As I wind down my first stint as a blogger, I’m thinking back to other milestones.
In 1977, I used my fax machine. It had an acoustic coupler and was located in Congressman Mann’s office in the U.S. Capitol where I was an 18 year old intern. I was blown away that you could put that phone receiver in there and send a picture.
In 1980, I used my first word processor. For someone who loves words, this experience was almost mystical.
I attended my first teleconferencing industry meeting in 1981 at the University of Wisconsin-Extension. The big issues then were travel cost displacement and distance education. On the trade show floor I remember freeze frame systems and executive videoconferencing systems. (Next August I’m going to Las Vegas for a reunion of the teleconferencing industry – I’ll be tipping a glass with at least 133 veterans of teleconferencing and social computing.) We were all so excited about the possibilities for collaboration in the early 80s. It was a very idealistic and optimistic crew that met at those conferences.
I also remember being an intern at The Institute for the Future around 1983 and using a workstation that connected our Sand Hill Road location to another spot in Palo Alto via voice and video “store and forward"...
Most of the time at IFTF I was working on a Kaypro machine (remember those?). That year was also the first time I met Doug Engelbart. Little did I know that a few years later I’d be using his Augment system on a PC platform. Hyperform (designed by Dean Meyer) was my first introduction to links, windows, structured text and keysets – in 1985.
Fast forward to 2007 where I've now completed my first blogging experience. I want to thank Dave and the rest of you for accompanying me. I enjoyed sharing ideas with you.
Comments (1)
Mary,
Ahh, the "I remember when ..." computer stories. Although my first computer use goes back to a audio coupled teletype terminal with paper tape that connected to a computer at Lear Siegler from my high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan to someplace in Florida (I remember it as Jacksonville, although I have no clue as to why there!!) my favorite computer story was when I was in the Army in Augsburg, Germany in 1978. Had a fellow soldier who had built a Southwest Tech 6800 Personal Computer kit (he still has it and it still works!) and when he tried to order the 2k memory upgrade BOARDS he was denied as it was considered protected technology and could not be exported from the US.
I also wonder about how it was that several of us drove together in 3 cars from East Lansing, Michigan to Florida (yup, Spring break 1982!!) and were able to always meet up for food and gas and everything else WITHOUT cell phones or GPS!! No clue how we pulled that one off. It would probably be impossible today.
As I write this I am sitting in a Starbuck's in Schenectady, NY (about 500 miles from my home) with my cell phone next to me and my significant other adjacent. We are here for a quick visit to the hometown. I spent much of today working on a project involving narrative capture and have been viewing things remotely, answering questions, and making sure my customer doesn't go off the deep end over the long holiday weekend. She is providing updated results for the 15 patients that went through her specific cancer research protocol this week, giving some people immediate good news, and some people bad news.
When I starting computing all this would have been done in the computer center located next to the parking structure where the cute blond girl (darn, can't remember her name) would have taken my stack of FORTRAN IV cards, with the very important control deck up front, run them through the card reader and then tell me to come back in an hour or two (if I was lucky) and if the paper printout was more than about 20 pages it meant I would be looking through a core dump to figure out what the heck had gone wrong. And her patients would have waited for at least a few more days to find out whether or not they had a future for them to worry about at all.
Yup, things have changed just a bit these past 33 years.
Wayne
Posted by Wayne Zandbergen | November 11, 2007 12:32 AM
Posted on November 11, 2007 00:32