Cruising The Information Highway

I grew up with three channels on TV and sometimes PBS. One delivered newspaper. A shared party line. The news was just two hours of stuff a day, and most of it was about someone's cow. The party line was your facebook gossip. And, the Sear's catalog and the newspaper was your Amazon and ebay. The nearest pipe shop was the Tinderbox in the mall. But, we knew lots of people who smoked pipes. You'd see them all on their front porches as you drive by.
I can do without the hundreds of 24 hour news channels, and I can do without news bloggers. All of the rest of the stuff is pretty cool though. I still have lots of friends who have never gotten on a computer, no online accounts of any sorts, no cell phone, no tablets. They seem to be pretty happy people. And, I've thought about it...

And, the Sear's catalog and the newspaper was your Amazon and ebay.

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Fancy stuff ... mine was Farm & Fleet!

Cosmic, like you, I can remember all those same things and although my kids tell me I'm "technically challenged" this internet thing has opened worlds we never knew existed. Back then almost all of the old timers smoked pipes and the drug store stocked all the "cogger" blends, with display cards featuring over the counter brand pipes and always a basket full of "no names" for us beginners. There were guys I can't remember ever seeing without a pipe hanging out of their mouth. And who knew artesian pipes even existed. The guy with a great collection belonged to Wally Frank's pipe of the month club. Are we happier? Who knows but we are certainly aware of a much bigger world. Like you, I'm pleased my world expanded. If there is one regret it's the 24 hour a day talking heads that passes for news. I miss me Walter Cronkite every day!!!

I've been online since 1991, when Usenet newsgroups where all the forums that were available, and Alta Vista along with Yahoo where the search engines everyone came to use when they finally showed up. My first operating system was DOS 3.3, and my computer had an Intel 286 chip. My wordprocessor was WordPerfect. FTP and Gopher were how we got info from servers. The idea of watching movies online was almost beyond imagination. When Amazon arrived, all they sold was books. Now I'm online with a smartphone, listening to music I would never have discovered without YouTube and the various music streaming sites and apps. I can download PDFs of books that have been out of print for over a century. We live in a period as significant to the future as the age of Gutenberg and the development of photography, radio, and moving pictures. We live in a privileged time. The very psychology of humanity is changing, whether we like it or not; and those of us who grew up before the personal computer became fused with our lives are here to see the change as it occurs.

Can anyone read a punched card or wire a board for a collating machine. Read paper-tape from a j-35?. Anyone still have a timex Sinclair?

Can anyone read a punched card or wire a board for a collating machine. Read paper-tape from a j-35?. Anyone still have a timex Sinclair?