Eigenmumbles

When I was in high school, network connectivity seemed like a marvelous thing. I played with gopher (remember gopher?) over a relatively slow modem connection, and it was great. But for the most part, I used the computer as an isolated object. I spent most of my time programming, with breaks to look at paper documentation when it was necessary.

When I was an undergraduate, I worked almost exclusively on computers that were connected via the campus network. But those computers were either desktop machines or servers that I connected to via desktop machines. Nobody I knew had a laptop computer, for example, and there was no such thing as a smart phone yet. So I was connected when at the computer, and disconnected otherwise.

In graduate school, I got my first laptop. I was connected whenever I was on campus, but I had intermittent connectivity elsewhere, including the apartment where I lived during my last couple years at Berkeley. So I still spent a lot of time in places where there was no network access (or none that I was willing to pay for). I still sometimes used my laptop to write code or text when I was disconnected, but mostly I treasured doing other things in those times when there was no network available. I spent a lot of time scribbling with a pen and pad. This trend continued when I was a postdoc.

Things are more complicated now, for several reasons. I have a smart phone, though I’ve gotten pretty good at leaving it alone when I want deliberately to disconnect. But my phone is not tethered to my computer, so I often find myself in states of intermediate connectivity: able to check email on my phone), but not to respond efficiently, since typing on my phone is painfully slow; able to write code and browse online documentation, but kept by firewalls from checking that code into a central repository unless I’m willing to start a VPN and bounce my connection through three intermediate hosts; able to see when there are software updates I should apply, but unable to apply them until I’ve moved to a connection with higher bandwidth. And every so often it dawns on me – and I know I am not alone in this thought – that this sort of intermediate level of connectivity can be miserably frustrating, and is not what I want. What I want is disconnected operation: just me, the computer, and a pad of paper, with no network at my fingertips by phone or other device. But this state is surprisingly difficult to achieve.