PART 2: THE INTERNET

It was also 1991, when a lovely young electrical engineering student introduced me to the computer lab she worked in. There were these sleek, monstrous computers with huge color monitors and strange looking CPUs that had no floppy drives. The interface was also different, with dozens of windows all over the screen and little "widgets" like a pair of eyeballs that followed the cursor wherever it went on the screen. There were color pictures--actual photographs, not just illustrations. The screens did these funky things when nobody was using the computers. It was all strange and crazy to me. These were Sun Microsystems "SPARC" workstations, and the operating system was Unix--running X-Windows. All of this was new to me, but the most shocking thing was that this young lady was able to "chat" with other students in other buildings in real time, connect to computers in other universities -- even in other countries! And she could send and receive "e-mail" with other folks. This, of course, was the Internet.

I made two decisions right then and there. First, I just had to get an Internet account, so I applied to continue my graduate studies and get my Ph.D., and the email address that came with it. I did that in 1991. Second, I had to marry this girl so that she could show me some more of this magic. I eventually did that too, in 1993.

Stepping into the Internet zone was an adventure a day, not unlike my "Goin' Commando" today. One of the coolest things I discovered how to do was to use text editors like Emacs, Pico, Pine, and a few others. We could use these to write emails, of course, but also to write documents. And by using a kind of mark-up language, I could use another nifty application called LaTeX to do word processing and print off clean looking documents. The absolute greatest part of this was that I didn't need any disks since all I had to do was save my files in my account. Wherever I could get access to the Internet of campus, I could get into my account, open my files, and continue working. Lovely stuff.

Then we got Internet access from home, and we could dial into our campus server and access everything from a computer at home. So, we got a "dumb terminal," which was basically a keyboard and a monitor that had a modem port in the back. We'd dial in, and get a reasonable connection at a reasonable speed, but it was all text-based without any of the nifty Sun workstation features, but highly functional nonetheless. Email, FTP, Telnet to other networks, Talk, Finger, Whois, and dozens of other features worked fine, and work was great except for the lack of print capabilities from the dumb terminal.

Soon, we decided to get a "real" computer that would also have games, printing, and "real" word-processing capabilities, so we went out and bought a used Mac. In many ways, this was the beginning of a long slide downhill. First, there was the proprietary software, printer drivers, and all kinds of necessary support to make things work. We had to install new fonts, and when we bought a new printer soon afterwards, we had to upgrade the operating system, which meant we had to fork out more money and spend lots and lots of time to get things back into shape. OK, fair enough. Upgrading is something we all go through every couple of years or so, and it's become a relatively straightforward process. Back then, it was a bit more of a challenge because things were not so well organized as they are today. I also had less of a clue. So I bought a new Mac with everything ready to go.