Chasing Ghosts - Interpretatio

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Chasing Ghosts<br>On progress, memory, and its generations

Interpretatio<br>Mar 28, 2026

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When I was around eleven, I downloaded Pac-Man onto our home computer. Seeing it, my mother mentioned that back when she was young, many of her colleagues at the research institute would stay after work to play Pac-Man on the office computers. This was the 1980s. In Eastern Europe, computers weren’t yet a mass phenomenon, and playing Pac-Man after hours felt like something exclusive.<br>From today, the whole scene looks like a cultural artifact, an unnoticed fragment of history, carried off into the past by the wind of progress. And what’s strange is that two things became artifacts simultaneously: the original scene of institute employees playing after work, and the moment my mother told me about it. Unless I one day teach my daughter to play Pac-Man and tell her, alongside that, the story of how computers came to exist. Though the original episode won’t stop being a fragment.<br>About twenty years passed between the event and the telling. Another twenty between the telling and today. Now we look toward the near future through the expectation of personal robots and AGI. But we don’t really know what comes in twenty years. Neither did the people at the institute — though they sensed something, perhaps. Which cannot be said of their IBM.<br>I have an old computer at home, still working but long abandoned. Its software stopped being supported years ago, and time no longer accepts changes. So it’s always January 1st, 2001, eternal millennium. And photographs from that place and time. A home museum of recent tech history. Pac-Man may or may not have been installed on it. But the date it shows is roughly right, and it works as a kind of portal to the past. Old technology stays true to its era.<br>Unlike it, I can’t even remember what I was doing on January 1st, 2001. Can you?

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