Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Keeping Up With Technology
by Kathleen Rutledge
I am an “early adopter.” I love new techie toys. When I started the company I wanted a really good PC for my infant company so I ordered the new Pentium with 512 MB of memory for a whopping $4,000. I remember the delivery truck off loading the box covered in the signature cow hide patterns. Reverently, I opened the box and allowed the fragile contents to equilibrate to room temperature before plugging it in. My single full time employee, Bernie, was set up with my older home machine. We didn’t have networking yet, so we spent our days swapping floppies with each other.
The fax machine ruled. The phone line would ring the distinctive fax ring and the excitement was palpable as we waited as the document, oh so slowly, printed. Between the fax machine and overnight mail delivery, we were on the "cutting edge."
Of course, as an early adopter, I was eager to get on the internet. Remember dial up access at 2400 baud? And how thrilling it was when we could got 9600 access? I still have my 1994 monthly updates from Steve Case enthusiastically telling us the AOL online community had passed the one million member mark.
It’s amazing how the internet has changed our day to day routines. The fax machine occasionally surprises me with a muffled ring and churns out a document. In fact I had to move the fax to a more central part of the building as we would find days’ old documents sitting n the tray. Now, instead, we have real time streaming video in our panel testing area, video calls, ultra fast internet, social networking and so much more.
