Running MS DOS Version 6.22, 20th Anniversary Edition

Preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition

What is 20 years?

To a writer like John McPhee [], awarded a Pulitzer Prize for documenting the riffs ofpoetry, the lyrical odes and sonnets gracing the undending hymn of the epic,tumbled among the tuff and breccia and sandstone and mudstone and granite anddiorite and all the other rock that makes up a slice through the U.S. roughlyalong the path of Interstate 80 from New Jersey to California—to a writer likeJohn McPhee, soldiering away at presenting 540 million years (give or take), 20years doesn't register, unless perhaps as a possible way to estimate the lengthof some cataclysmic event, a volcanic eruption or sudden draining of many cubicmiles of rock—but these events would more likely be measured in 20 days or even20 hours; that's what made them cataclysmic. No, I would avoid asking JohnMcPhee to ponder the period of 20 years for fear of evoking the same sort ofresponse I got when I asked Derry Odonovan, racing enthusiast and true son ofEire, why the drag racer he built (and drove) didn't have a tachometer (althoughI said, of course, tach): Well, let's see (rolls his eyesa bit), I make it through the quarter in something less than 5 seconds and theengine's turning around 7 grand most of the time, which means that (longerpause, eyes squinched tight shut to let me know that he is calculating...) thebeast will turn over maybe 600 times. Now why would you be wantin' me to count them? (Although he had long since left the Emerald Islefor California and supported his racing by masquerading as a lineman forPG&E and sounded as though he was born and raised in the Santa Clara Valley,whenever I asked a question that required him to expend more than 15 or 20 wordsin showing just how little I really knew, he sounded like a leprechaun by thetime he was through.)