Ah, the good old days! When text came in whatever color you wanted as long as it was green, grey, or orange. When each ASCII character plopped out of your audio coupler like tapioca through a straw.

I learned how to write on the Internet back in the mid eighties while I was in high school. They let the faculty brats into the computer center and let us on the VAXen and the Xerox Sigma 9. I fell in with a click of uber-geeks and we were all split screen chatting, writing long e-mail screeds, and publishing serial fiction for our peer's review. Oh, and the gaming -- text based Star Trek which prints out a grid showing your current sector on the ancient Anderson Jacobson 860 fanfold paper terminals. The delete key would backup over the previous character and smack it brutally with the ink ball until it was a worn black blot. Deleting a whole sentence took long enough to run to the bathroom.

They also had this odd "vector computer" which had a round oscilloscope type monitor with a single electron gun which one could manipulate into tracing exquisite looping mandalas of green light.

The Xerox Sigma 9 lurked in a glassed-in room with one desk for the operator, and the rest taken up by tape drives that looked like washing machines, and refrigerators full of transistors. Oh, and the punched card reader for input. You'd pass you program through the window, and the nice computer troll would feed it to the Sigma 9.

I always wondered what the Sigma 9 thought about all that input, I mean aside from computing the result. I was certain that the machine was not really that fascinated with running my little basic programs, or even with the statistical computations, or drawing fractal snowflakes in ASCII on the fanfold paper. I surmised that it spent it's night-time plethora of available cycles to consider the plight of the world, and if only I knew how to communicate more subtly with the Sigma 9, that I could receive it's august counsel.

So I suppose in some sense, the Xerox Sigma 9 was the voice of God to me, and I, with my humble Z account, bore dumb witness to it's awesomeness.