I'll write long this time. My bad.

Me, I'm working from a personal point of reference in 1977 - 1981. Books are essential, dictionaries are essential (and encyclopedias too - I have a 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica next to this desk at this moment).. But Apple and Dell have sold me some useful machines too.

I did encounter some of the very earliest computer "touch screens" at Champaign-Urbana in 1977-1978. They had a popular Star Trek Game that us undergraduates weren't typically allowed to access. CERL at the University of Illinois was a very very big deal and one of my assistant professors took me inside it once as a favor. That assistant professor knew what he was doing computer-wise and he was a Caucasian very seriously studying Mandarin Chinese as well - Lord knows what happened to him, but it was probably fantastic. We undergrads had some beginning Computer Science requirement, but I was hopeless at COBAL and FORTRAN and my IBM punch card programs never did work. Not even once.

Three business school guys in my dorm got hired by some early computer pioneer about 1980 to sell computers. They probably made a fortune if they stayed sober long enough. Once those guys started a charcoal fire on the roof of the dorm, so I'm not certain if they could stay sober that long, but they certainly charmed the dean of students into somehow NOT expelling them. They probably did really well at sales. To me at the time, I thought those guys were just going to be selling a bunch of toys.

September 1993 was just about the time of the bond market hiccup as I remember. Some banks made a lot of money, and some lost a lot of money. We got our information from newsprint and the Public Broadcasting's Nightly Business Report and WBBM news radio 78 in Chicago. Of course, there was cable TV. Computers were still only for word processing MOL. My office might have had a Bloomberg machine, but likely that was still in the future. Dial-up modems were still in the future too (but not by much). Late in '93, we went to France and then to Brazil. I don't exactly recall how those trips got arranged before computers. I went to the ANA Summer Seminar that earlier that year, and there was not a computer or cell phone to be seen. That Seminar was arranged by USPS, hand-filled applications and personal checks.

Happily, Today I function just fine with my books and various scraps of paper, even if I don't play well with others.

"Dead Tree" as a denigration - now how silly is that??? Information has been stored that way for about 600 years and books/ paper aren't going away anytime soon.

I didn't realize people still measured their personal worth according to how much goofy **** they know about computers. Or how early they had a connection to the Web. Today, computers are a throw-away commodity. The Internet actually seems to be regressing nowadays, not progressing. I'm certain that I must be part of the problem.

Oly