A find during Googling recently — Lindsay sent a photo of Evanston restaurant Hecky’s, a place we never went while we actually attended Northwestern — is Martha Larson’s “Computer Lab Swing” (lyrics and mp3), which turns out to be an amazing capture of an odd time and place: NU’s late-’90s digital world.
The servers named after neighborhood restaurants (Hecky’s is the only survivor), the Telnet text-only email client, the “Ph” service that operated like a digital phone directory but then became a semi-social network before social networks existed…. all of these things were real and our children will never believe us.
It’s a high-class joint where the big names rendezvous
You’ve got Hecky, Casbah, Merle and Sweet Lulu
The lights are white and the screens glow a funky green,
And, baby, pine is the secret word, if you know what I mean
Keep on swingin’ there’s no stoppin’, the Cyberworld is always hoppin’
Computer Lab…Computer LabI sing bee-billi-oten-boten-bobo-skideeten-be-bop
As I take that mouse for a spin across my desktop
The guy sittin’ next to me is a real Johnny Style,
So I’ll Ph that cat, and get his profile
All those masterminds a-thinkin’ but there ain’t no food or drinkin’
Computer Lab…Computer Lab
Our current interns will never believe us.
The rest of Larson’s songs from that time aren’t online, but I bet they’d be interesting to Northwestern people as well. A 1999 graduate of the NU mechanical-engineering program, say her liner notes, “Martha performed the title track to her album, Lonesome Techie Woman, at the 1999 McCormick School of Engineering commencement ceremony.”