holy heck I remembered this all of a sudden. I was asking myself, what were some early influences on our sentiments towards computers? this one kid's book, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, was one of those influences.
I wanted a Homework Machine, so very badly. homework sucked! ~Chara (ugh I need to figure out how to type Greek characters. WinCompose maybe)
He studied the writing for a moment and then sighed. “If only we could save even more time. You’d think six hours of school would be enough for them, without making us take school home. If only I could build some kind of a robot to do all our homework for us…”“Now, wait a minute,” Joe said hastily. “Let’s not go overboard. I’m still not sure there won’t be some kind of trouble from this pen board, like there generally is when you start inventing things. So far, I’ll admit, it looks all right. But if you built a robot, we’d be in trouble for real.”
wow. it's like I'm reading a biography of Sam Altman! ~Chara
Upstairs, in her bedroom, Irene bent over her short-wave radio, completely unaware that she was interrupting her father’s television program with her amateur broadcast.“W9TGM,” she said. “W9TGM. This is W9XAG. Come in.”
She snapped a switch, and Danny’s voice crackled in her earphones. “W9XAG. This is W9TGM.”
“Hi, Danny.”
“H’lo, Irene. What’s up?”
I used to think this was the coolest idea in the world—talking to your friends over the magic of radio. And it still seems like a cooler idea, somehow, than what we've got now. You might think that's ridiculous. Look at where I'm saying that! On the Internet, a modern miracle of long-distance, high-bandwidth communication. Why on Earth would it seem lacking?
Is it simply a question of oversaturation? I'm old enough to remember a couple of decades of life before the Internet, days during which I really did listen to shortwave radio, although I never tried to get on the air myself. All the same, more than half of the "real life" that I remember has been spent online. Familiarity has bred contempt, and so forth.
But there's one thing about radio that's not true about using the Internet: you can build a radio with a few dollars of parts. Building a radio transmitter is tougher but it's still easily within reach of anyone who can solder some parts together. Radio therefore ought to be accessible in a way that the Internet, for all its pretensions of being a universal medium for The People™, just isn't. I say "ought to be", because in practice radio is heavily locked down by regulation in service of corporate monetization of the RF spectrum. The technology itself though is trivial in comparison to what's needed to sustain Internet connections.
We've got some galena around here; or I could try the trick of melting some sulfur and iron filings together, to get a iron sulfide suitable for "cat's whisker" RF detection, and try to make the world's simplest radio. I did try that trick once! I used a piece cleaved off a large sample of galena—I now regret damaging the sample, kinda—and a thin strand of copper wire extracted from ordinary multi-stranded lamp cord as the "whisker", along with a handwound coil and a variable capacitor scrounged from a busted five-tube radio. (Good luck finding one in a thrift shop these days, though; they used to be routine finds.) It could pick up a few AM stations.
~Χαρά (there, I bothered that time)
