The Last People Who Know How It Works

There was, for a while, a noise.

In the mid 1990s, a computer got on the internet by making a phone call. It picked up the landline (the same one everyone else in the house would have used), dialed a number, and then the modem on your end and the modem on the other end screeched at each other for a while. If you were online back then, you can probably hear it right now. The dial tone, the beeps of the number, a long whine, and then a burst of static like a fax machine falling down the stairs.

The noise wasn’t for you. But if you listened closely enough, the noise told you whether the call was going to work. After enough failed connections, you could hear the sequence go wrong before the computer got around to telling you.

Nobody taught me that. But I learned it when I was a kid. I was ten, and I wanted to play video games.

Getting a game to run in those days was a bit of an adventure sometimes. There was no Steam with an easy set of buttons to Download and Play games with. You installed the game via physical media, and then it didn’t work. A black screen. Or no sound. Or an error message that induced fear (Oh no, I’ve performed an illegal operation!).

So you went digging. You opened autoexec.bat, a file you were never really meant to see, and found lines like SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1, which turned out to be your computer telling every game where to find the sound card. If that I5 was wrong, because the card was actually on interrupt 7 or something else had gotten to 5 first, you didn’t hear anything. Sometimes you built a boot disk for a single game, a floppy whose entire purpose was to start the computer in exactly the configuration that one game needed, usually because the game wanted nearly all of the first 640K of memory and your mouse driver was sitting on some of it. Then you restarted. And tried again. And kept restarting until, if you were lucky, it worked.

Nobody forced me to do any of this. I wanted to play the game, and the operating system was standing between me and it, and so at ten years old I was reading configuration files, which is not a thing kids do for fun. I doubt I’d have learned any of it otherwise.

It was frustrating at the time. And yet I remember it very fondly now, which is a lot easier to do when I’m no longer the one trying to get the sound card working.

But something happened along the way. I got to know that machine the way you get to know an old car. I knew the grinding it made when it was thinking and the grinding that meant trouble. When it broke, I had somewhere to start, because I remembered what I’d changed last time. Almost none of this was useful anywhere except on that particular beige box on my crummy desk. It didn’t matter. I’d taken it apart, one way or another, and put it back together, and that was how I knew it inside and out.

Now I tell an AI assistant what I want and it does it. If something breaks, I say “try again” like it’s some kind of slot machine. I may never open any configuration files at all. And to be clear, this is wonderful. Nobody wants to spend a Saturday fighting their computer, and if the whole reason you were in that file was to get to the thing you actually cared about, handing it off is a pretty great deal.

Though it does make me wonder what I’ll remember about a problem that something else solved for me. I could ask it to explain, of course. Whether I’ll bother once everything is working again is another matter (I won’t).

There’s an old fear in this industry that the experts retire and take the knowledge with them, and then one day the COBOL breaks and nobody knows how to fix it. Maybe. But I don’t think the information is going anywhere. The manuals and documentation are still there. The source code is still there. If anything, an AI will walk you through them more patiently than any documentation ever did. Anyone who wants to learn still can.

What’s slowly fading away though is something more subtle: It’s the familiarity of the struggle. The struggle is the whole thing! It’s how we learned.

Remember paper maps? You’d unfold one over the steering wheel (it never folded back up the way it came), take a wrong turn, and get lost. A lot. But getting lost taught you which streets connected and where the shortcut was and which way was north, and after a while you didn’t need the map, because you knew the city. Now a calm voice says “in 500 feet, turn left,” and you arrive every time. But what if the phone dies? Plenty of us are left standing on a corner in a city we’ve lived in for ten years with no idea which way is home.

GPS didn’t set out to make us a worse driver. It just made us strangers in our own neighborhoods.

That’s my worry about AI. I think it could make us strangers to the machines we depend on, at the same moment we start depending on them for considerably more than ever before.

The kids growing up with this won’t miss any of what I miss about these old machines, and I don’t think they should. I don’t lie awake wondering what’s behind my light switch. They’ll have their own fights with their own machines, and I can’t expect them to get nostalgic about losing an afternoon to a computer they never owned.

But the other night I went looking for a recording of a modem connecting. People have saved these, and I’m glad they did. I played it just to hear it again. The dialing, the hiss, the static, and then the quiet when the connection took. I still knew every note.

The computer I played it on just played it. No settings, no switches, no autoexec.bat. I’m glad that part is easier now.

But I have no idea what it sounds like when it’s in trouble.