Computer Advances

On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, Mr. Self Destruct wrote: When I first got onto the net, the first thing I found out was that it is most useful for e-mail. I tried IRC, I tried Usenet, I tried a couple other things, and eventually I found myself paying $19.95 a month for e-mail. I don't think that is much value. Maybe $20 a year would have been worth it, but not per month. For probably 18 months all I had was text-based access. I finally upgraded to a PPP account a few months ago, and was expecting to see all sorts of cool stuff. I wasn't disappointed in that respect...I did see lots of cool stuff. Was it worth the $24.95 a month I now had to pay? No. Maybe, again $25 a year. But all in all I find the Internet to be EXTREMELY valuable. Where else can I go to find 200 zealots who collect classic computers to get information about a particularly obscure piece of hardware and get an answer to my questions usually within 24 hours? I can get technical documentation for the stuff I use at work, including application notes, hardware references, troubleshooting information, etc. whenever I want, 24 hours a day, and I don't have to wait on hold for 30 minutes to an hour, and its free. Sure I would prefer to talk to some live dolt, simply because its easier to just have the answer given to me rather than having to search it out, and my time is better spent doing work rather than scrounging around for information, although admittedly the on-hold wait and the time I would spend searching out the info I need is a wash. I can buy/sell stuff on the net and have a world-wide marketbase. I can do this by paying $24.95 a month. Try doing that before the Internet became a viable public medium. You'd have to be a large corporation or have lots of money. I can send data, programs, pictures, basically information to colleagues anywhere in the world practically and do it simply by just e-mailing it to them. Before this would require one side to have a BBS or both parties to schedule a time to connect to each other with modems to do the exchange. I can dig up information on zip codes, find maps to places I need to go, find restaurants, find people, getting shipping costs for packages I send out, I can e-mail a diatribe to the President of the United States of America. Basically, it is truly information at your fingertips (almost) instantly. Constantly updated, constantly growing, alive. I just realized this has practically nothing to do with classic computers and I apologize. Sam ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass