could be lugged, with effort. I liked the gunmetal gray case; I used to say it was the sort of computer that Army sappers would have dragged ashore in a rubberized bag at Normandy Beach to calculate artillery azimuths if, you know, they did that sort of thing back then. I liked the way the keyboard — a very solid keyboard — folded out of the base. The Apple McIntosh that had just gone on sale the year before seemed, by comparison, cheap and plastic, transparent and toylike. Besides, it had that stupid mouse, which required a hand to be lifted off the keyboard, an idea which, as a touch typist since the 7th grade, I dismissed out of hand.

   I thought of the Kaypro Tuesday, when I took delivery of my latest computer, a new iMac. The Kaypro was an 8-bit machine, while the iMac has 16 gig, or 250,000 times the memory, I am told.  At almost exactly the same price — the Kaypro cost $1650 in 1985; the iMac cost $1495 now, plus $400 tacked on for the 1 terabyte memory I needed to transfer all the crap over from my old machine, including 73,000 photos.

     The old machine is a 2012 model iMac. Honestly, I'd have kept using it forever, or tried to. I'd never have had the courage to replace it — set in my ways. But my wife pointed out, repeatedly, that a 13-year-old computer is not a thing, and with Donald Trump disrupting the international supply chain, along with much else, prices are certain to go up, and I'd better get one. Still, I dithered like Hamlet, placing an order and cancelling it twice. The first time in December, when I realized I'd ordered the wrong keyboard. The second time a couple weeks ago, just out of the sheer stress of making the change while continuing to write a column and breathe air and all the other stresses placed upon me
    But the third time was the charm, as they say. I finally remembered, that if I didn't take my wife's lead, I'd still be a single guy living in a one bedroom apartment in Oak Park. I'm composing my first blog post on now, tapping at its new, perhaps a little stiff keyboard, the same as the old, but cleaner, and with a special round key to receive my right index fingerprint to wake up the computer without need of a password.
     To be honest, I hadn't wanted that Kaypro 2X either — my dream writing instrument was an IBM Selectric II — self-correcting, which would lift up mistakes with a touch of your right pinky. A blue one, so it would rhyme — a baby blue Selectric II. Then again, when I entered First Grade I was nostalgic for kindergarten. 

     Alas, even I could see that technology had thundered past my dreams. Why should manuscripts be cut apart and taped together when you could just shift around electrons on a glowing green screen? Though there was a value to retyping copy, you massaged the material as the words passed from the paper, through your eyes, into your brain and out your fingers.

    I don't remember buying the Kaypro as being particularly traumatic, even though I was earning $14,000 a year at the time as the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal. I was also 24, and pushing forward is what one does. What I did, anyway.

    Now I was worried about ... well, lots of things. Getting all the data from the old computer to the new. At first I thought of having the Apple store do it. But that would involve dropping my old computer off for a day or two. Meaning I'd have no computer at all, except a laptop. Then I thought I'd pop $60 for the special lightening cable to connect them. In the end, I let the migration assistant do it through the air. When I first unboxed the new computer and began the process, the migration assistant said the transfer would take 60 hours. But that turned out to be pessimistic — it ended up requiring a little more than six, files flying across the room through the aether from one machine to the other. 

     In between the two machines, how many others? Big boxy Dells, beige plastic monitors shipped from Texas — the ease of return and the consumer service were what kept me a loyal customer. I remember once having three monitors in various states — arriving, being boxed up, sent back. And one long night a technical rep had me on the floor with the back of the computer off, pulling boards out. It somehow got back together.

     Apple swept that away. It started with an iPod, a cool brushed aluminum lozenge with music inside. Just hold it made me proud to be a human being, to belong to the same race who did this. And now I have a laptop and an iPhone, AirPods and this smokin' hot iMac. I never considered any other brand.

     The point, Neil, you must be straining. Get to the point. I think the point should be clear — with all the transferring data from old iMac to new, and the getting the fonts just right and downloading apps I couldn't run because my machine was so old, I didn't have time to think of a proper post. This will have to do.

     The Kaypro is still in the basement, wrapped in plastic. I keep it, not as a potentially valuable relic of the early consumer computer era — I see on eBay you can pick one up for a couple hundred dollars — but just in case I need to read something off those boxes of floppy discs I also have stashed somewhere. You never know.

    For now, I've left the old one set up, on the roll top desk behind me, — purchased with paper route money when I was 14, because a writer needs a roll top desk. Where I imagine it'll stay for a few weeks, as a backup, until it starts getting in the way, and will go into a plastic bag and into the basement next to the Kaypro, which hasn't been opened for nearly 40 years. Better safe than sorry.