In the Land Before Al Gore Invented the Internet

It is a simple fact that there is a giant technology gap experienced by those of us who are still quite young (thank you very much) but who have reached a Certain Age. Where Certain Age means that we have eschewed the recent resurgence of leg warmers as fashion items on the grounds that since we wore them when they were in style the first time around, we are mercifully exempt now.

I could totally relate to the post Meg wrote a while back about the invention of emoticons and the memory of having to wait in line for access to the computers in the one lab on her college campus. I left her a goofy comment about my college experiences with a typewriter, and she promptly sent me a kind email with a link to another post of hers about that very thing. She claims we are the same age; however, I think I might be a bit older than she is, since my college computer lab didn't have any lines of people waiting to use the computers since most of them were too intimidated by the machines. Whatever. We're darn close in age, that's for sure.

And then I remembered the post I read on Foolery about mimeograph machines and the danger they pose to lovely long hair. Which of course had immediately made me recall the early days of graduate school, when only the professors were allowed to use the copy machines, and we lowly graduate assistants had to use the mimeograph to make handouts for our students. The "clear" ink turned purple the minute it touched your skin and left days-long stains. It also smelled strong enough to get you high if you stayed in that room for any length of time running dittos.

And then I couldn't stand it any longer. I just have to tell you the story I know about living in a time when the store "Modems Plus" sold something completely unknown and had a name eminently mockable for sounding like it just might deal in feminine hygiene products...

Once upon a time, long not that long ago there was a girl who was given a choice about what to take with her to college: a computer or a typewriter. Naturally, she chose the latter. The former was a little scary, somewhat unknown, and, quite honestly, seemed like overkill.

The typewriter she was given as a graduation present, on the other hand, was magnificent. It had a small LCD display that showed her the line of text she was typing, so that she could edit it, correcting typos, even rearranging words, before she hit "return" and went onto the next line. For ambitious projects, should could tell the machine to save the whole text, and its memory would hold about five pages worth, which she could then read through and revise before printing. Of course, the reading screen held about eight words of text, so it was a little tricky to do sophisticated editing. But this was certainly a giant step up from the white-out and mechanical typewriter days of high school.

As a junior in college, she came to appreciate the joys of the computer lab with its high tech editing options. She could cut and paste whole paragraphs of text!

By the time she went to graduate school, a computer seemed indispensable. So she spent about $1000 of her very own money on a 386 processor* desk top model with a monochrome screen (white letters on a black background). It stored information on 5 1/4" floppy disks ("floppies" for short) that were black and, yes, floppy.

The second year she had it, she got a lot of complaints on her student evaluations (she was a graduate teaching assistant by then) that she was not responsive to email.

Why is so much importance placed on this newfangled thing they call email? she wondered to herself. Why don't they just ask me questions before or after class or in my office hours like any other mere mortal?

And why on earth do they have their knickers in a twist about the fact that I don't respond to it instantly? she added crankily.

Perhaps it was because she had a 1200 baud* modem that she was not a giant fan of the email.

Halfway through her graduate career, she upgraded to a laptop with a color screen. She still had a crummy modem -- but at least it was faster, and she learned to check her email more regularly. And to love all the things that being connected in the digital age could offer her.

This was particularly handy because it enabled her to carry on a steamy cyber affair with a soon-to-be-doctor who was studying for his medical boards in another state. They'd met on a long weekend at a mutual friend's wedding, reconnected mid-summer for another long weekend break in their mutual studying (she was taking her own PhD qualifying exams at the end of that summer), and in the meanwhile sent each other daily letters about everything they were thinking, feeling, flirting, imagining, hoping, and dreaming about their futures, their attraction for each other, and the trees outside their respective study room windows.

It was very romantic.

And full of that tingly tension that comes from longing for something you cannot have because he lives eight states away.

It ended, of course, as all relationships by correspondence are doomed to end -- over the telephone.

At least by then, she'd learned to check her email everyday.

And to write the most romantic letters you'd ever imagined without ever picking up a pen.

She cannot deny that she has never before or since been as good at responding to email immediately as she was during that summer of Internet romance. But she still has a file of his printed-out emails to her, alongside a box full of quaint hand-written letters from a previous, less technologically inclined boyfriend, which she suspects means that all other things being equal, she is a softie for love letters of the variety you can actually touch.

But that's probably just because she was born so long ago, back before Al Gore invented the Internet.

The End.

* If these terms mean nothing to you, it only means that you are not yet old enough to have wrinkles. Don't bother your pretty little head about them. They are simply Stone Age measurements of computer power, the single-celled organisms from which your Pentium III processors eventually sprung, thanks to the miracle of Darwinian evolution, as it were.

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