Losing track of time: 02 (London)

I was given a small Mac in the summer of 1987(?) to work on at home when I was tasked with compiling a list of the traditional character equivalents for the simplified character database that we had on our Unix system in my office at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), where I was working on two Chinese computer research projects:  Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis, and CALL / Computer Aided Language Learning).

    My desk was in a corner of the living room at a north-facing window.

    I had surrounded myself with five different dictionaries to cross reference.

    I’d get home from SOAS around 10pm.  (I always left at SOAS closing time, 9pm, one of the last to leave the building.)

    I’d walk straight into my living room and switch on the Mac first, as it took time (this was 1987) to boot up, then go and remove my shoes.  That was how keen I was to get going.

    During one long stretch, I’d only get up out of my chair in the corner of the living room to go to the kitchen for coffee or to the loo, then back again.

    At one point, I looked up out of the window.  The sky was a shade that I couldn’t tell was dawn (4am in summer before it got light) or dusk (9:30pm before it got dark), that was how sucked in I was by the database conversion work.

    I had no idea at all which day it was, and how long I’d been working at it.

    In the end, I found out that I’d been sitting there, working at it for 19 hours non-stop.

    So, I can understand how these artistic people could be so lost in their own creative world all the time.

(London, 1987)