The Shore.

I learned about the schism between hardware and software from a computer game: Wing Commander II. It was 1992, and nothing in my previous encounters with computers had prepared me for this. My IBM-compatible 286 was this thing I used to write essays or play Tetris. Those capabilities seemed as natural and innate to the machine as running and laughing did to my 12-year old self. And then I found out from a classmate about Wing Commander II. Being a starfighter pilot sounded brilliant, so I begged a pirate copy and loaded it up, levitating with excitement at the prospect of my glorious new career. 

And then the stuttering started. I’d be in the cockpit of my Epee fighter, an enemy in my sights, and the world would break. Sometimes it came back in a second or two, but other times it would just stall. In the hope of shocking the program back awake, sometimes I’d open a book and wait quietly, hoping to impress it with my patience. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to punch the power button (which I thought of as the ejection switch) and wait for the whole thing to boot up again. 

This made it really hard not to think of hardware as a vessel for software, an imperfect cage of flesh around a brilliant, electric spirit (it may have helped that I was in a mission school, getting dunked in cod-theology daily). Hardware was a recalcitrant beige box on my mother’s desk, and software was an alternate dimension in a stack of 3.5” floppy disks. 

Even at age twelve, I had the sense that the universe in the machine was somehow just better. I had no words for it – I didn’t know about platonic forms or everyday friction or perfectibility. Software just felt like the way things should be. The box was a portal, through which I could step from the world of the power button to the universe of the Terran Confederation and the Kilrathi.