🚀 go-pugleaf

Meanwhile, who remembers those old dinosaur terminals?  Pale blue, curved,
combining keyboard and monitor in one, with modem sockets you put your
telephone receiver in when you were calling up UNIX?  !!!  This was
mid-seventies.  I remember composing an article on UNIX before "vi"; you
had to edit sentence by sentence.  Then you "t-roffed" it to the printer,
which scrolled it out for you in long, silky, uncut pages.  Do you
remember that?  And then when we got our own printers, the typeset seemed
so primitive compared to t-roff, and it took so long to print.

Why are all computers beige?  I'm seeing some new models that are black or
dark gray, and they seem like such bold innovations.

When did the commercial internet come out?  I remember not so long ago
when the "internet" was a system that supported hundreds of different
listservs and bitnets for academics.  I remember, but not what year, being
aghast at the knowledge that they were going to commercialize it and
charge you for it--because the "internet" was always free.  When did we
start sporting those http addresses?  I think I remember seeing them in
1993, but not understanding what they meant.

(In fact, when did e-mail become a major form of communication?  I'll
confess that in 1986, when someone asked me to "e-mail" him, I had no idea
what he meant.  But then I was pretty technologically backward,
having just come from Geneva Switzerland where none of us postdocs had
anything like a computer account, to start my first tenure track job.
They gave me a personal computer with no hard-drive.  In 1987 I asked
privately for an account and they put me on "uhura," which later got
changed to "troi."  Our computers are Trek stars.)

Did you ever dream in 1971 that the computer would be what
it is today? Sarah
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Sarah L. Higley                            slhi@troi.cc.rochester.edu
Associate Professor of English                office:  (716) 275-9261
The University of Rochester                   fax:     (716) 442-5769
Rochester NY, 14627
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Py dydwc glein / O erddygnawt vein?
"What brings a gem from a hard stone?"               Book of Taliesin
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