How My System Evolved

In the introductory post (What is Everyday Computer User?, 2020-11-10), I noted that I have been using home computers since 1977. I also worked with computers in my job as an environmental engineer. The programs I used on the job were specified by my company and were different from the ones I used at home. As a result, I gained wide experience with office programs (Lotus, Symphony, Excel, Word, Power Point, dBase, Access, Wordperfect, etc.). 

At home, my initial focus was games on the Atari 800 (Star Raiders, Chess, Frogger, Galaxian, Centipede, etc.). Much to my surprise, I found out that I really was not that interested in games. I began to use my home computer to access information on the Internet and on bulletin boards such as CompuServe. 

Accessing information from home in the 1980s taught you patience. Connection was limited to telephone lines with low (by today's standards) speed modems. For example, my first modem was a 300 baud (bits/second or bps) device connected to the phone lines with an acoustic coupler. That is, you dialed the modem of the server you wanted to connect to with your telephone. After dialing, you listened to the high-pitched warble that indicated that the two modems were "negotiating a connection."  After they connected, you placed the handset of your phone in a receiver with two rubber cups, one for the earpiece end of the handset, the other for the voice piece. You typed a command and waited...and waited. 

To get a feel for how long you waited, compare the speed of that modem with a modern broadband modem: 300 bps to 10,000,000 (typical speed of broadband over phone wires), so content that would take a second to download today would have taken 9 hours back then. 

In the early 1990s, the game changed significantly with the introduction of faster 56,000 bps modems and the World Wide Web (WWW or W3). Before the WWW, information on the Internet was accessed through various protocols such as Gopher and Archie. When the Mosaic (later Netscape) browser became widely available in 1994, the Web exploded. Suddenly (or so it seems looking back), websites with information available on almost any topic you could think of proliferated. I started my own personal website in 1997 and I continue to have one today at www.jcby.com.

I relate all of the above to let you know that when I tell you about my system for everyday use of a computer, it is a system refined over 40 years of using a home computer. If you read future posts of this blog, you will learn about that system. Hope you join me.

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