I Love the Computer - Michael Enger

2026-06-06

I Love the Computer

In a recent discussion on the Aftermath Podcast about the ill effects of the current AI hype cycle, one of the editors said something that really resonated with me:

I love the computer. — Chris Person

This was in the middle of a rant about how these snake oil salesmen are ruining the space he loves with their insatiable avarice and, as much as I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of technologists who are legitimately angry at this social crime being committed, I’m going focus on that specific quote.

Because I, too, love the computer.

In The Beginning

It all began with a curious box that my mother brought home from work. Sometime when I was around six or seven we were living in Dølihagen, a suburban area near Jessheim, itself a small town in Norway. The area was less populous then than it is now, having ballooned in size since they opened the new international airport nearby, and my memories of it are a sparse mix of playgrounds, muddy fields, and a sea of homogenous buildings.

We had moved there after the death of my father, from a large house my parents had build next door to my grandparents, to a small flat on the lower ground floor where my mother, my brother, and I all slept in the same room. My mother flitted through a series of workplaces and eventually landed a job in the ministry of foreign affairs, a position that was going to send us to the Philippines. I don’t remember much of the preparations leading up to the move, but one experience is burned into my mind: the day she brought home the computer. From the moment she unpacked and set it up on the dining room table I was enthralled.

This daunting and foreign machine was fairly typical for the early 90s and was a tool she was given to aid in her new work. It was an IBM 486 DX6 running Windows 3.0 (later Windows for Workgroups 3.11), housed in a business-grey tower adorned with green LEDs and an beguiling turbo button. It came preinstalled with Paint, SkiFree, and Solitaire, and would become my portal into a new world wherein I would find friends, hobbies, and a career. It was eventually equipped with a sound card and CD-ROM drive—my mother damning whomever had coined the term “Plug & Play” during its installation—and I have countless memories of time spent exploring all it had to offer. Nearly two decades after that first introduction, a therapist would speculate that my interest in computers could stem from how it was a rare point of stability in a life where I ended up leaving my home and my friends every few years.

The Smell of Ink on Cheap Paper

As I had the pleasure of being drawn into the world of computers in the pre-Internet era1, my experience of discovery is inexorably linked with the enthusiast print media at the time. Magazines like TEKNO and Geek, and eventually Incite PC Gaming and PC Gamer, gave me insight not only into the hardware and software that so enraptured me, but a culture which I yearned to be a part of. My interests revolved mostly around gaming, but I would pour over any and all computer-related publication I could get my hands on. I understood very little but I was desperate to learn, and thoroughly explored the floppy discs and CDs that came along with the magazines. Through these publications I picked up the slang and the overlapping interests, and found myself building an identity around what it meant to be a “geek”, a “gamer”, or a “computer guy”. Having revisited some of those magazines in recent times shows how crude, misogynistic, and adversarial a lot of the writing was, so although they provided me with a lot of self-discovery I’m glad I outgrew that mentality.

It would be easy to say that it’s just nostalgia that makes me lament what was lost in the transition to the Internet, and it’s not like print was spared the rot of capitalism that has made online geek spaces into ad-ridden, engagement-maximising cesspools. But I am glad that I was able to do my initial discovery in a world devoid of pop-ups, auto-playing ads, click-bait, and incessant pleas to “like and subscribe”. Print media was slow, imperfect, and filled with a callous toxicity that still permeates the hobby, but, as I have espoused before, there is something unique in the kind of writing that was done by a full editorial team and meant for permanently printing on paper. All that being said, as much as I loved the magazines I collected, they pale in comparison to the endless font of knowledge which was about to enter my life. For what better place is there for a kid with a voracious appetite for niche information than the wonderful World Wide Web?

One thing that I remember fondly, but which has been long since been made irrelevant, are the magazine articles that featured lists of “interesting websites” to visit. It’s a unique overlap of the digital and...