My desoldering gun should arrive today, so hopefully I'll get the Altair 
up and running! Before all that I've got to go to my uncle's house and 
replace a few of his wall sockets and plug in some extenders/power strips 
(so that my aunt will stop plugging in super heavy extenders that 
eventually end up ruining the hold on the sockets themselves). He's paying 
me a little bit of money for it, so I've got no problem with that. I'll 
chalk it up towards that expensive (~$160 USD) desoldering gun. That, or 
I'll put it towards building a proper case for my floppy disk drives. I 
can get acrylic pieces to put it together for around $90 online and then 
just paint it. (Granted, I'd rather have it made out of aluminum or steel, 
but that stuff's just waaaay too expensive).

The other day I was reading people's answers on Quora (for the 
uninitiated, it's like Yahoo Answers but instead of being a trollsite it's 
"sophisticated"), and I came across something that really resonated with 
me. The question was "Are we in the golden age of computing" and the 
person who answered said no and that in his opinion the golden age of 
computing would have been sometime during the 80s - when computing 
*itself* was seen as a creative activity and not just as a means of 
utility (watching videos, writing documents, etc).

I really understood this. Even though I didn't come around until back in 
1998 (and certainly didn't use a computer on my own until I was at least 
four or five years old), that's how computing was for me as a child. It 
wasn't just watching videos on YouTube (not that I even had sufficient 
bandwidth for that until we got 1mbps down in 2008) -- it was exploration. 
I would browse through every file and control panel that was relevant to 
me or that I thought was even interesting on Windows 98 and XP. Once I 
figured out how to write programs, I would start writing them all the time 
(this was, for a while - a mystery to me. I had a book from the 80s on 
computers with, of course, BASIC programs to key in. Having had no 
experience with microcomputers of the 80s, I couldn't figure out how on 
earth to do it on Windows. I remember even trying to type it in on notepad 
and saving it as an EXE file. Didn't work, obviously). At some point 
probably around 6th grade I dived into emulation and Gamemaker games and 
showed it off to other people in LIFT - the gifted program at my school. I 
would make and edit small videos just because Windows Movie Maker was 
there and I could, and I remember showing them off to classmates on a free 
day during school. I even tried to download Autodesk Maya at one point, 
giving up when the download window said it'd take 21 or 28 days or 
something like that (not that I would have ever figured out how to use it 
anyway). It was totally about exploration and searching for new ideas and 
ways to interact with the machine and with the world. It was a creative 
pursuit. And sure, I might have watched some videos or typed up some word 
documents - utility computing - but I was constantly in the pursuit of 
creative computing -- something I didn't even realize was being put on the 
backburner going into the last decade or so. Almost no computer comes with 
some obvious, easy way to write programs; Windows no longer has a Movie 
Maker; large forums are dying in favor of social networks; and going past 
the first page of Google seems pointless. Modern computing isn't perceived 
as a creative activity in and of itself and as such isn't designed that 
way. The beard's been shaved off and the tie's been straightened (thank 
you, season 1 finale of Halt and Catch Fire). But there's hope.

I think that the reason a lot of us are here on Gopher is that same 
pursuit of creative computing. There's an element of exploration and 
interactivity that's so intimate and fun because anyone can explore and 
anyone can create. It's why I love *nix sites that offer something fun and 
interactive. It's why I love retrocomputing - a hobby that is in and of 
itself exploration of computers. The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has 
a room chock full of microcomputers from the 70s and 80s and then a room 
of mainframes that you can explore and interact with and have fun with for 
as long as you want - which is something that I think also embraces the 
user's creative spirit and desire for a more intimate relationship with 
computers. Those machines have souls - ones that our own can mingle with 
and resonate with and love with. Computing is romantic - can be, anyway - 
and I wish more of the world could see it that way. I'm completely 
rambling at this point, but if this really resonates with anyone else, I'd 
love to hear it.

Anyway, my little Vonets wifi adapter has been knocked about three or four 
times since starting this phlog post, and before it ends up getting 
accidentally cut off again, I'm going to go ahead and wrap up. I'll post 
updates about my Altair on Mastodon - and once it's up and running, a 
decent amount of pictures on the PixelFed instance (pixelfed.sdf.org) that 
smj's been promoting.

That's all for now! See y'all next time! (Is this how I always close my 
posts? lol)