Hexadecimal Genome

Eye-Bee-M, Paul Rand, 1981

I mentioned in October that my first computer was an IBM PS/1. In fact, I also had a used Commodore 64 for a few years, though I can't remember which came first; plus, I never really thought of the C64 as a computer. Like a console it plugged into the tv and it had a tape deck which to my young mind was equivalent to a game cartridge but with excruciatingly long loading times.

The interface of the 64 made it difficult for me to accidentally break it - the command for loading a game was written down on a piece of paper, and that was as much as I knew. By comparison, a technician had to be called out at least three times to reinstall Windows 3.1 on the PC. This was the same OS that came with a tutorial for using a mouse, so it was simply a case of double clicking the wrong thing. I used to explore the System and Windows folders looking for interesting hidden stuff (ooh, regedit.exe), but I only remember one particular time now in which I went into the Control Panel and decided to change the theme settings to something more Christmas-y. Unfortunately when it was next booted, Windows failed to load because my Christmas theme exceeded the video card's colour limit. You live, you learn.

Anyway, that Personal System 1 would have come off the production line just down the road at Spango Valley - back when tangible objects used to be manufactured. Like my later Aptiva, we had IBM PCs because the Padre worked there and there was a staff discount. By the 80s and the almost complete disappearance of shipyards on the lower Clyde, IBM became the major employer in the area. Last month I happened across a Flickr set exploring the empty Spango Valley complex - I haven't passed by the factory in quite a while, but seeing the state it's in was actually quite sad. The Padre was there for just over twenty-five years until two or three years ago, so I had plenty of interaction with the place over the years. The very earliest I can recall is an open day in 1989 where I got my very own employee badge with my photo. In the Nineties he was on the assembly line on a rotating shift. Whenever he was on late shift we had to pick him up from the plant quite late in the evening - my brother and I had to come along for the ride because my mother wouldn't leave us in the house at that age, and when he was on nights my brother and I had to be quiet when we got in from school.

I received plenty of freebies across the years: various anti-static straps, an ancient PDA, culminating in some for-your-consideration fairly high-end graphics cards from Taiwan. Ironically, they were too new to fit in the bloody six year old Aptiva. If you wanted to save cash on CDs, films, software and games; there was a healthy market for pirated content. The first games I got for the PC were sourced this way. Whereas £15 was likely to get you one recent game in the shops (like my treasured copy of Rogue Spear), the same amount got me Grand Prix 3, Driver, Rainbow Six, and the expansion pack Eagle Watch. In June 2000 I even got a two-disc V-CD of The Matrix - long since succumbed to bit rot and been replaced with the DVD.

When I did a week's work experience in the factory in March 2002 I overheard a managerial conversation about a group of suspended work-from-home employees that had requested CD-R drives and been caught pirating software - that's what they did when they weren't walking out the door with pockets stuffed full of Pentium processors. I actually quite enjoyed what I was doing on work experience. I was shadowing the tech support guy for the international call centre - he was Spanish, and the EMEA range of the centre brought in a lot of foreign language speakers, mostly native speakers from abroad. We went around fixing Windows boxes, assigning new passwords when people forgot theirs and generally maintaining the office network. I was surprised to see the operators had two machines at each desk connected by KVM switches - one running Windows 2000 (IIRC), and another running OS/2! Apparently their essential database couldn't be migrated. It was fascinating to see the legacy hardware the place ran on. There was a problem with one of the LED panels in the call centre and myself and another guy called Dave pulled up the floor panels of the server room to test the wiring which led to a small Windows 3.1 box of all things. On Friday I spent my last day with Dave again, and after lunch we took a long walk down into one of the assembly modules at the other end of the complex in order to rewire what looked like a telephone exchange - exactly the sort of technical thing that appeals to me.

One of the few local guys taking UK and Ireland calls knew exactly where things were headed. I listened in on calls with him on the Wednesday morning rather than attend a meeting - probably because I was noticeably falling asleep at the previous morning's gathering to the point I missed a question directed at me. This guy gave a great piece of advice that was unfortunately too late for me - learn a language. He knew manufacturing was dead and that being a monoglot in this town was soon going to leave you out of work. Not when the rest of the world comes equipped with two languages and can migrate freely. Heavy industry gave way to light industry, only for light industry to be moved overseas barely two decades later. Growing up around IBM only to see light manufacturing decline well within my lifetime demonstrably affected my political and economic thought, as evidenced by this blog. This is why I find it sad: I'm only twenty-four and I can remember when we used to make concrete products, but now we have to survive an economy centred around abstract services. Watch as the reserve army of the unemployed expands.

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