Reflections of a ModemJunkie by Leonard Grossman "Think about the future," the editor said. But nothing came to mind. Then I thought about the immortal words of Maynard G. Krebs, who, when asked to write an essay entitled "Whither are We Drifting?" as a high school assignment, responded, "I don't know." (Krebs was a "beatnik" character on the 50's t.v. show, "Dobie Gillis." If you were born on the cusp of the baby boom you will remember.) Krebs got an "A." Even though Congress has granted me excessive time to think about this and other weighty matters, I don't know either. Whether we are talking about the online world or computers in general, this is a period of flux. Patterns and trends are hazy. For more than 20 years I have attended the same New Years Eve, party. For the last half dozen, I have swapped computer stories all night. It was after midnight when I realized the subject hadn't even come up. Finally about 1:00 a.m. one of my once a year friends asked, as he always does: "What new toys did you get this year." I realized there was nothing exciting. Oh yes, during 1995 I did add a few meg of RAM to the pawn shop special and I convinced NEC to replace my single speed CD ROM with an upgrade, but other than that nothing much. (I'm not counting that tape backup I so desperately had to have and which stares at me from its bay inducing guilt but not prompting me to take action). But even if I had made a major upgrade, would it be that exciting. Yes, things would be faster...and I have recently begun to d/l shareware which snootily informs we that it requires a 486 when I try to install it. But there is nothing I need to do that I can't do right now. In the face of the federal shut down, and the payless furloughs expected when we do get back to work, I can't really justify any major expenditures at the moment. At a meeting of NICOL (The Northern Illinois Computer Owners League, the first week of January, about 25 to 30% of the members were using Windows 95. More anticipated moving over in the near future but a few, like me, had already deleted it from their systems. The trend seems to be reluctant acceptance of Win95, not enthusiasm. We did watch a demo of Word Pro from Lotus run under WIN95 on a blistering IBM ThinkPad, and projected overhead. Even on this P150 or whatever it was with 20 meg of RAM, things seemed slow to me. (But then I quite happily compose on Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS. If I need to do something fancy I import the file in WPWIN and slog on from there. Most of what I write, aside from legal documents when the government is open, gets transported to editors, each of whom publishes in a different format. Nothing beats ASCII for this purpose. That way everyone can use my stuff and I don't have to remember the preferred format of each publisher. Why compose in Windows fonts if I am going to save it in ASCII in the end?) The demonstrator did point out that the default is now to single space rather than double space after a period. "Sez Who?", we wanted to know. There was no answer. One mavin suggested that the difference was because Word Processing with proportional spacing is more like print than type, but who knows. Word Pro does offer some exciting features, but Lotus (IBM) seems to be risking the same fate that hit Word Perfect. The new app makes significant changes in the interface. Whether Ami Pro fans will find it worth while to learn a new app, and if so whether the one they choose will be Word Pro, is an open question. The most fascinating thing about the demo was the opening WIN95 screen. After complimenting the demonstrator on his fancy wallpaper, a sharp eyed member of the group noticed one shortcut icon not far above the START button. All it contained was the letters "MG." Sure enough, this tried and true Lotus demonstrator, with all the latest file management tools at his disposal, could not bear to get along without that great Lotus orphan, Magellan, only a single click away. Be still my beating heart...maybe there is hope yet. At the same NICOL meeting a show of hands was asked with regard to CPUs. A large percentage of the group were on Pentiums and 486s. Virtually all of the Pentiums were running at least 16 meg of RAM. None of the 486s ran less than 8 meg of RAM. Only a few retrogrades like me were still running 386 machines. No one admitted using 286s any more, at least as primary machines. (Even my government office replaced 30 286 and 386/16 machines with P90s just before they locked us out. They were 486s upgraded to P90, but that's another story. One lawyer complained that he was one of only two in the office upgraded to only a 486. I noted that when we laplinked his data to the new machine there was nothing there--not a single document created by him. "Does it make a difference whether you don't use a 486 or don't use Pentium," I asked. He seemed to think so.) So, clearly, the trend to faster and faster and more and more RAM. Not much new in that. Even Netscape can't escape the syndrome. As it continues to work out the bugs in its 32 bit and 16 bit Netscape 2.x betas, it has left behind it's simpler 1.2 version, which while no longer a beta, and preferred by many users, still had some flaws. Following Microsoft's bigger is better, all or nothing approach, the software has gotten fat-- and as the corporate management uses the funds generated by the amazing response to its public offering to purchase other companies, I just hope it hasn't forgotten it's original vision and just what made it so popular. Bill Gates has Netscape in his sights-- the next year will be interesting. Not everyone is arguing that bigger and faster is better. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune recently featured stories hyping the $500 terminal connected to the Internet- happily downloading applets but keeping its operating software on servers somewhere out there and storing users files out there as well. OTOH PC Week included a box on its cover page, week after week, in which it insisted that the concept of the $500 machine is dead. In my view we had the $500 machines and abandoned them because we wanted more. And we won't be going back. Even if the software and transmission problems could be solved, there is a greater obstacle to the dumb terminal approach. The recent experience of Compuserve users as a result of German censorship and AOL's embarrassing "breast" incident, combined with the proposed telecommunications bill's prohibitions on "indecency" raise significant issues of personal privacy. Quite simply, I don't want my thoughts stored "out there." Even more important, I don't want my computer habits to be so easily discovered by others. My addiction is my own business. Last summer I said this was the Golden Age of the Internet. As censorship and commercial interests change the way we use it, it will never be the same. The online culture has changed drastically in the past year. Now, the Newbies are the Net. What will the future bring? Why are you asking me? Heck, I predicted Congress would never shut down the government. Happy New Year Comments to grossman@mcs.com or leonard.grossman@syslink.mcs.com Copyright 1996 Leonard Grossman