I believe a case can be made–indeed a case has been made by others, by historians of Apple and hacker culture–that “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” a story I wrote for Esquire back in 1971 about “phone phreaks” and the first computer hackers (it was only the second magazine story I’d ever had published) played a crucial role in the careers of the founders of Apple and of a legendary ur-hacker I made famous who went by the name of Captain Crunch.

For the first 10 years of my life as a writer, I was a deeply agonized, chronically blocked writer, and it was not until I devised a method of writing-by-rewriting on my Olympia Report Deluxe that I was able to become a productive–if still slow and labor-intensive–writer. It’s not just superstition that kept me from switching to a computer; I suppose I could adopt my rewriting-from-the-top method to a computer if I were to print out each successive draft and rewrite the next one on the screen, then print that out and start rewriting from the top again.

Actually, that typewriter, my Olympia Report Deluxe, or rather Deluxes (I have three of them because they’re no longer manufactured, and I need one for backup and one to cannibalize for parts) are the real reason I’ve rejected switching to a computer for so long.

You know that promo slogan for Alien: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” In cyberspace, no one can hear you doubt.

I’d made the mistake of adopting the moniker “Redhead,” and the supposedly philosophical participants were all over me like a cheap suit the moment I logged on, assuming, it finally dawned on me, that I was a different gender of Redhead.)