From the Editor’s Desk: Early Influences ⭐

One of my earliest memories of personal technology is in some ways quite clear and in others a bit fuzzy, as memories usually are, I guess. I was in a Sears department store with my mother and I wandered over to a display of what I sort of remember to be Commodore 64 computers, but given the probable timing was more likely Commodore VIC-20s. Commodore used to supply stacks of one-sheet product overviews for its computers and accessories, so I carefully collected each of those even though it would be many years before I would have or could spend that much money. But I all I could think about then was what I could do with that computer.

I was obsessed with this. And one of my clearest memories of this obsession is the Star Wars game I thought I would make, somehow, on this underpowered pre-PC computer. What I imagined was a sequence in which the little spaceship the user was piloting (an X-Wing) was skirting down the side of a humongous, dreadnought-like enemy ship—a Star Destroyer, of course—while battling small enemy ships (TIE Fighters) and laser-firing turrets on the big ship.

It’s obvious to me now that I was obsessed with this because I was obsessed with Star Wars, and that the sequence I imagined was inspired by The Empire Strikes Back, the 1980 sequel to Star Wars that featured what were then state of the art special effects. It’s amusing to consider that computers powerful enough to play such a game wouldn’t exist for another 15-ish years (Star Wars: X-Wing came out in 1993). And that I was never going to make this thing anyway: Over 45 years later, I’m still struggling to create a fully working text editor.

But the power of Star Wars and the impact that it had on people of my generation are both undeniable and underrated. This was the first movie that I saw multiple times in the cinema. I owned the soundtrack on a double-LP album that I had to play on my dad’s stereo. I collected the Marvel comics and, as a budding young artist, I created multiple comic book versions of these movies of my own over time. And I was fascinated by every attempt to recreate the magic of Star Wars, from overt copies like Battlestar Galactica to more literary science fiction endeavors.

I was about to turn 12 when I started the 6th grade in the fall of 1978, one year after Star Wars changed everything. And while I was never an honor roll student, I loved reading and I joined an accelerated English class that met in the mornings before school started. Over the course of that school year, I read The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Beowulf, and outside the class, I also read The Sword of Shannara, itself an overt rip-off of The Lord of the Rings. That book was the subject of my first long-form writing project, a critical takedown of all the ways its author had stolen from Tolkien. (And it will come up again in my 2025 year-end books recap, coincidentally.)

Those books and Star Wars didn’t just open my eyes to new things, they inspired my reading for the next decade and more, and that opened my eyes even further. It was during this time that I devoured all the classics of science fiction and fantasy, with a heavy emphasis on the former, via almost everything Asimov, Clark, Niven, Pournelle, and others wrote (and were still writing in that wonderful decade). I was particularly impressed by the world building in Asimov’s intertwined Foundation and Robot series and Niven’s Known Space, both of which expanded in time via both full-length books and individual stories.

As inspiring, I discovered Stephen King, another world builder, while babysitting for a family down the street in the summer between my 9th and 10th grades. (Which, in the fuzziness of memory, I still sort of remember as being the summer between my 7th and 8th grades. Moving on.) This was 1982, and the father of the kids I was watching Monday through Friday each week was reading King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. I already wrote about that incident, but I’m pleased to report that Mr. King is still with us, still pumping out books, and is still one of my favorite authors of all time. Maybe the favorite.

That everyone I’ve mentioned here was an innovator of some kind is probably obvious. But it’s astonishing to consider just how much George Lucas and his creations affected me and so many others, as was the case with Asimov, King, and all the rest. It was just the right time, right age. A debt is owed.

As important, maybe more important, are the people who influenced me to try something that was new to me at the time but would go on to change my life.

The teacher of that 6th grade English class, Jean Roberts, was responsible for opening my eyes to new worlds, and it was she who handed me the 726-page paperback version of The Sword of Shannara and asked me to review it in book report form with an emphasis on which ideas were copied wholesale (most of them) and which were unique (very few). She was just the first of several teachers who would profoundly impact my life. The most recent started me down my career path in writing in the early 1990s. These people are important.

In 1990, Michael Crichton published Jurassic Park, which went on to be a worldwide phenomenon. This is difficult to remember, but Crichton was only a minor side figure in writing and film at the time, despite having written over 15 books by that point, one of which, The Andromeda Strain, was (and still is) a personal favorite. He was better known then for his movie scripts, though few outside of Hollywood were familiar with the name. He was behind classics like Westworld and Coma, and two 80s movies I really liked at the time, Looker and Runaway.

But Jurassic Park put Crichton on the map, so to speak. I can’t recall why I read the book as soon as it came out, in hardcover no less. Perhaps it was just my love of dinosaurs and science fiction. Perhaps there was a review in The Boston Globe, I don’t know. But I could barely put it down, and I remember handing the book to my best friend when I finished it, excited by the story and its realism, and crestfallen that it could never be made into a movie. The effects it would require to be believable just didn’t exist.

I went on to read almost every book that Crichton wrote, most thought-provoking works about the perils of technology, go figure. But I didn’t have to wait long for the movie version of Jurassic Park, as it arrived just three years later. It, too, was a worldwide phenomenon. As important, the dinosaur effects, inexplicably, were believable and they still hold up today. Sitting in the theater watching this movie, it occurred to me that everything had changed, that anything one could think could be put on film. That thing I’d long wanted, a realistic, live-action version of The Lord of the Rings, was suddenly possible. It could happen. And it did, though not for another two decades.

Coincidentally, the events described here bookended an era I might today describe as that during which I was a personal computing enthusiast. The first home videogame machines and the first home computers arrived during this formative period, and I went on to own two Commodore 64s, an Apple IIGS, and two Amigas (a 500 and then a 600) before I decided to go back to school to learn computer programming, formally, in my late 20s. By that point, I was married and living outside of Boston. But we would move to Phoenix in 1993, the same year the Jurassic Park movie and the Star Wars: X-Wing videogame came out. There, I would meet Gary Brent, the teacher—OK, professor—who would transition me into my current era, so to speak. A career writing about personal technology, now over 30 years in.

I didn’t set out to write all this, I don’t even know where it came from, exactly. But this week and next week will be slow from a news perspective, and so I’ve started going through all the articles we published in 2025, looking for the top stories, sure, but also the top trends. Some are obvious, like the AI hype and the machinations at Xbox, and that work is rote, repetitive, and kind of boring.

But some of the themes I see are perhaps more nebulous or even personal. And that got me thinking.

A lot has changed this past year, and I’m on a slightly different path, not through any proactive decision on my part, but thanks to events in our industry and world that I’m just caught up in. As I wrote in From the Editor’s Desk: Seeking a Little Expertise ⭐, the ways in which we’re influenced today are quite a bit different than they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago, and there’s a lot more noise. But there are good influences to be had, too. They’re out there. Sometimes you find them. Maybe sometimes they find you, as Stephen King might write.

I’ll expand on that soon. And I’ll have the usual roundup of year-end articles covering industry events and then things like books, music, podcasts, and so on. But I got distracted, as happens when one is when bored. And so here we are. Thinking about the past.