Letter from the CEO
Miraculous Technological Changes and Why I Write for macCompanion
By Robert Pritchett
I actually woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the technological changes I’ve experienced through life so far and felt I had to write down my thoughts and feelings on the subject.
Some Reminisces and Near Misses
I came through the Nuclear age, the Space age and the Microcomputer age. I had to do the 1st grade over because I was in the hospital a lot and I struggled to learn to read. I didn’t have Sesame Street back then to help me. I fought “b”s and “d”s, because they were the same to me (I didn’t know at the time and until I reached adulthood that I was suffering from dyslexia). Using my head was always a struggle, but I could always use my hands.
We were not
exactly prospering on a music teacher’s salary and writing was never my strong
point during my youth. Paper was scarce to write on, thus I wrote little. Thus,
writing was not my strong point.
I still remember the day I had to use a Brillo pad while our family was camping. My mother thought I must have been blind not to have known what one was or how it was used to wash dishes. I was dumbfounded. I’d never been exposed to it before, so it was new and strange to me. I was baffled at it and thought it was a great idea. Dry soap in a scratch pad! Who’d a thought? I thought it was innovative.
I learned to “keyboard” on my mom’s manual Royal typewriter http://www.typewritermuseum.org with the extra long carriage. She would do genealogy group sheets and family pedigree charts and I helped out when I stayed home from public school with all the colds, flu and whatever other childhood maladies that happened along, such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, etc.
We used plastic Tupperware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupperware for glasses and leftovers and they seemed to always be greasy, because we washed dishes by hand. For some odd reason we thought it was more important to “save” water rather than use it to clean with (must be the well water on the farm thinking), so the soapy detergent didn’t last long in the sink. Much later, when I used automatic dishwashers, a lot of my illnesses went away.
We cleaned out dirty cotton diapers and plastic pants by hand in the toilet and you can probably imagine what that was like. Thankfully, now disposable diapers are used instead – and eco-friendly cloth diapers are making a comeback.
We’ve come a long ways from washerboards and 2
and 3-holer outhouses http://waltonfeed.com/old/out.html to indoor plumbing, running hot and cold water and electricity that works 24/7.
We now have the luxury of having appliances and other electronics that can be
left on all night.
Somehow as I look back now, only through prayers and miracles did I survive childhood when I wasn’t working on my grandparents dairy farm and living with my parents during the school year. I was the oldest of the children in our family, so all the parenting mistakes were tried on me first. It’s true, kids don’t come with operating manuals! And I must have been a big burden for my parents, being sick most of the time.
I can remember when we got our first color TV, our first automatic power steering car with in-dash air conditioning, our first clothes washer and dryer, so we didn’t have to put clothes on the clotheslines anymore.
And when I got married I had to do it all over again. It was a long time before we got a microwave oven, an electric lawn mower and a house big enough for our own dishwasher and clothes washer and dryer. Now we have one of those glass-top ovens and an ice dispenser along with the water in the front of the fridge. And we have our own deep freezer in the garage. And we use vehicles with air conditioning (we live in a very warm climate for much of the year and our first car as a married couple didn’t have air conditioning). Oh and we have a DVD player along with the other living room “essentials”, like stereo entertainment equipment, distributed speakers and even wall-to-wall indoor carpeting. We have been truly blessed with modern day miracles!
The Fix Is In
While in college,
I discovered rather quickly that I could make more money fixing office machines
(copiers, typewriters and word processors) than milking cows, working in the
forest as a lumberman, or working all night in a food processing plant or
cleaning buildings as a custodian, so I started my own business and learned how
to fix just about everything that was mechanical or electro-mechanical as
office equipment from manual typewriters and calculators to copiers and
word-processing systems.
Later I enjoyed working in cleaner environments around computer mainframes, minis and micros and maintained support equipment, including such things as IBM card equipment.
Those systems had to be programmed using what I called bullet-boards, because they appeared to use military-grade bullet points soldered to wires to program from point A to point B. I doubt the latest generation has even seen a “Don’t fold, spindle or mutilate” IBM card that used to come in the mail for subscription services and membership drives back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_card
When I went to work for a government nuclear facility, I stepped back in time and worked on some of the first mechanical typewriters ever built (pre-1940’s) for business (used in secured TEMPEST environments http://www.officemuseum.com/typewriters_office_models.htm), rotary calculators, stapling and binding equipment, and all sorts of electro-mechanical typewriters and other office equipment like the Wang, the Xerox an the IBM word processing systems, among a host of others. (We still maintained some mechanical typewriters for a Tempest environment up through the early ‘90’s.)
I saw the inevitable transitions from real desktop clutter to screen clutter as the electro-mechanical devices we took so long to learn to maintain were gradually replaced. Penny parts were replaced by micro-electronic boards that cost hundreds of dollars to install.
I serviced early IBM typebar
equipment up through Selectrics http://www.etypewriters.com/history.htm and the pseudo-electronic devices up through the Microcomputer age. Many of the office equipment manufacturers no
longer exist. Not too long ago, I threw out all the 25 years of Service
Manuals, User Guides, Parts Manuals, books and other detritus that I had
gathered as the backbone of business for years. They could have been “office
equipment” museum pieces http://www.ideafinder.com/history/category/office.htm.
We went from rollers, pins, screws, shims, oil and grease and small parts to doing electronic board repairs on multi-layers boards. We used oscilloscopes to home in errant floppy drives (requiring “cat’s eyes” for proper alignment). We replaced lots of bad memory chips on full-sized memory cards that snapped into motherboards. We even worked on the portable sewing-machine sized portable computers. And eventually we ended up becoming board-swappers instead of keyboard repairers as electronics went down in price and wages went up.
We began the computer network revolution with network cards that cost thousands of dollars each and yes, we even repaired those too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungermann-Bass.
I learned about structured wiring and became a Telecom Engineer and we developed the first network standards, as folks debated the best technologies to do the job. Ethernet won out (Token Ring can still be found in use and don’t even get me started on Category 6 and Category 7 shielded vs. twisted pair cabling issues) and we gradually shifted from broadband to baseband and centralized “dumb terminal” networking to distributed microcomputer networking.
We went from hubs to switches to routers and I remember the hot debates we had about router “wish list” requirements, until we settled on Cisco gear. I saw the price drop from thousands of dollars for equipment to literally tens of dollars. And I’ve watched as “Murphy’s Law” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law seems to have been replaced by “Moore’s Law” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law.
I participated in
getting best-of-breed shootouts for replacing copper with fiber and I actively
participated in those debates as well - and still do! But I think we got end-runned
by insecure wireless technology. Fiber won’t be the “next big thing” until the
cost of fiber electronics drops to copper electronic prices as demand increases
for product. I still marvel at how glass fiber cables can be had for less than
$20. But then at one time, USB cables were expensive and so were Category 5
network cables (not nearly as expensive as the baseband drop cables and
Ethernet cable “vampire taps” used to be though!). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap
Why Write for macCompanion?
Out of weaknesses, if we focus on improvement, we can make strengths, mostly because of the mistakes we make along the way. And I admit, I’ve made a few. I thought Baseband cabling was pretty cool, until I learned why structured cabling was important. I thought HTML web page coding was a fad and I missed out on a great opportunity when it first came along. When I graduated from college, I could have gone to work for Microsoft, but didn’t. I had no idea folks by nature are “lazy” and are willing to pay for stuff they don’t want to do themselves. Some think Podcasting may be a fad. Perhaps it will be replaced with Streamcasting. Overbuilt “dark fiber” bandwidth will get lit up and utilized. When it does, I want to learn about it.
I struggled with learning to put my thoughts on paper, research topics and present and train others on maintaining and using their equipment. I learned how to do it. I learn by doing, not by being shown. I know a lot of our readers and listeners learn the same way.
By running macCompanion, I’ve had opportunities to learn about hardware and software most folks can only dream about, because either they don’t have the time or inclination to explore, to study, or to really dig into the esoterica of computerdom. I make the time to do so. I explore these things along with others on our staff, so you don’t have to. And I found that effort to be fun. Learning should be fun!
I still use pen and paper for a lot of things. I also occasionally use my mind. However, I marvel at all the modern miracles we’ve been blessed with and the inspiration that must have occurred over many lifetimes to give us the best that mankind has to offer to make life just a little better each day.
For close to little or no money our staff do the same thing for you by showing how the Marvels of Macdom can change lives for the better as together, we explore books, hardware and software that very well could be your meal ticket to a better life. And if we can make a positive difference in the lives of others by doing what we do – making a weakness into a strength. Eventually, all this effort will be worth the time and sweat-equity put into it.
And that is why I write for macCompanion Magazine. We know what it feels like to be called a “dumb little kid who doesn’t know anything”. We don’t want you to feel that way here. There are no “Lusers” who use Macs.
Please enjoy this issue and let others know about what can be accomplished using a Macintosh computer for both home and business.
