Personal Machines and Portable Worlds

It's not just Gen X, I had a Pokedex with a full keyboard and a tiny LCD as a kid, and I had exactly this sort of feeling about it. That the thing itself wasn't very practical or even that interesting in the long run was beside the point; it stood in for an ideal.

Don't even get me started on my 2003-era Sony minidisc players. The odd moment between Walkman and MP3 player, and kind of amazing. There's something honest about capturing and storing sound in real time.

But I recorded all kinds of nonsense to mine besides music. Morning radio chatter, a weird Top 40 verse, friends joking on the bus. Fleeting magic.

My portable machine of youth was the HP95LX (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX). It had Lotus 1-2-3 built in, MS-DOS, and a nice HP calculator app :)