people did have pcs in the 80s and 90s. this idea of the digital native should really be pushed back to most of gen x it's just that the computers were hidden out of sight. in the 80s, wealthy families may have bought apple computers for their kids, but the family computers, which were probably amigas or ataris until they turned into dos pcs and then windows pcs, were generally left in the basement. i grew up pretty poor and everybody i knew had a pc, but the family matriarchs didn't want them in the living room, and the reality is that they mostly went unused. you would give your kids gaming consoles and let them set them up with old tvs in their rooms, but the computers went in the basement, in the utility room, where nobody could see them, and they just sat collecting dust. they were in theory bought for work but you never used them for work.

the first 486 i'm referring to was my stepfather's and it was set up in a corner of the basement behind the hot water tank and across from the standalone freezer and the washer and dryer. it was supposed to be his "office" but he would go in there once a month to type something. no internet access. my bedroom was behind a wall on the other side of the basement. so, i would sneak in there after dark and play civ until 5:00 am, as though i was a rich kid, which i wasn't. the rich kids had their own 486s in their actual bedrooms and played civ until 5:00 am while typing in their beds.

there is a long stalled music project that i can insert in before 2cc and am going to, as i reboot and do a second completion run. that means this will be the new first project and i'm actually starting it from scratch. years before anamanaguchi or chiptune or "nintendocore" became popular ideas, i was planning on recording a guitar-based video game music album. i think i still have tapes of samples recorded about 1998 and a very small amount of it was used on the first inri cd on connecting tracks like "abusive". there's not going to be any more inri, but as i go through this all one last time with a careful analysis, there may be more projects like this that fall out and spin off into their own projects.

i don't have any developed demos, but the earliest sampling i did for this project (i didn't have a gaming console at the time and it was still the 90s. digital recording existed but was expensive. i was sampling my friends' nintendos with a handheld tape recorder.) would be dated to around 98 or 99. i would, however, want to date the project to the time frame that i was playing old games, instead, which would have been more like late 80s and early 90s.

i don't remember exactly when i got the nintendo in the basement but it would have been after the snes had been released so it was probably christmas, 1991. the nintendos were marked way down because the stores were selling super nintendos. exactly. i had, however, already been sneaking in to the office to use the 486 (which ran dos) for a few years before that and my dad's atari 2600 (which had space invaders and pacman) was probably there when i was born.

i definitely had a guitar by mid 1991. i played stairway to heaven at a local talent show in 1991. if i'm going through this pre-inri period, i'd like to potentially make an acoustic guitar demo of what some of the earliest versions of some of these songs would have sounded like, so that's something else.

one way i could do this is to do albums for each of the platforms and date them to when i played the platform, and it would be restricted to very old platforms - atari 2600, dos pc games, 8 bit nintendo, sega genesis II.

another idea i've had for years is to make concept albums for the kids books as i work through them and that's something i could look at as well but i would want to date that to the current reality and it would mess up the chronology. nor would it be connected to any specific musical idea.

the anamanaguchi-style midi guitar project is something i wanted to do in the mid 90s and didn't so it makes sense to pencil it in to the reboot, even if it's an anachronism.