[PRCo] Re: Lost machines

[Harold Geissenheimer]

Greetings to all
When I opened this I believed  that this might be about another very
Pittsburgh expression.

When I moved to Pittsburgyh, automobiles were called MACHINES!

Another reason why Pittsburgh was someplace special.

Harold Geissenheimer

Bob Rathke wrote:

> Following is an interesting essay on machines that are now gone - 
> steam locomotives, Atari games, Betamax video recorders...
>  
> I'm glad that I still have my Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder.
>  
> Bob 12/25/03
>  
> ----------------------------------------
> Techsploitation
>
> By Annalee Newitz <mailto:darknet at techsploitation.com>
>
> Lost machines
>
> IT WAS ONE of those times when I find myself eavesdropping on a 
> conversation not out of prurience but because it's the kind of 
> discussion I'd probably be having if any of my friends were around. A 
> group of academics sat near me on the bus, engaging in awkward 
> intellectual flirtation about neurasthenia, one of my favorite 
> 19th-century diseases of the mind. Neurasthenia was one of those 
> catchall maladies, like depression is now: it referred to any disorder 
> of "the nerves" that caused anxiety, random pain, melancholy, or 
> fainting.
>
> Somehow, perhaps because the holiday season always makes me think 
> about death, the academics' arch banter about retro psychological 
> problems reminded me of all the things we've lost to what is allegedly 
> scientific progress. I don't care if we leave behind crap like 
> homemade clothes and horseback riding as a mode of transportation and 
> sitting in the parlor next to the fire reading by candlelight. I'm 
> referring to all the cool machines and idealistic theories we've lost 
> in our effort to find "the truth" or get a grant or sell the newest, 
> shiniest widget in the universe.
>
> For example: I'm sad about trains. I never lived during a time when 
> locomotives were cutting edge, and yet I still miss them. I often 
> imagine a very surly Henry David Thoreau standing next to Walden Pond, 
> out in the bug-infested, hot damp of the mid-19th-century 
> Massachusetts countryside, watching a distant train go by, feeling 
> like he's watching the future rip a hole in his brain. I like to go to 
> museums where you can see the huge, barrel-bodied, old-fashioned train 
> engines that look like Japanese giant monsters. Most of all, I miss a 
> world where public transportation was the only way to get around fast. 
> The train world was a pre-car world, a place where there were no 
> asphalt roads or traffic jams or freeway accidents.
>
> Of course, I know this is the worst kind of nostalgia: trains were run 
> on coal and belched ridiculous amounts of smoke into the atmosphere. 
> They were crowded and dirty, full of noisy people who snored all the 
> way from Boston to New York City while you tried to ignore them. 
> Nevertheless, I wish we'd stuck with trains instead of getting hooked 
> on those newfangled automobiles.
>
> I also miss spaceships for humans. The space shuttle is just a 
> glorified airplane compared to the ships that flew to the moon. It's 
> not so much that I wish we could have more of those cramped rockets 
> where life in zero G sucks ass, but rather that we could reawaken our 
> hope that very soon we would be sailing between the stars on great 
> adventures, meeting aliens and discovering new worlds. I guess I miss 
> the idea of spaceships. I know: I've watched too much Star Trek and 
> read too much Amy Thomson. But still, whenever I see one of those 
> pictures of a rocket ship or flying saucer circa 1954, I feel lonely 
> and tired. It's as if the future has been drained out of me. We will 
> never seek out new life and new civilizations. We will only go where 
> we've gone before.
>
> And that's why I'm in mourning for so many other dying and dead 
> technologies: the Merlin handheld proto-Gameboy I had in sixth grade, 
> Atari game systems, Commodore 64s, reel-to-reel tape players, water 
> pics, lava lamps, flip phones, VCRs, Betamaxes, fax machines, coaxial 
> cable, cable cars, carburetors, electric belts, orgone boxes, and hot 
> water bottles.
>
> Do you ever feel like there was some future we could have reached if 
> we hadn't gotten sidetracked along the way by blenders and speakers 
> and cars? Maybe in some alternate universe humans didn't waste their 
> time with ICBMs and faxes; maybe those alternate humans are healing 
> themselves with nanotech and using spaceships to explore the galaxy.
>
> But then again, maybe beauty is in the digression. Perhaps the whole 
> point of scientific progress is to pick things up, stare at them a 
> lot, and put them down again. Without meandering a bit, we'd never 
> have had silly pseudo-diseases like neurasthenia and borderline 
> personality disorder; but neither would we have genomics and the 
> Internet and carbon nanotubes. Progress is not always progress, as it 
> were.
>
> I suppose that's why I miss the trains.
>
> Annalee Newitz (nostalgic at techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd 
> who has absolutely zero nostalgia for clock radios and is ready for 
> them to die. Her column also appears in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly 
> newspaper.
>