Most Interesting Machine

What is the most interesting machine you've ever used?

In the past several years as I’ve worked with more and more Millennials and have begun working with some young Gen Z leaders and so one of my favorite stories to tell is about the most interesting machine I’ve ever owned.

In the late 90s I had moved to the Boston area for grad school and my Dad was doing a bunch of backpacking—going after his dream of finishing off the Appalachian Trail. Since I lived closer to that trail than I ever had before I joined him for a section, and other times would drop him off or pick him up.

My Dad knew how to live simply. At the time he did no-cook Go-Lite backpacking which I would not suggest for anyone with a functioning human palette. One time I met him on the trail and re-supplied him. He gave me a list of dry goods to bring, including some small oatmeal breakfast packets. I met him in the mid-morning and he dug through his new supplies and found a breakfast packet, and proceeded to dump the entire packet into his mouth dry. He then grabbed his water bottle and took a long pull, then swished the mixture of cold water and oatmeal in his mouth for a long time and then he began to chew and swallow his mouth-made lukewarm oatmeal.

The entire time this happened I was staring at him in shock, as if he had just eaten mud and moss or something, as if I had discovered a homeless and confounding Tom Bombadil on the Appalachian Trail. The disgust was visible on my face as he finally swallowed more than half of the goopy concoction. “What’s the problem?” he sputtered out, along with a few freshly moistened oats.

“Did you just make oatmeal in your mouth?”

He took another swallow while pushing in a few errant oats with a dirty finger, “Yeah, I figure that’s how it ends up once it makes it to my stomach, so why waste carrying a stove and fuel and all that weight?”

I shook my head and started up the presidential range with him on the AT. It was clearly going to be a long week.

Even though my Dad knew how to live simply those who knew him well saw how much he loved gadgets and tech. He was always trying out some new toy or learning about someone’s new tech they were showing off, and then he made plans to try out one of his own. On that trip on the trail I learned he had a new gadget: a portable email machine. Once I saw how it worked I got one of my own.

Here is roughly what it looked like:

It was kind of like a little miniature light-weight computer, but it only did two things. You could write emails with it, and then you could connect to send/receive them. That’s it. But remember, this is back when most people didn’t even use email much. I had just finished college and back when I started I was the only one in my dorm that had my own computer and the only way most used a computer at all was to type it up in the computer lab in the science building (the only computer lab on campus at the time) and print it off right there in the room. People routinely lost an entire paper not saved in that situation. Computers were improving quickly, but they were still not the core of office or campus productivity. Many still used typewriters to turn in papers.

So this device was a revelation. The way it worked was you typed up a few emails, and then you would go to a pay phone. Wait a sec… do you remember pay phones? For the younger ones, this is what they looked like:

I guess I should describe for the uninitiated and for posterity. You see, a pay phone was like a cell phone that you could only make phone calls with that was attached to a building or booth with a cable that anyone could use for a quarter. Kinda cool eh? The tricky part is you actually had to know the number of the person you’re calling. I now struggle to remember the numbers of my immediate family members. Don’t act like you don’t have the same problem!

But back in the mid-nineties, public pay phones were still the only way to reach people when traveling. They were everywhere in those days, with 2.6 million in the United States at their peak. Now there are less than 100,000, and a third of those are in New York City alone. So the way this worked is I would take my little email machine and I would flip out a small device that was a speaker. That part looked like this:

I would then dial a 1-800 number, and press a button on the device, and then the little device would begin making those loud fax machine noises. If you don’t remember what I’m talking about it sounded like this:

And then all your emails would be sent over the pay phone, and it would also download all your new emails (this was the 90s, so getting an email was a fun thing, like getting a birthday card from your grandma.) Some might recall AOL’s iconic “You’ve Got Mail” sound from the 90s which was so optimistic and joyful and pre-dated us all becoming enslaved by SPAM emails by several decades.

If I ever used this email machine in an airport people would all stop and stare at what I was doing and would immediately suspect I was a spy sending back sensitive information to my eastern bloc handlers. If I used it out in the countryside on the stoop of a gas station the rednecks would stop and stare at what I was doing and immediately suspect I was an alien from outer space. Which coincidentally is kind of how young people look at me when I share this story today.

They cannot believe this device existed at all or that I owned and used one for several years. I suppose it was a pretty a space-age strange device at the time. And in reality, the technology was developed by NASA in the first place. Almost no one ever saw this device, as the first BlackBerry came out in 1999 and so this became old news, and my Alien Spy Email Machine was outmoded while BlackBerrys and Nokia phones and pagers took off. And then of course all of those were outmoded by the iPhone in 2007. If you disembodied consciousness is reading this in the future, the iPhone was a device most humans did everything on from about 2010 and on until we all uploaded ourselves into data farms to serve our Artificial Intelligence overlords.

So in order to convince you, dear reader, of this device’s existence and my fun use of it, here is a video demonstrating it:

So how about you, what’s the most interesting machine of any kind that you’ve ever used?