Debugging the Bite of a Megabyte

The rainy Saturday stretched before me like a 20-megabyte disk waiting to be filled. It was 9 a.m., and I was bored already. I’d eaten my Shredded Wheat and banana. Now . . . what to do?

The gray skies were relentless. It was the kind of weekend you wanted to delete. And then this idea popped onto my screen.

I grabbed my husband and my Visa card and headed off to the Whole Earth Access Co. Today was the day I would make the great leap forward. Today was the day I’d leave my mid-’80s, mid-sized computer behind and move on up to a state-of-the-art Macintosh Plus with a hard-disk drive.

Everyone who saw my little old Macintosh with its cute little external drive said, “Someone like you needs more power.” People couldn’t believe I was still dragging that mouse across those wimpy little floppy disks. Someone like me needed hard disks, megabytes, certainly much more power.

And I was sick of wasting my incredibly valuable time staring at the clock icon while waiting for the machine to function. I was an iconoclast. I wanted to be able to click and go.

By high noon on that rainy Saturday, with a mere flick of the Visa card, I was up 20 megabytes and out two grand.

We came home and unpacked all the boxes. The new computer; the external hard-disk drive; four manuals; three simple, self-explanatory disks; cables to connect my modem; my printer; special connections for the so-called “scuzzy port”--hey, I was learning the lingo.

I sat there like the Queen of Oz while my husband connected the whole thing. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, I told myself.

“Ready,” he said.

I went straight to work because time is money and money is power, and now I had more power so I ought to make more money.

The first thing I noticed was that the new hard-disk drive made a horrible noise. It sounded like . . . a machine. I hate machines.

I turned it off so I could think. When I turned it back on, I couldn’t get the computer to recognize the existence of the hard-disk drive.

I called my husband. “Honey, I can’t find my megabytes.” He couldn’t find them either.

I called my friend Brad. He was one of the apostles of the book, “The Macintosh Bible.” But Brad wasn’t home. He was at his office picking up his office computer so his kids could use his office computer at home and he could then use his home computer at home.

I read the manuals. I tried all the simple, self-explanatory disks. I clicked and double-clicked all the files. The hands of the clock icon whirled relentlessly.

Finally, I called the Whole Earth Access Co. The nice man said the drive was probably broken and that if I brought it in, they would see about getting me another one.

“How could it be broken?” I asked. “We just bought it this morning.”

“Sometimes they come like that,” he said. “You know, most stores won’t even take things back.”

The broken drive was whirling loudly. My husband said the noise wasn’t the drive. It was the fan that cooled it. “It’s important that you be able to hear the fan,” he said.

It was 4 o’clock. I had wasted five hours fiddling with the damn thing. I started thinking about how I’d need a radio to cover the noise. I would need days to figure out the new computer. I could waste a lot of time on this.

We packed up the new computer, the bum drive, the four manuals, the cables and the three simple, self-explanatory disks. At 6 o’clock, I signed the paper de-Visa-ing the two grand.

By 7 o’clock, I was sitting in sweet silent thought, watching the clock icon on my non-state-of-the-art, non-power computer. My friend Brad returned my call.

“I solved the problem,” I told him.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“I erased the day.”