Our first computer showed up on a card table the spring of 1983 — eighth grade for me — an Apple IIe my dad hauled home for spring break. You turned it on and it gave you a blinking cursor and nothing else. No apps. No feed. Just a prompt and the understanding that whatever happened next was up to me.
So I made it do things. What I wanted more than anything in the world was a Lamborghini Countach, so I drew one — HPLOT by HPLOT, coordinate by coordinate, that impossible wedge of a car laid down across the hi-res screen over I-don't-know-how-many afternoons. It was the best thing I had ever made. The machine wasn't an appliance; it was a frontier with a keyboard, and I was drawing supercars out on the edge of it.
Then my brother erased the floppy. All of it. The Countach, gone to a blank disk.
I'd like to tell you I laughed it off. I did not. I walked away from computers for years — wary of the whole species of machine that could swallow that much work in one wrong keystroke.
What pulled me back was color. Somewhere in college I saw a Mac running in color for the first time, and something that had gone quiet since the card table sat straight back up. I fell for computers all over again, and that time it stuck — it became the work, the craft, the career. I've loved them ever since.
But loving the machine and having fun with it turn out to be different things, and somewhere in the career they came apart. Computers got fast and smooth and sealed shut — and, this is the part I felt for years before I could name it, they got very good at demanding the exact things I'm worst at. The follow-through. The boilerplate. The flat, careful middle of every project, where the vision is already settled and all that's left is the twelfth patient repetition. My head has never worked that way. It runs in leaps and systems and big pictures and is terrible at the straight line between them. For a long stretch the machine asked me to be good at the straight line. I white-knuckled it, and it stopped being fun.
Then the machine started talking back.
Not the hype — the actual, sit-up-in-your-chair version. I describe something in plain English and an agent goes and does it. I point Claude at a mess and the mess gets untangled. But here's what actually undid me: it isn't just fast. It takes the flat middle. I hand off the careful repetition and stay up on the ridge — the systems, the leaps, the big picture — which is the only ground I was ever any good on. The gaps I've spent a lifetime apologizing for get quietly filled. And the things I am good at get bigger, because I can finally reach the top of them.
I've started to think this might be the age of the neurodivergent — and I mean that in the best possible way. Not because anyone got fixed. Because the tools finally stopped punishing minds that don't run in straight lines and started meeting them where they actually live. The tax came off. What's left is the part that was always fun.
The next place I want to point all of this is the machine itself. With AI moving onto our own devices and memory prices going vertical, I think a lot of us are about to start building our own boxes again — the way we used to. That's a whole post of its own, and it's coming.
Reader, it's the Countach again. It's laying something down and not knowing exactly what the screen will do next. It's a frontier with a keyboard — except now the keyboard talks back, it fills in what I'm missing, and nobody can erase this floppy.
I've loved computers since that color Mac. But I hadn't had fun with one — real, card-table, drawing-a-Countach fun — in a very long time. That's the part that came back.
Computers are fun again. The kid plotting a supercar on that first Apple IIe would not believe his luck.
— Pete