Holiday Weekend Reading: "Living With A Computer" in 1982

I mentioned yesterday that I used to talk with my friend Steve Banker about the "exciting" new offerings of the nascent computer age. The Victor 9000, the KayPro, the Eagle, the Xerox Star, the TRS Model 100 (the iPad of its day) and so many others. Model 100, which was a wonderful little machine:

I believe that one of the first articles ever in a "real" magazine about these delightful new inventions was my "Living With a Computer," which came out in the Atlantic 28 years ago. The elegant and valuable new site LongForm.org, whose virtues I'll describe more another time, had an updated reference to the article last month. Several people have written asking me about it since then, so for the record the article can be found here. The Processor Technology SOL-20 that is the star of the article looked like this, genuine walnut sides and all (photo from sol20.org):

Considering that every possible aspect of the technology world has changed since the time I wrote the article, I think it actually has aged OK! But judge for yourself. Certainly it has aged better than the author. And the author tries to avoid thinking that the little children he describes in the article as dragging dead cats into the house are now as old as he was when he wrote it.

You could download the article and read it on your iPad, nook, or Kindle. Somehow that seems right.