---
title: Tones in the Dark
date: 2026-05-24T10:00:00-04:00
draft: false
description: A poor kid who learned to program off software broadcast over AM radio spends a workday on the grounds of Apple Park, the company that made the machine that made him.
tags:
  - personal
  - computing history
  - apple
lastmod: 2026-05-24T19:37:30.208Z
---

In the late 1970s my parents had friends we'd visit for dinner now and then. I've lost their names and how the families knew each other, all of it, but I remember their house was full of books, and while the adults talked I'd sit and read, as happy as a kid could be. We moved from Indiana to Missouri in 1979 and saw them only once or twice after that.

The last time we were ever at their place, the man took us out to his barn to show us a computer he had built. It was enormous, a wall of lights and tape reels and panels that looked like the bridge computer from the original Star Trek. He had one program loaded that he'd been playing with, a maze generator. He'd set some parameters, and I'm fairly sure I remember actual flip switches for it, and the machine would print a maze to a built-in continuous-feed dot matrix printer, running across as many pages as he'd configured. I was fascinated. I went home with a thick stack of generated mazes to solve.

That was the first computer I ever saw. It set the scene for everything that followed.

---

A few years later, the first computer I ever *used* belonged to a school.

Around 1982, the school where my dad worked owned a single Apple ][+, and whenever it wasn't needed in the classroom he was allowed to bring it home. Summers, long weekends, holiday breaks, any stretch when school was out. I was in sixth grade, living in a poor rural area on the kind of 1970s homestead where you grew much of what you ate and fixed what broke. I was already amazed by how small it was. The only computer I'd ever seen before was that wall of lights and tape out in the barn, and here was one that sat on a desk and came home in the car.

A computer was a rare thing to have out in the country, but it didn't land in unprepared soil. My mom loved science fiction and fantasy, and she raised me on it. I grew up on Tolkien, on Star Trek, on Doctor Who. The future was already a place I spent a lot of time imagining, so a machine that felt like a piece of it arriving in our little house was thrilling rather than strange, and it was thrilling for both of us. She was as taken with it as I was.

There was no internet to connect it to, of course. What there was instead was a whole improvised economy of getting software onto the thing. My mom found people to swap floppy disks with. I bought computer magazines and typed their programs in line by line. Some nights I sat up recording software broadcast over AM radio onto cassette tapes, the data encoded as screeching tones, hoping the signal held long enough to capture the whole program. When my family drove to see relatives, I brought the computer and a small CRT monitor along so I could keep typing in code from magazine listings once we got there.

That ][+ eventually became a ][e, and then the portable ][c. I've never taken a computer class. Not one, in all the years since. What I learned instead was how to figure out what I needed to know to make the computer do what I wanted, which turns out to be the only durable skill in this line of work. Everything I've built in the forty-some years since traces back to those tones coming out of the radio in the dark.

---

We never owned a computer of our own through all those years. My dad just kept borrowing them, and I kept making the most of every stretch one was in the house. The first computer that was actually mine was a hot-rodded Apple ][e I bought as a college freshman in 1989, a thousand dollars handed to a fellow student for a machine someone had already lovingly upgraded.

A couple of years later I was working as a user consultant at the campus computer center, which is a dignified name for the help desk. I spent my days on Unix, on Sun workstations and dumb terminals, answering questions from people who were as new to all of it as the rest of us. That was the start of getting paid to use computers, and I've been doing some version of it ever since.

---

A few weeks ago I was in San Carlos for a production launch, and I had a slow day before it started. So I did the obvious thing. I took a commuter train and then a bus down to Cupertino to stand on the grounds of what that borrowed machine eventually became.

I went to see Apple Park, and specifically The Ring, the enormous circular building that was Steve Jobs's last project. I never actually saw it. As I mentioned in my weeknotes, the campus is buried so deeply in trees and clever landscaping that you can stand a hundred feet away and see nothing but oak and grass and a low fence half-swallowed by shrubs.

![A sunlit woodland clearing. A large oak with deeply furrowed bark stands at right, its limbs arching overhead. Tall trees and dense shrubs ring the clearing, with a patch of blue sky and clouds showing through the canopy. The ground runs from leaf litter at left to lush grass dotted with small purple wildflowers in front. A low dark metal fence sits in the middle distance, mostly swallowed by greenery.](IMG_3796.jpeg "I'm standing about a hundred feet from the Ring. This is all you can see of it.")

But the reason I made the trip in the first place wasn't architectural. It was that the company hidden behind those trees made the machine that made me. I wanted to put my feet on the ground there, the week I was helping ship software into the industry that machine helped bring into being.

The visitor center had a scale model of the whole campus, above ground and below, and an augmented-reality app running on borrowed iPads that let you peel the model apart layer by layer and look at the engineering underneath.

![A hand holds a tablet at arm's length. Its screen shows a detailed 3D aerial render of a vast circular glass building ringed by trees, labeled "Ring Building," with onscreen controls and a prompt to swipe up. Behind the tablet, blurred and out of focus, is a large white physical scale model of the same campus.](IMG_4040.jpeg "The augmented-reality app at the visitor center, doing what the trees wouldn't let me.")

I got a coffee and sat at a table with my laptop while a man at the next table taught an enthusiastic class on how to make art on an iPad.

![Looking straight down at a paper cup of latte on a wooden table. The foam and crema form two rounded lobes with a notch between them and a small stem at the top.](IMG_3780.jpeg "An apple, at Apple. I'll take it.")

I bought a t-shirt with the old six-color logo, the one I remember from the side of that ][+, sold only at the visitor center and nowhere else.

---

Walking the grounds, I came across a barn. An actual barn, dark gray board-and-batten, tucked behind a fence and some tall grass near the edge of the campus. A plaque told the story. The Glendenning Barn was built around 1916 by the descendants of a Scottish family who'd been farming this land since 1851, back when the valley grew apricots and plums instead of software. The farm was sold off in the 1960s, the barn passed through Hewlett-Packard's campus and then Apple's, and when the Ring went up the barn was cataloged, taken apart, and rebuilt a little ways away. The most forward-looking company on earth kept a hundred-year-old hay barn and moved it out of the way rather than tear it down.

![A dark gray board-and-batten barn with a steeply pitched roof, seen from below across a slope. A fence of tall, irregularly spaced gray slats stands in front of it, with shrubs and ornamental grasses around the base and a bright blue, partly cloudy sky above.](IMG_3800.jpeg "The Glendenning Barn, near the edge of the campus, a century older than anything else in sight.")

![A black metal pedestal sign with a gold border and gold lettering, set in tall grass before a wall of green shrubs. The upper half is a dense block of readable text headed "Glendenning Barn"; below it is the City of Cupertino seal. The lower half of the pedestal is blank.](IMG_3798.jpeg "Built around 1916 on a farm that predates the valley's chips and code, dismantled and rebuilt when the Ring went up.")

---

A poor kid from a homestead, who learned to program off the radio and the pages of hobbyist magazines because that was the only way to get the software, grew up to spend a workday on the grounds of the company that started it all, on his way to launch something that mattered. The kid would have found that completely unbelievable. Though maybe not the barn. The first computer he ever saw lived in one of those, out in an Indiana field, a wall of lights printing mazes into the dark. He'd have understood a barn just fine.
