Good Hacks

[A] “good hack” was some feat of technical virtuosity undertaken for pure pleasure rather than necessity, like programming a mainframe the size of a dozen refrigerators to play a song.
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes

A good hack! This passage sent me down a rabbit hole of research on good hacks I remember.

Hearsay

Just over a decade ago, a friend messaged me to ask for help picking up a computer from Norman of The NorMill and dropping it off at a gallery for a digital art exhibition.

The computer was one of the terminals used in "Hearsay," another "good hack."

"Hearsay" was an interactive, 24-hour project in 1985. Messages were sent from one terminal to another around the globe. At each step, they were translated into another language until they finally landed back at the original terminal and were translated back into English.

You can read the full text of "Hearsay" here.

The "Hearsay" terminal was almost as tall as me. And heavy!

But more important than the terminal was meeting Norman White. We pulled up to an old stone mill in small-town Ontario. The landscape starkly contrasted the cramped gallery to which we were moving the terminal. Norm greeted us at the door and welcomed us into his kitchen. The mill, now dubbed The NorMill, was brimming with electrical equipment and knickknacks.

My friend noticed a burnt-down candle in a hardened puddle of wax and a charred spot on the table. Norm brushed it off, "We were up late last night and left the candles burning." They almost burned down a hundred-year-old mill full of vintage computer equipment. Fortunately, the candles put themselves out.

Norm showed us his workshop. Had I known his influence in digital art then, I could have picked out parts for Telephonic Arm-Wrestling, The Helpless Robot, and other whimsical hacks that White worked on. I was looking at the contents of NorMill's yet-to-open NorMill Personal Computer Museum.

After loading the "Hearsay" computer into our borrowed car, we chatted with White about his work. He opined that smell was the last frontier of telephonic communication—voice, visuals, boring. VR was around the corner, anyway. He wanted to smell what someone in Amsterdam was cooking or know if the person on the other end of the line needed a shower.

We haven't figured out digital smell yet, have we?