My Documents

Начало книги

The first time I saw a computer was in 1980, when I was four or five years old. It’s not a pure memory, though — I’m probably mixing it up with other, later visits to my father’s office, on calle Agustinas. I remember my father explaining how those enormous machines worked, his black eyes fixed on mine, his perpetual cigarette in hand. He waited for my awed reaction and I faked interest, but as soon as I could, I went off to play near Loreto, a thin-lipped secretary with bangs framing her face, who never remembered my name.

Loreto’s electric typewriter struck me as marvelous: its small screen where the words accumulated until a powerful salvo carved them into the paper. It was a device that was perhaps similar to a computer, but I never thought of it that way. In any case, I preferred the other machine at her desk, a conventional black Olivetti, a model I was very familiar with because we had one just like it at my house. My mother had studied programming, but she’d abandoned computers and opted instead for that lesser technology, which was still current then, since the proliferation of computers was still a ways off.

Читать дальше →