A few blocks away nostalgia draws me back to the University computing services centre.
This is the place I sent my first email. This is the place I first started logging on, logging on to the JANET network. This is the place I started sharing drives and fileservers, downloading papers and then printing things out en-masse because you could never comfortably ready on the small screens and still needed to 'hold' the knowledge for it to be real. This is the place I made those first horrendous gaffs: emailing the wrong person, over-writing networked data, forgetting those logins and passwords. Cumbersome interfaces, complex alphanumeric email addresses, floppy disks that ran out of space so fast you'd walk in with a box of them (and have to format the things too) - it all happened here. Behind the security code doorlocks - themselves a novelty in 1990 - the main room only houses thirty or so PCs. Serving 14,000 students, the odds were always against you finding a spare machine, and the queues even for word-processors were legendary. Open 24hrs, it was home to so many late night essays I don't want to think about it. We learned to type with just our index fingers here. None of us had laptops and unlike today the halls didn't have their own PCs (though they themselves are becoming redundant with the number of macs students are carrying).
It's humbling to come back here.
Outside, my wireless palmtop is picking up the footprint of five other networks. In another few years there won't be 'computing rooms' any more.
