Category: Tech

I first read about The Net in December, 1972, as I’ll explain later. I never had any interest in CompuServe or AOL, or any online service that wasn’t The Internet. The original graphical Web browser was Mosaic 0.9, released in October, 1993. I read about it in the December ’93 issue of PC Magazine. I’d been looking for an Internet service with a local phone number, intending to open a UNIX Shell account. The possibilities of going graphical made me feel I had to get moving, so in January, 1994 I went online with The Internet Access Company, using a 40 MHz 386 PC and an Intel modem running at 14.4 Kbps. TIAC was a very good service, and it was later bought by Earthlink.

It was no easy task getting Mosaic going! For starters, Trumpet Winsock was the only reasonably priced Internet Protocol software that was available for home use, and downloading it with Xmodem and getting it working on Windows 3.11 took some effort, as well as $25 US sent to its author, Peter Tattam, in Australia. There was no PayPal in those days, so some ISP’s, including TIAC, took care of forwarding the money. Then Mosaic itself had to be downloaded, etc.

The first Web page I ever saw was Paramount Studio’s Star Trek homepage. After doing some text-based browsing in UNIX Shell with a program called Lynx, I immediately “got” the graphical Web experience. It was one of those memorable, “ah ha, of course” moments, that made me laugh out loud. Sort of like the first time I saw a cassette deck with auto search and reverse. 😉

I promised myself to get off of dialup as soon as I could, and that turned out to be August, 1998, after we sold our first house and bought this place. While my physical broadband connection never changed, the service providers sure did! I started with Road Runner → then MediaOne → moved to ATT Broadband → and ended with Comcast.

At work I was known to mutter about the need to rewire America with fiber optic cable, and I vowed to get it as soon as it was available. Last March, three weeks after seeing the Verizon truck on the street with spools of fiber optic cable, I ordered FiOS. Our phone service is also on FiOS. With the old copper wires the telephone crackled when it rained, even after Verizon swapped wire pairs in the buried pipe, so we were glad to be rid of it.

The title of this post is a reference to a past item.  Here is an example of what I use to embed the videos that I make.  I started out with a much longer command, with lots of tags and options specified, but it did nothing more than this does, so I trimmed out all of the fat!

Thirty years ago — OK, let’s make it 40 — Flash for me referred to a comic book character I liked. Now Flash is all about memory sticks. I started with a modest SanDisk 128-MB model:

But then I need a bigger fix, so I graduated to 1-GB:

That 1-gigger saw a lot of use and abuse, mostly at work. Eventually, all three of its caps broke, but not before it survived a ride in the washing machine and the dryer, while forgotten in the little “fifth pocket” of my Eddie Bauer chinos. Previously, I’d worn it around my neck, along with my employee badge, but the little piece of plastic for the lanyard broke, so into the pocket it went.

Now I have a 2-GB Flash drive, which even at USB-2 speeds takes some time to back up:

But now it seems that in the rush to meet demand, some USB flash drives are failing:

http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/859798/651604/33969/2/

Fortunately, these things are ridiculously cheap. The research firm IDG is quoted in that article. They’re literally next door to the building where I work, but other than some of their people parking in our garage and eating in our cafeteria, we have no contact with them.

Embedding audio and video into this blog makes me think of how far things have come from the days when I held the microphone of my treasured Aiwa TP-32A to the TV speaker and recorded Star Trek. Forty years isn’t a long time … is it?