Glorious Orange By: H.G. Miller You’ll have to forgive the color scheme, but sometimes I have a hankering for the familiar. What I’ve done, of course, is change the background of my computer screen to this hideous orange color and made the text bright yellow. Please notice that the typeface is courier. Not courier new... courier. The difference is subtle, but it’s there. So, what is it about this glorious orange? Well, like most people, I learned how to write back in grade school. Got my hand smacked for holding my big fat pencil improperly. Practiced cursive loops for weeks on end. Ate the erasers before I could use them to correct anything. Then, I took the required typing class in high school and gained the skills necessary to bother the world with cleanly typed text. That’s how I learned to write. But, learning how to be a writer was a completely different environment. I learned how to be a writer in a dark room in the basement of a house on Crescent Boulevard in Hutchinson, Kansas. With a boiler heater at my back and a cassette deck blasting Guns ‘n’ Roses from a tool bench to my right. I learned how to be a writer basking in the orangish glow from the screen of a Toshiba T-3100, hacking out text on a program called Professional Write, running on the operating system Dos 2.0. I’ve still got the process of commands committed to memory. You flipped open the top -- this was one of the first “lap-top” computers, weighing about fifty pounds -- turned on the power and waited for a few minutes until you got the memory message: 640kb OK. 640 kilobytes. I kid you not. After that, you had to hit the ESC key and wait for the menu... Professional Write was always the first option, so you hit ENTER. Then came my favorite part. The program started with a simple menu: 1. Create/Edit 2. Setup 3. Exit That was it. Setup let you choose things like tab spacing and... well that was about it. Exit was exit, but my favorite was always the first option: Create or Edit. What a great way to get started writing. Not “new” or “open” or something sterile and official. Create. It had a way of making you feel like what you were doing was more than just another term paper for English class. It made me want to do more than the minimum required by school. So, I did. I sat down there for hours and hours. Lost many nights of my life to the art of creation. I wrote a novel on that computer. I wrote screenplays and stage plays and newspaper stories and letters to friends and poems to girlfriends on that machine. I took it with me to college and got made fun of by a professor for turning in a paper printed by a dot-matrix printer. Everything in courier. Yellow type on an orange background. It was simple and perfect. I still have it, too. The T-3100 is stowed safely away in my closet next to the box of baseball cards that will serve as my retirement fund someday. (Is Brian McRae still playing? I have his autograph... No? Oh, maybe I won’t have the greatest retirement, then) I’ve always imagined that I would someday pull the old beat up Toshiba out of retirement and become one of those eccentric writers who type everything on the machine that got them started. It’s a bit of a romantic notion, I know. That’s how I operate, though -- on dreams. I imagined it when I was staring down that orange screen with the boiler at my back, so I guess it’s comforting to still imagine it from in front of my fancy Microsoft product with the menus and the automatic spell check and the CD player blasting Guns ‘n’ Roses. Some things don’t change. And, I’m glad I’ve got the color options.