I was trolling 20 meters in between thunderstorms this weekend when I snagged a fellow for what turned out to be a long, enjoyable QSO. Rag chewing on SSB isn’t always my cup of tea, but there have been plenty of times when I’ve gone long enough that an interesting conversation develops. This was one of those…

Frank was in Colorado and we discovered quickly that we were both almost exactly the same age. That can make greasing the skids of conversation a little easier as it implies many similar experiences. Our musical tastes were very similar and we had both watched Larry Bird and Magic Johnson make the NBA worth watching, and we witnessed that in real time not from some old video clip. Our families were of similar size and age so we had that in common and we both were early adopters of the internet when it became available.

Frank told me that made us Digital Immigrants.

This was a term that seemed familiar, as though I should know what it meant but I didn’t. He explained that it was the moniker attached to those of us who remember life before the internet, and then fully participated in its growth and rapid evolution. I looked it up later and found the term had been coined around the turn of the last century. Just an FYI, I also discovered the term for those born after 1985 and never lived without the internet - digital natives.

Always good when you can learn something from a QSO and I did, and now you have too. You’re welcome!

With this on the front burner, our conversation shifted quickly to memories of how we navigated before GPS and smart phones. My career kept me on the road a lot and my glovebox was always stuffed with paper maps. I used to write travel instructions on a notepad that would get me close to my destination, and then I would stop at a gas station and ask for the last mile directions to where I was going. Worked every time without fail although maybe I had to make a few U-turns to nail it down.

US Robotics telephone modem circa 1991

Then came personal computers. My first was a Timex-Sinclair unit followed by a Commodore 64 and VIC 20. In 1988 I purchased my first “IBM compatible” machine with a blazing 386SX-16 processor and a 10Mb hard drive. First it was DOS and later Windows 3. Then the internet came to my house via a telephone line. CompuServe was my digital fix into the information superhighway via a dial-up modem. A few years later I upgraded the machine (with a whopping 40Mb hard drive) and installed Linux via Slackware.

Those pioneering days were fun, but around 1993 things went vertical when I attended a forum conducted by one of the first internet service providers in Cincinnati where I saw the Mosaic web browser for the first time. After that, it was pedal to the metal and I jumped into the brave new world with hopeless abandon. The sum total of mankind’s knowledge was suddenly at our fingertips. At everyone’s fingertips. Surely this power and communication capability would revolutionize the entire planet.

It was about that point in our QSO when we sadly agreed that the internet hadn’t come close to the potential we had seen in this technology originally. Instead it has become a cess pool of lucre with every next thing being an even bigger scam meant to engage users’ wallets in a spending orgy. Everything was overhyped to incredible levels and thirty some years later we were both amazed it still finds a way to be even slimier than before.

And then Frank said, “We used to surf the web. Now we’re trying not to drown. I never wanted to carry the internet around in my pocket. It’s too distracting and pulls me out of the present moment, fracturing my attention.”

We could have gone on for hours had it not been for declining band conditions so we decided to save the rest of this discussion for another time. I sure hope we get another time, that old rag needs a bit more chawing.