I am resisting the urge to track down the exact citation — no, dang it, the urge was too much for me and I did track it down… I quote from Richard Cohen’s column on Page B1, (aka page 39), front page of the Metro section of the Washington Post for Thursday, 22 September 1983:

A bunch of newspaper editors were sitting around the other day talking about the new home computers. One of them said that there was a new Apple on the market and another said that IBM had a good model and a third mentioned something about the Commodore. This prompted one of them to say “I want the new Apple.” Not me, I said. I want the old Lionel.

That line stuck with me at the time, and has continued to do so from that day to this. I always read it as the other editors viewing — or at least pretending to view — the computer as a tool to do work. Cohen, in the remainder of the column, rightly recognizing the computer as really being much more akin to an electric train set — a fascinating, complicated, endlessly expandable toy, there to be tinkered with, rather than put to practical use. Cohen concludes by making it clear he prefers model trains. To each his own.

I have, very occasionally, played computer games. Mostly, the closest I come these days is doing New York Times crossword puzzles on my phone. For me, computers have always been tools for work, not a means to play Stars Crushers of the Imperial Galaxy or whatever. Except. At the same time, the computer itself has been the toy, the puzzle, the train set. Swapping out the drives. Getting the interface to work. Remapping the keyboard. Soldering in replacement capacitors on the motherboard. I just spent about a day and a half battling Windows 11 so it would let me see my network attached storage drives again. It was fun. I took time off from that contretemps to tweak an old Lenovo Thinkcentre desktop that I have running Ubuntu and MythTV 34 for use as a home-brew DVR so that I could then run Kodi on my home network and remotely view … And off we go into gibberish. I have undoubtedly spent more time tweaking MythTV to get it working than I have spent time actually using it to watch TV shows. Thus has it always been.

Back in 1983, I was teetering on the brink of buying a Kaypro II computer. As I recall, I spent a big chunk of the advance check from my first book to take the plunge and buy the thing. It was a machine totally unsuited to playing most games — but it came with Wordstar, which I could (and did) use to write books. The other thing I could do on that computer was customize Wordstar. Customize the keyboard shortcuts. Tweak the dot commands. (Dot commands? Long story. Suffice to say they were a Wordstar thing.) That was recreation, not work. Just this morning, I read with interest about some gadget called (and I am not making this up) called a Greaseweazle (sic) that I could use to read the old 5.25 inch floppy disks from my Kaypro. I want one.

Writing was and is the work. Fiddling with the computers was and is the game.

And now, yet again, I am a bit bemused to find myself with a whole new Lionel train set — by which I mean the whole universe of dealing with WordPress, which I am using to produce the website you are visiting. I have had some dealing with WordPress before, but now I am starting again in earnest. I am at present ankle-deep, resisting the urge (and so far I am resisting) to dive in over my head and fiddle endlessly to get the fonts and the themes and the plug-ins and the indenting just right. I am trying to limit myself, for now, in this initial phase, to the task of learning just enough to create a reasonably professional-looking website that will report my skills and experience as a writer, editor, and book layout guy.

And, of course, using the Internet to track down the Cohen quote was another example of admixing the tool and the train set.

Let’s see if I can resist the urge to go bananas on WordPress longer than I could hold off on the urge to track down that citation.

All best,