My friend the Electrical Engineer from MIT dropped in recently, in between meetings in London and Paris, and as usual I put him to work.  His big job for the visit was installing my new batteries.  I felt just a little bit bad about making him do this – he’s in his mid sixties and had to lie on his side in the engine room to disconnect the old batteries before lifting them almost over his head and out of the boat.  Then he had to do that all over again to get the new ones in.  There are five batteries running the lights, fridge and sockets, and each one weighs more than 60 lbs. 

But I didn’t feel all that bad, because, frankly, I hold him partly responsible for the whole kit and kaboodle.   When you have a crazy idea most people just tell you you’re daft.  David says, Let me think about that…

I’ve known David since I was 15 and he was 25, a young MIT post doc.  The improbable beginning to this almost life-long friendship was that his wife was my high school Latin teacher.

Later, when I was in college a few subway stops away from MIT, we met for lunch occasionally.  In my senior year I fretted about producing my thesis.  I always composed at the typewriter, and then edited by hand.  I mentioned my obsessive need to retype a whole page whenever I wanted to change a single word.  Then, as soon as I saw the next clean version, another word would demand to be changed and I would have to type the page all over again.

Why hadn’t someone invented a machine that would retype the page for me so I could always edit from a perfectly clean copy?

It was 1978 and we were in a coffee shop in Harvard Square.  David said, Let me think about that…

What I needed, he explained, was access to a computer. 

On a computer you could write something, and then, if you knew the commands, you could change a single word and it would save that change and it would retype your page.   It was called a “text editor” (word processing was an idea yet to come).  The text editor interpreted your instructions line by line, and each time you pressed the carriage return (enter) your page would be retyped.

In the 70s computers took up whole rooms, and most people never got near one.  At MIT, students, faculty and staff logged into the computer using terminals. Recently, David said, people were beginning to scorn ordinary, paper loaded, computer terminals.  Instead everyone wanted the latest thing, called a VDU (visual display unit).  It looked just like a television and everything you wrote was on the screen instead of on paper.

David said he could sneak out a terminal for me if I were willing to have the old-fashioned paper version. 

I said I was very fond of paper and didn’t know anything about computers.

David was sure I would work it out.  It was quite a cool idea.

Of course, my terminal needed a way to communicate with the MIT mainframe, so David also smuggled out a modem, a device with two rubber rings, designed for the receiver of an ordinary telephone, one rubber ring for the earpiece and one for the mouthpiece.   There’s a picture on a Columbia University website, improbably dedicated to the history of acoustic couplers, that looks at little like what David delivered to my Cambridge appartment.

With the circular dial on the phone, first I telephoned MIT, and then I dialled David’s password (which was, of course, very wrong of both of us).  When the computer began to emit a series of whines, squeaks and whistles, I shoved the receiver into the rubber holes on the modem, and then I was connected to an MIT mainframe, one of the most powerful computers in the world.

I dialled and shoved and typed furiously all evening, every evening for months.  My flatmate was very understanding.  She was (is) a poet and part of the house agreement was that if either of us were writing the phone was off the hook anyway.

I was startled every time I hit the return button and the terminal typed out revised lines of text, and I slept uneasily as long as the thing was in my bedroom. 

Nevertheless, I tweaked my paragraphs word by word, and my masterpiece was stored on the remote computer, which eventually produced a series of little holes in a long string of tickertape.  The night before my thesis was due David and I fed the tickertape into a printer.  The thesis was about 100 pages long and it took almost all night to print it out.

I am pretty sure I was the first undergraduate at Harvard to submit a thesis entirely produced by computer.   The authorities were completely confused when I explained that I couldn’t submit an original and three copies, because my “original” was just a bunch of holes.

A quarter of a century later I picked David up at Heathrow.  He’d moved on from stealing terminals for undergraduates to being part of the team that invented the internet, and later, when everyone wanted to join in, helping to design international protocols for the guts that run it, like IP addresses.  He travels all over the world being important, but when he is in the UK I always have some homely project for him.  Electrical engineers make useful friends. 

As I pulled out of the car park and headed for the motorway back to my little Oxfordshire village I told David that the plan for the weekend was to go look at boats for sale.

Three months earlier I had put my home of 25 years on the market.

I have decided, I declared, that the only possible consolation would be to buy a narrowboat and live on it.

I admitted that I knew nothing about boats.

Let me think about that… said David.   And then, after awhile, he added that he was sure I would work it out. In fact, it was quite a cool idea.