I often ask myself questions that I know are completely out of sorts with the real world.

The kind of questions where you imagine having the ability to travel back in time, but with every practical problem already taken care of. You have the money you need. You have good health. You are safe. You know what you know now.

Then the question becomes: what would you actually do?

Would you start a business? Become a programmer? Build something before anyone else thought of it? Would you use everything you know now to carve out some strange little corner of history for yourself?

I think about stuff like that more often than I probably should.

Because if everything was covered and you were free to do whatever actually made you happy, why wouldn’t you?

For me, I think it would come down to programming.

Programming is one of those things I love to no end. Obviously, my family comes before any computer or piece of software ever could, but creatively speaking, programming is a huge part of who I am. If I couldn’t do it anymore, I think there would be this enormous empty space where that creative passion used to be.

So picture this.

I go back forty years or so.

I’ve got a sleek IBM PS/2 Model 30 sitting on a desk. I’m living in some townhouse somewhere, eating cheap McDonald’s, watching kick-ass television, and spending my days writing software.

Where would I live?

I don’t really know.

Part of me thinks I’d just go back home.

Why the heck not?

I wouldn’t interfere with my family’s lives or start trying to change history. I’d basically be a time-travelling vacationer who happened to own a computer company.

I’d rent some space in an industrial park, set up a little software shop, and become part of the computer scene.

That’s the part that appeals to me.

Not becoming some billionaire overlord.

Not controlling the world.

Just being there.

Writing strange utilities. Word processors. Games. Maybe my own programming language. Maybe some bizarre piece of software nobody knew they needed until they saw it sitting in a box on a store shelf.

Hell, maybe I’d make something successful enough to take Microsoft down a few pegs.

I’ve never forgiven those jerks in their ivory tower for what happened to Netscape.

There is also something incredibly appealing about how quiet the world seemed compared with today.

No social media.

No smartphones.

No endless stream of notifications demanding your attention every five seconds.

I know nostalgia can lie to you. I know the past had plenty of problems. But when it comes to technology, I sometimes wonder whether we lost something important while everything became more connected.

Computers used to feel like machines you explored.

Now they often feel like machines exploring you.

If I could stay there forever, I probably would.

That would be my version of heaven.

An endless life spent making the games and software I wanted to see exist, surrounded by old computers, strange hardware, floppy disks, magazines, arcades, computer stores, and shelves filled with programs somebody actually had to make because they thought the idea was worth making.

I’ve tried making my own arcade game for years now. Honestly, I’ve probably been messing around with the idea longer than my son has been alive.

At one point, being a huge fan of Moby-Dick, I thought about making a game based on the book.

Except it wouldn’t actually be a game.

That’s the joke.

You boot it up on the NES and all you do is read Moby-Dick.

You press a button.

The page turns.

You press it again.

Another page.

You can save your game.

Load your game.

There’s a soundtrack.

Maybe the statistics screen tells you how many pages you have read, how long you’ve been reading, and how many times you’ve fallen asleep during Chapter 32.

Then after several hundred pages you finally beat the game.

Congratulations.

You read a book.

Because reading rules.

There. That’s the punchline.

Memorize that joke and use it at your next party. You’ll be the hit of the evening.

I wouldn’t know personally because I hate parties.

Can’t stand them.

But that’s part of why this imaginary time-travel life sounds so appealing.

Just leave me alone with a computer.

The whole thought came back to me recently because I was looking through games that were planned for the Atari 5200 but never released. One of them was called Animated Puzzle.

Looking at it today, I still think something like that could have found an audience with little kids, parents, and grandparents. It was simple, approachable, colourful, and exactly the kind of odd little software experiment that used to appear during that era.

And it makes you wonder how many other interesting ideas disappeared because somebody in accounting looked at a spreadsheet and said no.

That’s one of the things I love about old computing history.

There are entire alternate timelines hiding inside cancelled software.

Games that almost existed.

Computers that almost succeeded.

Companies that nearly went in completely different directions.

You can look at one unfinished prototype and suddenly imagine an entire world where things happened differently.

Maybe that’s why I think about going back so much.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to rewrite history.

I’d just like to spend some time inside it.

Okay, maybe an eternity.

Give me the townhouse, the IBM, the software company, unlimited health, unlimited money, cheap hamburgers, old television, and forty years of computer history waiting to happen.

I’ll manage.

Unfortunately, none of that is happening tonight.

Another week is in the bag.

Tomorrow we return to work.

God damn it.