I was sort of reluctantly dragged into the computer age. I, like a lot of my fellow baby boomers, clung to our old caveman ways as long as we could. I had broken down and bought a WebTV when they first came out so I could surf the Internet and send email, but I still did all of my writing on an old IBM electric typewriter. Luckily for me there was still a place right up in town that serviced and sold old typewriters so finding ribbons and such wasn't a problem. But then they went out of business and I had to break down and buy a word processor. It had a tiny screen that held a few lines of text and a floppy disc, but that was about it.
The real revelation came at work. The restaurant chain that I was working for decided to put computers in all of the restaurants. They were the old TRS-80's from Radio Shack. A lot of us had never even been that close to a computer before and at the training session we had, one lady asked if they had a “left-handed” mouse that she could use.
The launch of the computer system didn't go smoothly. There were 53 stores and they put the computers in all in the same day. I guess the powers that be just assumed that all you had to do was plug the thing in and get going. They had one programmer to take care of all of them. He also did repairs. To say that he was swamped was an understatement. He had written all of the code himself, so he was the only one who knew what was going on. I guess it was all about job security with him. We had a lot of programs that had errors in them and the email took like an hour to send.
So I wasn't all that enthusiastic when a few years later they were on their second upgrade and they were going to throw the old ones out. I decided what-the-heck, why let a perfectly good computer go to waste? So I took the old Compaq home. It had Windows 95 on it. I called and got dial up service from At&T. I think it cost about $10 a month at that time.
That setup lasted me a few years until a friend of mine gave me a computer that he also had gotten from work. It had a Windows Millennium operating system and he convinced me to switch to a higher speed connection, So I called up and ordered Worldnet, also from AT&T. The difference between the DSL and dial-up was incredible. No longer did I have to wait forever for pages to load. Why had I waited so long?
Then speeds got even faster and like some guy dreaming about zipping down the highway in a Porsche, I began thinking that I could surf the Internet even faster. And there were all those videos to download. I called and tried to order the higher speed, but I couldn't get it with Windows Millennium. So I finally ended up getting a new operating system too.
So I recently succumbed to the five advertisements that I got in the mail every week and ordered AT&T's Elite service. It actually turned out to be a few bucks a month cheaper than my old service. Of course I'm still waiting for it.
It was supposed to ready at 8 pm. a couple of days ago. After several phones calls and a thirty-minute wait, I was told that the order was still being “processed.” I was given a separate number to check the status of my order. It was late and the office was closed until 8 the next morning. I called back and was told that everything was fine. I told them that I was just told that it wasn't, that the order was still pending. After several more transfers and another thirty-minute wait, I was told that there were some “technical issues” and they would let me know when it was working. Meanwhile i get to pay for two Internet services while I wait.
According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, (www.stltoday.com), there is an Internet “speed race” going on between providers in the St. Louis area. Charter Communications, the local cable company, is the last to fire a salvo in the speed war. Its new Ultra60 service promises to quadruple the highest speed of their nearest competitor.
A 5-megabyte file takes your average DSL 26 seconds to download. Charter's standard connection would need 8 seconds. AT&T's U-verse connection would take about 2 seconds. Charter says that its new Ultra60 would require less than a second.
However those extra few seconds don't come cheap. The new service is expected to cost about $139.00 a month compared to the $25-$50 the other services charge. Hmm, a hundred bucks for a few seconds? I think I'll just keep waiting for my service to be installed. After all, I'm a patient man.
Louis Fitzgerald