06 Jun 07 Outage

Yesterday afternoon a passing thunderstorm co-incided with a complete loss of cable service.

Now here at Kimjac Towers we are pretty much reliant on it, as we use it for the Internet, for the TV, and for the phone.

For the first few minutes, I kept thinking that it would come up again in just a moment, but it didn’t, and then I resolved that I didn’t need to have the net to get some tasks done; that I could live without it for a while.

That was it really. Internet. No, I’m not an Internet addict, but I do rely on it for much of my work, and also for entertainment at times, and as a general information source.

There is that question, and reply from some:

“What would you do without the Internet? When I was growing up we didn’t have it!”

OK, well to respond to that is quite simple. When I was growing up, I didn’t have Internet. I didn’t get my first simple computer until I was 22. That, folks, was a Sinclair ZX81, with 1K RAM. I added a 16K RAM pack to it. Yes 16K, you read it correctly.

In 1985, I got a Commodore 64. I then heard about an online service called Compunet. I signed up. I’ve been online ever since. 1987 was the year I got my first PC. Even back then I wanted a “serious” machine, rather than a games system. It came with 640K RAM, a 12 inch VGA monitor (Standard VGA was 256 colors at 640 x 480), and a 30MB Hard Drive. It also had one of the new 3.5inch floppy drives. The whole thing cost around $2,000.

It came with MS-DOS 3.3, and a set of disks marked Windows 1.0 I installed Windows 1.0, and there was a GUI, with some widget things like a notepad, and a clock, and a very simple Word processor, and that was about it. I took it off, as it was not relly much use. I stayed firmly in the DOS camp for the next 6 years. The only reason I finally gave in, and put Windows 3.1 on my computer, was that I wanted to be able to look at this new-fangled World Wide Web, and I couldn’t do that in DOS – well not graphically anyway. I’d gotten my first proper Internet account in 1993, and wanted to go explore. For me though, the most exciting thing was email! I could communicate with all these people everywhere – well I could once I got everyone else I knew on the net too!

What’s the Internet? What’s a modem? Why do I want that?

Now we take it pretty much for granted, and miss it when it goes out.

So to the person that makes the statement about how we lived before it – yes we did of course. Same as we did before the mobile phone, digital camera, telephone, television, radio, and even electricity. There are still plenty of elderly folks in rural America that will tell you about life on a farm without electricity, and how the REA from 1935 onwards bought light into their homes.

So back to yesterdays outage. What did I do? I did some local file maintenance on the network, and then took the opportunity to get away from the computer for a while and go read a book.

After all, the computer is one of our slaves, not our master, right?