My first PC

I am sitting in cube on the twelfth floor of what I shall call the Irving Trust Technology Tower ("Our last name is trust, but you can call us Irving") waiting to test something that hasn't been fixed yet, that should have been available about the time the lights went out two weeks ago yesterday, unable to concentrate on anything more important. I stop by MeFi, the world's largest collective blog and linkfarm, and am directedto this "pop quiz:" What was the first personal computer? There I see it, for the first time since -- I guess since my parents moved from Oradell to Cheesequake when I was off at Earlham, abandoning much of my childhood impedimenta -- second from the bottom.

And, yes, it may well have been the Eisenhower administration when I built the thing, though the year Kennedy would be elected. I am touched to see it taken seriously, though I couldn't at the time myself, lusting as I did for electromechanical relays. But there I was then and here I am now, my years as a humanist, scholar, philosopher, poet, and perhaps a bit of a mystic, though not in the highest sense of the term, those years, what, a dream?

As the late Laurence Talbot once said of the full moon, it gives one pause.