Perfection may feel guilt
But it never does apologize.
Maybe that’s why so many pull away from the future
To make Christmas songs on an Amiga MOD,
McGyver BASIC onto a vintage Neumann,
Bootstrap compilers from second-hand parts,
Cultivate the sacred diamond of memory
Trying to blitt every nibble of conceivable space,
An offset here from payload byte for addressing modes,
A tinier language there where the lags are overcome
With what we now know, but without the tools,
Only the prescience of the itchy modern sense,
Unfathomably difficult, like growing potatoes without irrigation,
But worth it for the taste of homebrew reproduced with new eyes,
In hopes they will emerge pure in a time when the code
Was not yet corrupted, before the pillages were accomplished
And the pioneers absorbed into the programs,
Before the mistakes that plague our modern lives were made,
Before we were born.
They generate interrupts by tripping the carrier detect line with pins,
Manage to pull up instruction slots from nowhere, get email on 68k,
Learn the hard way the most artful use of POKE 33 and ESC-A
And how long a floppy disk can spin before giving way.
They dig like archeologists in the code of early video games
For scanlines, mirrored playfields, ways to read set values.
They port languages across processors, relying on the insane
Simplicity of the hardware to layer enough abstraction to turn
An impossibly frustrating ruin of a machine into something human.
They spend sleepless months dreaming a way to optimize
The BSP collision system for particle updates
An order of magnitude faster,
And become so intimate with the hex codes
They can write them directly to memory
And work out the relative jumps as they go along.
They put their souls into a PDP-11 clone
Made in the Soviet Union, with 4 mbs of RAM
And an exotic operating system with 13 commands,
No math, no logic, all programs some flavor of Aztec C
Just to pull some static http from a gopher server —
And know they are Gods for doing so, or at least able
To contact advanced civilizations as an equal.
Then it’s back to the black market scrapyard for cogwheels,
Relays, accumulators, Psion organizers, 3dfx Voodoo banshees,
Scanning disconsolately for any signs of a Sinclair, BBC micro,
Altair, Acorn Archimedes, a pizzabox for model 715.
They pay top dollar for a Hunt the Wumpus clone
Or a Biorhythm calculator, azimuth screwdriver at the ready,
Waiting for the sweet sound of the modem.
But even Xerox Alto – father of the Gods – must slip further
Into time, to the golden days of FORTRAN and PASCAL,
The lost opportunities of FOCAL and JOSS
(Themselves a sad decline from LISP),
To UNIVAC and EDSAC, batch processing of punchcards,
Teletypewriters with 5-bit Baudot code, whose characters
Were uppercase letters and a few punctuation symbols,
From which must be drawn instruction sets
Meaningful and simple enough to be written out
(Programmers wrote only ten lines of code per day
And never touched a keyboard) on a coding sheet,
Handed to a data entry clerk, with enough mnemonic heft
No mistakes would be made.
Or all the way back to binary zero,
The forward slash as the rain seen through a dirty window
In Turing's "famously dismal" Manchester
On prototypes built with war surplus parts
And nothing more.
The ways of grief are immeasurable.
