The Last People Who Know How It Works

In the 1990s, getting a computer game to run could be a project of its own.

You opened files like autoexec.bat and tried to figure out what they did. Sometimes you built a boot disk for a single game. You had a floppy disk whose entire purpose was to start your computer in the particular configuration that one game needed.

I did this when I was ten. I wanted to play the game badly enough to read through configuration files and keep trying things until it worked. I doubt I would have learned any of it otherwise.

There was a lot of this. You moved little jumpers on drives with your fingernail. You learned which interrupt your sound card used because getting it wrong meant you weren’t going to hear anything. Even the modem gave you some idea of what it was doing. After enough failed connections, you could hear when the familiar sequence of noises wasn’t going the way it should.

It was frustrating at the time. But I remember it fondly now, which is probably easier to do when I’m no longer trying to get the sound card working.

After enough of this, you had some idea of where to start when the computer misbehaved. You could remember the setting you’d changed last time. Plenty of that knowledge was only useful on the machine sitting on your desk, but it stuck because you’d had to figure it out yourself.

An AI assistant can now do all of this for you. You describe what you want and let it make the changes. If something goes wrong, you ask it to try again. You may never open the configuration file yourself. If the whole reason you were editing that file was to get on with something else, this is a pretty good arrangement.

It does leave me wondering how much I’ll remember about a problem that something else solved for me. I can ask for an explanation, of course. Whether I’ll bother when the thing is already working is another matter (and if I’m honest I probably wouldn’t).

There’s a familiar concern here about what happens when the people who understand the old systems retire. Eventually something will break and nobody will know how to fix it. Maybe. But I don’t think the technical information itself is about to disappear. The manuals and source code are still there, and an AI assistant can help you work through them. Anyone who wants to learn still can.

What I miss is the familiarity that came from working on the same machine over and over. I knew that beige computer in 1995 because I wanted to play games on it and it kept giving me trouble. As more of the work happens through an assistant, I expect we’ll spend less time getting to know the machines we rely on. We may end up depending on them for considerably more while knowing them less well than we knew the computers we used as kids.

I find that unsettling.

I doubt a kid growing up with these tools will miss any of this. I don’t spend much time thinking about what happens behind a light switch, and I don’t feel deprived by that. They’ll have their own problems to get stuck on. I can’t expect them to be nostalgic for an afternoon spent making a game run on a computer they never owned.

Still, I went looking the other night for a recording of a modem connecting. People have kept these around, and I’m glad they have. I played one just to hear it again. The dialing, the hiss, the static, and finally the quiet when the connection was established. I still knew the sequence by heart.

The computer I was listening on played it immediately. I didn’t have to configure anything or figure out why the sound wasn’t working. I’m glad that part is easier now.

But I do miss knowing my computer as well as I knew the one that used to make that noise.