Changing Technology a good and a bad thing Part II

In Part I, I talked about the old clone PC made in a workshop in back of a Chinese Restaurant in Springfield, Oregon. The latest Intel 8088 chip running MS-Dos with Windows 2.0 on top of that, MS Word, Pagemaker, and a duplex laser printer.

That computer was connected through the serial port to a modem and the telephone line to a list of bulletin boards in the local calling area. Some were easier to get to than others depending on how interesting they were and how busy they were. Even at that basic level a couple of them were a little "too friendly."

At some point, through those same bulletin boards we began to get instructions on how to work our way into the world wide web. A list of universities would appear and we could click on them and see various libraries and find fields of information, usually esoteric data that meant nothing. It wasn't very interesting. It was test based and very difficult.

Then came a mailer from either Wards or Sears with an invitation to join a new "scheme". Their vision was to link Americans through their PC's and Apples via the telephone lines and modems. I don't remember what this system was going to be called. I thought it an intriguing idea at the time, and tossed it along with all the other junk mail. I didn't hear anything further and assumed the idea had died. Several years later discs began to appear in stores with the familiar AOL trademark. I have no idea if AOL came out of that original SEARS mailing or not.

Jump ahead to 2003. Twelve authors at the RV park where my wife and I wintered decided to publish an anthology of our short stories. We had spent all winter writing them. How to coordinate the process among 12 men and women between 60 and 85 years of age. We did it all by broadband e-mail through the summer when the 12 authors either drove their motorhomes, 5th wheels, or flew back to summer homes scattered from Maine to Oregon. Everyone had a chance through their computers to submit their stories to me in Oregon. I edited them, sent them to a co-editor in Virginia who further edited and proofread them and sent them back. I designed the book around them and PDF'ed a copy to everyone who further proofread and e-mailed it back. At that point I e'mailed the Pagemaker file to Thomson-Shore in Dexter Minnesota. Unfortunately the books had to be delivered by truck. The book came out in 2004 shortly after everyone returned to the park in January.

By that time everyone was surfing the internet with ease, e-mail was replacing "snail mail".

Part III to come - a bad thing about technology.