ATM: Art, Tiles, Mosaics... an adventure in creativity

Kaypro, oh dearest Kaypro

I missed my Kaypro for twenty five years.

Laid off from my corporate job as construction manager when the independent oil industry went belly up, I spent one glorious summer in 1985 as a housewife growing, bottling, freezing, and cooking my own vegetables for an unappreciative husband (no matter how accomplished I became it was NOT his mommy's cooking)—and writing short stories. On my Kaypro. Mostly science fiction. That was my escape from the life in which I found myself trapped.

Back in those days I had no sense of self-worth or self-esteem so every rejection slip became the death knell for that particular story. Quite a few piled up. So, of course, I gave up. What was I supposed to do? I retreated to corporate life, my CPM Kaypro became an IBM AT and a Microsystems XT and a 286 and a 386 and so on... My divorce was finalized and life drudged on.

But that Kaypro will always be a part of me. It lives under my desk as a foot rest. I have all the original manuals and floppy disks. I've tried to get rid of it but it won't go away. And most of you (with the exception of one person, I know) are going "What the H is a Kaypro?"

Kaypro was one of the very first personal computers. It ran on an operating system called CPM. It very nearly became the OS you would be using today, except somebody else had more tenacity than the guy who owned that system, and while he became dust because he didn't show up for a meeting, the guy with a whole lot more hutzpah, Bill Gates, made it into the winning circle. Sometimes life is determined by tiny decisions.

Anyway, my Kaypro had a 5-inch screen and a keyboard that clipped to the front of the computer so I could carry it around like a suitcase. There was no hard drive but two slots for floppy disks. One drove the program, the other was the working disk.

So I spent that summer writing my short stories and poems in my room (we had a three-bedroom house so we could each have our own office) or in the kitchen or outside on the deck. Despite other problems, it was probably the best summer of my life. I was out of corporate life and being my own creative self. I guess in some way, I have been trying to get back there ever since.

So, warp speed, Scotty, to 2009 (yes, I AM going to see the new Star Trek movie this week) and here I am, sitting out on my deck on a May evening surrounded by my geraniums, writing this post on the re-incarnation of my Kaypro: my HP laptop. I bought it last year because my ancient desktop computer is showing its age and I could not afford to be computer-less. But it has now become such an important part of my life I couldn't imagine living without it.

(The neighborhood flock of parrots just flew squawking overhead—I would have missed that if I was writing this indoors!)

So, what does this have to do with art, exactly? Well, I was going to write about the Pompeii exhibit I saw recently at LACMA but I got slightly side-tracked, didn't I? Please stay tuned for that report!