Computers

Way back in the early 1970s while I was working at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley somebody at the nearby Lawrence Hall of Science got a brilliant idea. Maybe deaf people could communicate with each other at a distance by sending computer signals as if they were telegrams.

They ran some phone lines over the hill to our campus and connected them to several teletypewriters or TTYs. Those devices were about five feet square and two feet deep and had keyboards.

It worked! They could actually access material on the computer at their lab.

Computers were scary, but we were required to attend training and learn to use that technology before it became available for the students.

I sat in front of the contraption and tried a program called "Dorothea" after a famous psychologist named Dorothea Dix. The program was supposed to help students cope with emotional problems by encouraging them to share their feelings.

I'd had college classes in psychology and knew the non-directive phrases like "How do you feel about that?" so I typed some of them in as responses to prompts and within a few minutes the computer had become confused and was sending me gibberish.

Whew! A computer wasn't smart enough to do those scary sci-fi things we'd heard about after all.

Of course today computers can do things we could only have imagined back then and they're part of our every day lives. I'm proud to have been involved in one of the very first internet communications.

Connecting

For several days last week I had no telephone or internet connection. That was frustrating and I felt extremely relieved when both were finally fixed. That experience made me appreciate our modern communication systems and think of what life must have been like for our ancestors.

Generations ago if someone travelled from Europe or Asia to America or across the continent if their families ever heard from them at all it would have taken months for handwritten letters to arrive and more months for the replies to be returned.

Since many people couldn't read and write they would have had to get someone else to do that for them and might have had to pay for the service. The postage alone would have cost a lot if available, and often the letters would have been carried by someone who happened to be traveling in the right direction and might not ever arrive.

Pony Express and the transcontinental railroad made contact much easier, but it was still often a matter of weeks or months. The telegraph was fast, but only went from station to station and was also expensive.

Even in the 1940s it normally took two weeks for letters to be carried across the United Stated, though a stamp only cost three cents. Air mail was faster, but cost twice as much. Telephones had been invented, but not everyone had them and long distance rates were expensive.

Although computer and internet problems can drive us crazy, we're lucky to be able to communicate quickly with people in most parts of the world and I'm thankful my internet service is working again.