16-bit Intel 8088 Chip by Charles Bukowski

Today I learned that Charles Bukowski, “laureate of American lowlife”, wrote about the incompatibilities of early computing platforms in a poem called 16-bit Intel 8088 Chip:

16-bit Intel 8088 chip

with an Apple Macintosh

you can’t run Radio Shack programs

in its disc drive.

nor can a Commodore 64

drive read a file

you have created on an

IBM Personal Computer.

both Kaypro and Osborne computers use

the CP/M operating system

but can’t read each other’s

handwriting

for they format (write

on) discs in different

ways.

the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but

can’t use most programs produced for

the IBM Personal Computer

unless certain

bits and bytes are

altered

but the wind still blows over

Savannah

and in the Spring

the turkey buzzard struts and

flounces before his

hens.

Lovely. And accurate. And somehow even maybe profound? (via sing, memory)

• Charles Bukowski
• computing
• poetry

Write different

At 70, writer Charles Bukowski started using a computer — a Macintosh IIsi that his wife gave him for Christmas — and was so taken with it that he never went back to the typewriter.

There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite, sighted in closer to the target. I know a computer can’t make a writer but I think it makes a writer better. Simplicity in writing and simplicity in getting it down, hot and real. When this computer is in the shop and I go back to the electric, it’s like trying to break rock with a hammer. Of course, the essence of writing is there but you have to wait on it, it doesn’t leap from the gut as quickly, you begin to trail your thoughts — your thoughts are ahead of your fingers which are trying to catch up. It causes a block of sorts indeed.

• Charles Bukowski
• Mac
• writing