{"id":103357,"date":"2016-10-05T11:17:38","date_gmt":"2016-10-05T15:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103357"},"modified":"2016-10-05T11:43:10","modified_gmt":"2016-10-05T15:43:10","slug":"behold-zenith-z-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/05\/behold-zenith-z-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Behold the Zenith Z-19"},"content":{"rendered":"

Revisited<\/a>\u00a0is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Zenith Z-19.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Zenith Z-19 is not a computer. It\u2019s an end point of memory and desire, a vanishing horizon, a terminus, a terminal. It is also certainly not a\u00a0monitor<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In 1979 my family\u2019s Zenith Z-19 sat dull-eyed on a whitewashed, built-in desk in my parents\u2019 L-shaped bedroom in New Hampshire. That year I was ten, and I was never not at\u00a0that terminal. I beheld my Zenith Z-19 as I never had, and never will, not even close, observe a great painting or statue at Angkor Wat or\u00a0the Vatican.\u00a0I will never gaze at the aurora borealis that way\u2014something as wordless, undying and not\u00a0mine<\/em>\u00a0as the night sky? Frankly I find it hard to believe stars hold more than the polite interest of other people.<\/p>\n

Was it flat? It was, to the touch. You could jab in, past the hard, battleship-hued casing, touching a rectangular screen with pleasing dimensions that drew on the golden mean. Whatever static my fingers lifted, I remember it as minor, but I distinctly remember the uppermost layer of that machine\u2019s complexion to be petal-soft and cool\u2014poreless, scaleless, hairless, but vibrating with life like a mammal. I can see it now, in a cramped image, on my tarty MacBook pixmap, where the old terminal\u2019s recessive palate seems despairingly out of place. On Wikipedia, the screen plays as olive drab\u2014but drab it was not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Did we really acquire our Zenith Z-19 in \u201979? I\u2019m freshly skeptical. Reluctantly, I fact-check, matching my fanciful memories to the timeline of Zenith Data Systems. If we did have our terminal when I was ten, then the family, in our mock Colonial in the New Hampshire woods, were suspiciously au courant. Woods people in sync with, no less, the programmers of Microsoft\u2014that Angkor Wat of engineering\u2014on the opposing corner of our nation\u2019s map.<\/p>\n

Says Wikipedia:\u00a0\u201cMicrosoft programmers of the early 1980s did much of their work using\u00a0Zenith Z-19\u00a0and\u00a0Z-29\u00a0CRT display terminals hooked to central mainframe computers.\u201d Well, well, well\u2014I\u00a0also<\/em> did\u00a0much of my work using a Zenith Z-19 display terminal hooked to a central mainframe computer!\u00a0That\u2019s me there,\u00a0a ten year old, at the selfsame Zenith Z-19 display terminal, not programming nothing, not building Microsoft. Instead I was playing Xcaliber.<\/p>\n

Xcaliber hosted a game-turned-chatroom called Conference XYZ, or the Con, that system programmers had whipped up for Dartmouth College, where my father, in a separate department, taught English. The treasures of Conference XYZ\u2014other people\u2014were reached from my Z-19 via a rubber-lined coupler that sucked on the receiver of the family phone. This device coupled<\/em> the town\u2019s heaving mainframe and me to make one of the earliest computer networks. Conference XYZ was social life, where social life is also a game.<\/p>\n

In three dimensions I was an aspiring teenager, but on the Con I was Athena, a glorious sage and verbal archer who professed to Apollo and Claude and other mysterious players a passion for partying and a disdain for Reaganomics. As we teased, quarreled, and exchanged art made of ampersands, the mainframe to which I prayed\u2014summoning my Con with the squeal and crash of information\u2014buzzed and rattled in the Dartmouth yard (Kiewit Computing Center, a three-minute stroll from the town\u2019s village green, housed it).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zenith Data Systems wasn\u2019t even\u00a0founded\u00a0until 1979, so I must be trying too hard to seem like a prodigy. But, I learn, the very first Z-19s bore the logo of Heathkit, a company Zenith acquired in 1977. I believe I saw that red logo on my terminal, come to think of it, which they seem to have retained in the early days of the 1977 acquisition. So maybe I\u2019m right.<\/p>\n

In fact, in my memory the logo registered as Health<\/em>kit, which remained a mystery, despite my nagging sense that there were medical consequences to my terminal rapture. As I played my adventure game, as it devolved into chat, as we Xcaliberians collectively improvised the conceits of ALL CAPS and ascii and manners around reply all that would one day be known as digital culture; as I drank deep of the black yonder behind the green phosphorescent symbols that were my field of vision, and which came at times to form such limbic madness as I love you<\/em>\u00a0and Good point<\/em>\u00a0and Who are you?<\/em>; as my body pressed against its clothes from ten to fourteen, coursing with desire, my gaze was steady. I became a \u201cdigital\u201d and hit reproductive years at once.<\/p>\n

The negative space between and beyond those words, which seemed to recess infinitely, world without end, but stopped short of my trembling fingertips, seemed to me the alpha-omega of a mystery I desperately needed and still every day need. It\u2019s four billion of us now, Internet users on Earth (stop and think of that),\u00a0entombed or set free in this lightless, everlasting, universal deep that I first glimpsed in my own terminal\u2019s soundless dark. That I first thought was only mine.<\/p>\n

Virginia Heffernan is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art<\/a>, available from Simon and Schuster.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Revisited\u00a0is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. The Zenith Z-19 is not a computer. It\u2019s an end point of memory and desire, a vanishing horizon, a terminus, a terminal. It is also certainly not a\u00a0monitor. In 1979 my family\u2019s Zenith Z-19 sat dull-eyed on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1073,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22669],"tags":[184,14414,24961,14109,24952,24965,24960,24956,24953,24962,24964,24957,24958,331,4088,24403,24955,163,24950,15805,24954,4699,14617,15203,21226,12543,24963,11794,224,24959,2774,24402,1291,24951,24949],"class_list":["post-103357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-revisited","tag-1970s","tag-1980s","tag-adventure-game","tag-angkor-wat","tag-athena","tag-central-mainframe-computers","tag-chat","tag-chatroom","tag-conference-xyz","tag-dartmouth-college","tag-display-terminal","tag-early-internet","tag-heathkit","tag-internet","tag-macbook","tag-magic-and-loss","tag-mainframe","tag-memory","tag-microsoft","tag-mystery","tag-networking","tag-new-hampshire","tag-prodigy","tag-programming","tag-revisited","tag-social-media","tag-system-programmers","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-terminal","tag-vatican","tag-virginia-heffernan","tag-wikipedia","tag-xcaliber","tag-zenith-z-19"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRevisited: Behold the Zenith Z-19<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Virginia Heffernan remembers her family\u2019s first computer: \u201can endpoint of memory and desire, a vanishing horizon, a terminus, a terminal.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/05\/behold-zenith-z-19\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Behold the Zenith Z-19 by Virginia Heffernan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 5, 2016 \u2013 Revisited\u00a0is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago.The Zenith Z-19 is not a computer. 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