How Long Ago Was 1981?
Among the various blogs I read was a 1981 TV news report on receiving the newspaper on your computer.
Watch it and see how far away 28 years can look.
posted by redbarb at 10:11 PM
Faith and Reason
Another cast into the sea of Internet nothingness. Pretense of self-importance is not allowed. It is just another white chick with a PhD and a blog. Is anybody out there? Does anybody care?
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Among the various blogs I read was a 1981 TV news report on receiving the newspaper on your computer.
Watch it and see how far away 28 years can look.
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About Me
- Name: redbarb
- Location: United States
I am a political science professor at a small Midwestern university. I am a grown tomboy who finds numerous ways of escape into the world of imagination. I also love chocolate and admit it is a substitute at times for male attention. I am a Methodist who is serious about her faith, but skeptical of all humans who claim to know for sure what God is thinking. I am a liberal Democrat who knows enough about politics to be capable of seeing the flaws in arguments on my side as well as the other side. Okay, some of time I'm slow on that. I am stubborn. I love to argue as long as it doesn't get personal. I am the youngest of five children. I want to know more and am happy that I'll never know it all. At least, I won't on this plane of existence.
5 Comments:
I recall a verse, in _Daniel_ I feel virtually certain, which tells us that "many shall go (or run?) to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."
J. V.
A rotary telephone??? In 1981??? These people could envision the future of information delivery and they couldn't even graduate to 1970s communications technology?
Seriously, though, I wonder if the guys at the Examiner had any idea that they were feeding the first servings of hemlock to their golden goose? Even with a quarter century head start, the newspaper business never could craft a business plan that would allow them to survive the advent of the internet. (And there is a certain eeriness in hearing the TV reporters chirping away about how this unwieldy and expensive technology obviously presents no threat to the old reliable broadsheet; it's as though we had old film clips of blacksmiths laughing at those newfangled horseless carriages chugging by a 5 miles an hour.)
In my pessimistic moments, I wonder if those of us in the higher ed biz shouldn't take a lesson from all this.
Our _MOST_-annoying, in my personal view, all-news radio station recently took a telephone poll as to how listeners got their news, whether from the Internet or from traditional newspapers, though I now regret not having paid close attention to the results since they would obviously have been relevant here.
J. V.
p.s. Given my visual limitation, I tend to get most of mine from the radio, supplementing my specialist interests via the Web.
Barb, I graduated from college in 1981 and started at DST in '82, when did Dad get his Mac? I remember that when Windows came to us at work, I wasn't very impressed since Dad's Mac had a product that looked a lot like Windows. Also, question, besides "in house" programs and email, did Dad have the ability to "surf?" jan.jan
Out of curiosity, and begging your pardon for possible ignorance, did they actually have computers of that type back as far as the early 80's? I took my first computer literacy course in the late 80's at the agency for the blind at which I was working then, and the computers on which we were learning were IBM and DOS-based. It is my current understanding that the Internet as we now know it bdegan to come into its own in the 1990's.
I hear good things about Macs, how they are virus-free according again to my current understanding, but I further gather that they are behind Windows-based computers in use of adaptive/assistive technologies for the blind and visually-impaired, thus me sticking with windows for now at least.
Hoping that this finds both of you well, and with best wishes,
J. V.
p.s. I trust you understood me to say that I understood the Internet as we now know it to _BEGIN_ to come into its own in the 90's.
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