Historical May 1995 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
I don’t wear floral shorts and floppy sandals, you’ll never see me with white sun-block on my nose, the doors on my car aren’t made of wood, and I don’t know how to swim.
But hey, man, I’M A SURFER. Yep, the net has me.
I surf daily. Heck, I surf several times each day. No, I don’t get on a board and put my overly-buoyant body in the water. Instead, man, I surf the Internet. More properly, I fire up my computer, light up a good cigar, and sign on to AOL — that’s America On-Line for you Luddites. Once there, my keyboard and I are on the fast track to Nirvana. Even bearing in mind that I have a somewhat compulsive, addictive, Type A personality, I find the net remarkably alluring. You’d have to make me wear mittens, the equivalent of shackling me to the mast of my ship like Ulysses’ sailors, to keep me from logging on three, four, five, or six times each day. Ironic, the one thing I didn’t have enough of is time, and now I have another addictive avocation. (Knowing me as I did, this is why I never let myself get near Nintendo or other electronic games.
It didn’t dawn on me that this same thing would happen with the net until it was too late. 1 was mainlining before I knew I was hooked!) The net has lots of attractive aspects.
I can peruse many of the holdings of the Smithsonian Museums without ever leaving my chair. Sure, I don’t get to enjoy the hassle of standing in line or the cost of flying to D.C., and I don’t get to see all of the museum’s offerings, but it beats anything else I can do from my easy chair. Hang your antenna, Channel Nine! Practically any topic or issue that might grab me is there for the asking.
All I need do is type in a KEYWORD and the screen offers a myriad of pathways related to the subject matter.
There are more windows and files than I could ever hope to read. Here’s just a flavor of the hundreds of AOL offerings: finances, auto racing, debate forum, sports, travel tips, chess, gardening, legal questions, movies, national public radio, politics, cooking, science fiction, books, art galleries, Mantic magazine and New York Times features, trivia club, Ask The. Doctor, and the Disney Channel.
Each of these offerings has anywhere from one to twenty separate forums of information and dialogue. And every forum has as many as fifty folders of questions and topics, each with dozens of hundreds of individual responses and conversations!
All of these offerings make the net like a supermarket of interests, every shell offering an opportunity to browse or a chance to investigate. And there’s no fine for overdue books. (Oh yeah, you do have to pay while you’re using the service.
But hey, easy come, easy go!) The best thing the net offers, the most primo of all, is E-MAIL! No, not Eureka-mail, but Electronic-mail. E-mail means that I can zap messages to anyone, anywhere who is also on the net.
It doesn’t matter whether they’re on AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, or some direct intemet link (like at Washington University or Jenny Craig).
I can boot-up, sign-on, send, and receive messages. It’s cheaper than spending 32 cents for a stamp, plus an envelope, plus a piece of paper. It’s much more reliable, which isn’t saying much. (I’m forever getting surface-mail addressed to folks who live at my same number on Waterman, McPherson, Westminster, Washington, and Hiram Lane!) And when it comes to speed, email is virtually instantaneous; whereas surface-mail, snail-mail give new meaning to the word patience. And I’m into mail. You see, since I was a kid, opening the mail has always been one of my favorite things to do. Even today, on Saturdays I go to the front door six, eight, ten times a day to see if the mail is here.
When it arrives, I eagerly cany in the pile; I can’t wait!
Most of it is junk mail, of course, but that’s OK.
I even enjoy the myriad of solicitations that I get because they’re mail. And it’s the same at work. However busy I am, I’m not too busy to stop what I’m doing and go through the mail.
On those real crazy days at work (which happens more than I like to think about), I bring the mail home, unopened, so I can go through it while listening to the 10 p.m. news.
With this compulsion, you can see why I’m so into e-mail. Heck, I get to “check the mail” — to sign on and see if there’s a message beckoning me — half a dozen times a day!
I often do this in the morning while I’m having my first cup of coffee before I leave for work, once I arrive in the office, several times during the day, at home after dinner, and then again before I go to bed. By now you may be asking a very logical question, “Hawkeye, who are all these people you’re writing to?’ That’s a more polite way of saying what you’re really thinking: ‘We know you quite well, Hawkeye, and have read your column for years. There’s no way that you have this many friends!” Good points, dear reader, but that’s another beauty of e-mail. You get to meet all kinds of people, people from around the world, who share your interests. You post your message, whenever, in the other person’s Email box, and they, whenever, read it.
The best analogy is posting messages on a bulletin board (but e-mail messages can only be read by a designated recipient).
After they’ve read the message, then they post a response on the board which I read whenever.
My list of regular correspondents covers the world.
I often zap with friends in Vermont, British Columbia, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Japan.
Then there’s a host of friends from 63130 on in. And these are just the people I knew before I started surfing.
In addition to these old time friends, courtesy of the net, I now regularly zap with people in Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Guam, and Texas.
My keywords get me into discussions with professional colleagues whom I’ve never met. And best, I don’t even have to get out of my L. L. Bean nightshirt to chat.
I could go on and on.
As you can see, I think this is all pretty groovy!
But I want to stop so I can get on-line and see if there are any e-mail messages for me.
If you’re into and up to it, zap me at TRHoerr@AOL.COM. I’m looking forward to surfing with you!
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, May 1995.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1995_05.pdf, printed page(s) 8, 7; PDF page(s) 7, 6.
