Rick Charnes, San Francisco, Jan. 3, 1988 For the last two weeks or so I have been without a 'b' key on ¨ my keyboard. A number of my recent BBS messages are lacking 'b's ¨ and my computing in general, as anyone could imagine, has been ¨ greatly hampered. I have mentioned this to a number of people ¨ and have done what I could to explain the strange look of my BBS ¨ scrawlings and why I was missing from the circuit for a good ten ¨ days or so. I have until now been hiding behind explanations of ¨ 'damaged keyboard' and 'bad accident,' and have today decided in ¨ a moment of New Year's contrition to come clean about what REALLY ¨ happened. It causes me embarassment, humiliation and grief, ¨ exposes me to ridicule and laughter in front of my dear comrades, ¨ and generally makes for an interesting if not edifying story. I ¨ hereby call it, THE MOST EXPENSIVE CHINESE MEAL I EVER ATE * * * In most beginners' books on computers, books with titles like ¨ _So You Bought Your First Computer: Now What Do You Do With It?_, ¨ in scads of articles addressing topics of general computer use, ¨ and in general computer wisdom the first and most important ¨ dictum to which one is exhorted to obey is: NEVER EAT OR DRINK ¨ AT THE COMPUTER. With "never pull out a disk while the little ¨ red light is on" running a close second, this is the highest ¨ principle to which it is suggested that we computer users ¨ subscribe. If the government enforced this First Golden Rule of ¨ Computerdom I would certainly be the world's most wanted ¨ criminal, spending the bulk of my useful life locked behind bars, ¨ almost certainly in solitary confinement. I would be the subject ¨ of do-gooders' magazine articles in Byte and Infoworld, the scorn ¨ of the computer legal establishment and the butt of all sorts of ¨ Nancy Reagan-style "just say no" jokes. My mug would no doubt ¨ appear on the front pages of newspapers accompanying articles ¨ using me as an example of 'what not to do.' ¨ But the fact of the matter is that despite advice from ¨ friends, computer manufacturers' representatives and clean-living ¨ authors of computer books, I eat and drink generously while at ¨ the computer, I have always eaten and imbibed all sorts of fluids ¨ in front of the computer, and come hell or high water I will ¨ probably continue to do so until caught red-handed by the long ¨ arm of the law. If this is a character defect, so be it, but ¨ until The Lord sees fit to remove this particular one from my ¨ sinful soul I will most probably continue to violate this first ¨ precept of civilized behavior. One day a few weeks ago, coming home from work I had ¨ stopped by at a Chinese restaurant to pick up a take-home ¨ container of one of my favorite dishes, shrimp chop suey. I was ¨ anxious to do some programming on the computer and grabbed a fork ¨ from the kitchen. Parenthetically I've been surprised at some ¨ people's puzzlement that it's possible to eat and compute at the ¨ same time. It's quite like reading and eating at the same time: ¨ you compute during chews. In any case I put the dish on my desk ¨ and started programming away. It must have been that sauce at ¨ the bottom that I was having a hard time reaching and I must have ¨ picked up the plate to get to the bottom and --- spilled some on ¨ the keyboard.  ¨ OK, shrimp chop suey sauce on the keyboard. Life is tough. ¨ So what else is new? I felt a minor wave of panic sweep over my ¨ body, then got some paper towel to take care of it. I wiped it ¨ clean, turned the keyboard upside down just to make sure nothing ¨ had fallen overboard, and then peered inside. It looked bad. It looked wet down there. The spill had been right around ¨ the area of the space bar and the lower row of keys in the ¨ center: 'V', 'B', 'N', 'M'. I unscrewed the cover and got my ¨ tools. Q-Tips, alcohol, vacuum cleaner with the hose attached to ¨ the 'blow air out' side, etc., etc. My Qume 102a keyboard does ¨ not yield its keys easily to the circuit board underneath, and ¨ all I could do was wipe away whatever liquid I saw. I took a ¨ deep breath, turned the terminal off and left it to dry for a few ¨ hours.  ¨ I came back later late in the evening and the moisture ¨ seemed to mostly be gone. I turned the terminal on, didn't like ¨ what I saw, and went to bed. They say in mornings hope springs eternal and my ¨ relationship to my computer is no exception. The circuit board ¨ seemed to be completely dry, and I was expecting nothing but the ¨ best. Alas, I was only to be let down, and this time what I saw ¨ starting bringing on a real, rather more permanent, panic. An ¨ incessant, neverending string of 'b's was making its way across ¨ the face of my terminal, non-stop. I could type OK -- the ¨ terminal would display what I had entered at the keyboard -- but ¨ as soon as I would stop the great 'b' parade would continue ¨ unabated like an army of ants impassioned by a spill of sugar on ¨ the floor. Sometimes I would see a string of 'm's and an ¨ occasional problem with the 'n' would rear its head, but in ¨ general my keyboard seemed to be tuned to some inner, spiritual, ¨ tumultuous relationship with the letter 'b'.  ¨ I couldn't even log on to my hard disk; whenever I tried ¨ sneaking in the word 'HARD' it would come out 'BBHARD' or ¨ 'HARDBB.' I tried all the things one does in these situations -- ¨ things that you know won't and can't work but you do nevertheless ¨ in an attempt to fool yourself into thinking you're doing ¨ something about the problem, things designed to keep your mind ¨ from the awful truth that you've just done something terribly and ¨ sinfully stupid. My guess was, and is, that a small amount of (sesame?  ¨ peanut?) oil had probably lodged itself immediately between the ¨ moving part of the key and the circuit board, thus making ¨ permanent the connection that is normally made only when the key ¨ is pressed. The next day I called Qume's technical support staff in San ¨ Jose and connected to a fellow who was friendly, courteous and ¨ helpful. He explained in a friendly, courteous and helpful way ¨ that there was a good possibility that my keyboard was ruined; ¨ the Qumes have a thin plastic membrane coating the circuit board ¨ and if any oil or other liquid penetrated below this membrane I ¨ could purchase a new keyboard at such and such firm for $140. I ¨ had spent an unsuccessful evening before trying to fully remove ¨ the 'B' key mechanism from the keyboard in order to clean what ¨ was underneath, and he gave me what seemed to be good ¨ instructions to do just that, still with the reminder that if ¨ anything had gotten underneath the membrane I would be most disappointed. I hung up though feeling oddly hopeful. I got home and tried to follow his instructions, unhooking ¨ some latch on the sides of the spring. I tried it from the ¨ right, I tried it from the left, I tried a paper clip, I tried ¨ tweezers. I pulled it, I pulled it down, I jumped up and I ¨ jumped down and nothing I could do would dislodge that key ¨ mechanism. This being December 23th Qume was closed for the next ¨ 4 days. ¨ Funny things happened to me during those next four ¨ days of computerlessness. I did things I hadn't done for years ¨ and from which I used to derive much pleasure: reading books, ¨ writing letters, catching up on months, even years, of unanswered ¨ correspondence. I talked to old friends on the phone with whom I ¨ had lost touch. Worst -- excuse me, I mean best -- of all, I ¨ even got to bed (generally) before midnight. I felt a great ¨ sense of peace, a rootedness and I hadn't known ¨ since April 1984 when I first trudged that box home from the ¨ store with my Morrow MD3 inside. Actually enjoying the freedom from addiction, the next ¨ day I didn't even call Qume back! I went for a few more days ¨ experiencing this strange new life I was leading, finding it ¨ quite pleasant to continue in my drug-free ways. But I can only ¨ take a certain amount of serenity and tranquility and in a manic ¨ fit of utter centeredness, about ten days after the original ¨ accident, really just for the hell of it -- not expecting ¨ anything different -- I went over to my computer and hit the ¨ switch. All that praying I'd been doing must have been on the right ¨ wavelength because the terminal was clean and motionless. No ¨ incessant scrolling of 'b's. What had happened? I didn't know ¨ and still to this day don't. Can something happen to oil in 10 ¨ days that renders it non-electrically conductive? Or was it just ¨ water taking its own sweet time to dry? Strange properties of ¨ MSG?  ¨ In any case my hard disk soon installed itself -- and my ¨ system environment, resident command package and all the rest of ¨ my dear, long-lost friends were soon loading themselves into my ¨ sweet and dear 64,000 bytes of RAM.  ¨ And everything seemed to be fine until I hit my 'b' key.  ¨ Exhibiting that great principle in which irony weaves itself ¨ through the history of human enterprise, my 'b' key was now dead.  ¨ Nothing happened when I pressed it. I've always felt that irony ¨ was the fundamental energy animating the universe, and I guess ¨ someone up there must have decided to prove to me the correctness ¨ of my belief. Actually though, I was so elated at having my computer back ¨ that it took a while to realize what was going on. After some ¨ minutes of typing however I was soon face to face with the cold, ¨ hard fact that I had no way of putting a 'b' into anything I was ¨ writing, much less reforming a VDE or WordStar paragraph with ¨ CTL-B. The first thing I did, though, upon having my computer ¨ back was to log onto all our wonderful Z-Nodes to say hello to my ¨ dear comrades. I was so happy to be back that I just assumed ¨ people wouldn't mind that my messages had blank spaces wherever ¨ the letter 'b' should have appeared. I went on like this for a while, stupidly but moderately ¨ happy, until my roommate Wayne dropped into the living room to ¨ say hello. We chatted for a while and I explained what was going ¨ on. He's by no means computer-literate but spent some time years ¨ ago playing with early CP/M machines and hooking them up to music ¨ synthesizers and having a rather interesting time of it all. He ¨ seemed rather excited about an idea he had that he felt would ¨ solve my problem and started mumbling incoherently about ASCII ¨ values and don't I have a program that could send out the ASCII ¨ value for 'b'? I couldn't imagine how to implement what he was ¨ talking about and sent him on his way. I would have been glad to ¨ get a program to redefine any of my keys to a 'b', but how could ¨ I do so without being able to type the letter at least once? It is said that when you stop thinking about something the ¨ solution will come to you, and anyway I think in this dialectical ¨ universe problems are always solved obliquely, but about 10 ¨ minutes after I sent Wayne packing it came to me: FINREP!!!!!  ¨ The spirit of Eric Gans, though the flesh and blood persona ¨ having long left the Z80 world, came to this Z-lover and shook ¨ his shoulders. In any text I was writing I could simply enter a ¨ 'dummy' character - '@', say - and then run ¨ FINREP filename // "@" 42 with 42h being of course the ASCII representation for 'b'. It was ¨ a wonderful idea! I ran in to Wayne's room to thank him and then ¨ back to the living room to write all sorts of new aliases.  ¨ I actually did this for an hour or so, towards the end of ¨ which getting a bit tired from the extra work, when all at once ¨ the better solution, the solution that I am now using, hit me. I ¨ run NUKEY.IOP, the Echelon key-redefinition input/output package.  ¨ It is the file NUKEY.IOP that contains the actual string ¨ redefinitions. I simply did a dummy redefinition of one of my ¨ function keys to 'z', then with a file patcher went into ¨ NUKEY.IOP and changed the 7Ah ('z') to 42.  ¨ I've now set fkey #4 to be upper-case 'B' and fkey #8 to be ¨ CTL-B and am computing the best I can with that. Am I doing OK?  ¨ Just by this document for yourself. That's how my problem was at ¨ least temporarily solved, and that's where I am today. If I can ¨ just remember to reach for function key #1 instead of the 'b' key ¨ -- assuredly not an easy feat -- I'm set. If I at some point ¨ decide I don't want to I may very well have to shell out $140 for ¨ that new keyboard.  ¨ It was a fun story to write, but it definitely may turn out ¨ to be the most expensive Chinese meal I've ever eaten. - Rick Charnes P.S. ** INCREDIBLE, AMAZING ADDENDUM JANUARY 6: THIS IS ¨ EXTRAORDINARY! I JUST TURNED MY COMPUTER ON -- ABOUT 3 WEEKS ¨ AFTER THE ACCIDENT -- AND THE 'B'/'b' KEY WORKS!! INCREDIBLE!!  ¨ How could this have happened? What a hobby this is...  ¨ P.P.S. January 23 -- After not touching my computer for 2 weeks ¨ while I was away: The 'b' again no longer works. What a hobby ¨ this is...