An analoger with digits
By William Wetherall
13 December 2025
I was born and raised in the analog-age, and remain attached to books and other printed matter. I also insist on honoring the standards of creativity and originality instilled in me by all my mentors, who insisted I think for myself, and kill Buddha if I meet him on the road.
Yet if ever I wrote an analog story in the pre-digital age, I can't recall it. Every story I've written in my life, I've written digitally. Baby pictures confirm I was born with ten fingers, and this story is proof that I still have them. For I wrote it using my fingers. I didn't dictate it. It is not the product of a thought reader, much less inspired or in any way faked by AI.
My digits first learned to manipulate crayons, pencils and pens, then manual and electric typewriters. Now they pound away on a wireless keyboard that transmits my brain and spleen dumps to a word processor, as a train of bits and bytes transmitted by electromagnetic currents to other devices, via the Internet.
Eventually my digitized stories generate pixilated graphs on a monitor, or text on paper if directed to a printer -- conveying my thoughts and feelings to anyone who can read the language in which I choose to write -- aided only by an occasional consultation of a dictionary or thesaurus, now online, as my frayed paper copies collect dust.
I've fingered a friend's tablet, and thumbed my daughter's (and more recently my own) smartphone. And I have no doubt that -- if stuck with such devices in a dark elevator, just me and my type of woman -- I could hack out the same sort of stories I've written since the early 1960s in California. And they'd be no better or worse because of technology -- or because of the how technology has changed some of the ways I write, or how human editors shepherd my stories into public media. But let me return to the question of quality later.
One, Two, Three . . . Infinity
This is the title of one my favorite books -- subtitled "Facts and Speculations of Science" -- a best seller published in 1947 by the Soviet-turned-American cosmologist George Gamow (1904-1968). I read the original edition in the late 1950s, and the 1961 revised edition in the early 1960s, at the peak of the race for space and the cold war between Gamow's fatherland and his new homeland.
At the time, I read mainly books about space and western gunslinger fiction. I wasn't supposed to be a writer. My hobbies, grades, and aptitude tests said I was strong in math and science, and weak in English and everything else that required literacy.
Long before the Soviet Union launched the first artificial earth satellite in October 1957, shattering America's confidence in the superiority of its rocket technology, I saw my future in electronics. But the Sputnik Shock greatly improved the education and employment opportunities for space-age dreamers like me.
My aspirations, when graduating from high school in 1959, were to study electronics and become an astronautical engineer. I had built an oscilloscope, read a thick handbook on orbital mechanics, and gazed at Saturn's rings through my own telescope near my home in the Sierras, where the skies were owned by the Milky Way, and beyond it Andromeda and the bottomless night -- to paraphrase Kawabata's beautiful metaphor that Seidensticker, when translating Yukiguni as Snow Country, declined to put into English.
So in the fall of 1962, when enrolling in the Department of Electrical Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, to begin my junior year, I was ready to explore the cosmos. My mind could not have been further from history, literature, or social issues, or anything Japanese except transistors and optics. I was fresh off a public school assembly line -- ignorant, romantic, and full of myself.
But I could type, and I had grievances. A dangerous combination.
First drafted January 2022
First posted 13 December 2025
Last revised 13 December 2025