eWorld

How the world has changed

The internet was down at our house today.

All day.

Our Granddaughter came over, early this morning, snagged her iPad, and declared that the world had ended.

Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash

We, and her mother, do what I thought was a pretty solid job moderating her use of the internet. We try to limit her time in the online world, and keep her interested in lots of real life things. But, even so, she really did seem to react as if it was a disaster.

She has lived her entire life in this house, and her mother’s house just down the street, and we do have really reliable utilities here, so I think this is the first time she’s ever experienced an internet outage here. Perhaps it was just shock that such a thing could happen.

But, as she decided that her world had come to an end, Melinda and I had coffee on the front porch and made a plan to get her out of the house. Just to remind her that there is life offline as well as online. We took her to the historic St. Francis Xavier Mission in SW Washington, started in 1831 by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

It was a good outing, and took the kid’s mind off the disaster at hand.

But, as I went through my day, I realized just how reliant I’ve become on it. And in such a short period of time.

I was always an Apple guy, even in the disastrous years of the Steve Jobs exile.

I had a computer, and did computer things with it, but wasn’t online in the early 1990’s. A friend though was always pushing me to get online. Finally he convinced me that to not be online was to be left behind.

So, I signed up for Apple’s online service, eWorld. And I’ve got to say, it was the coolest thing ever! Awesome graphics, all the knowledge of the world right there at one’s fingertips, I was hooked!

eWorld only existed between mid 1994 and mid 1996, so my use of the internet would have begun in that short span of time.

After the glorious eWorld shut down I wandered over the AOL, along with everyone else.

I’ll say that I really disliked AOL. It was clunky and ugly, just like everything not Apple at the time.

But it worked, and it got me from there to here…

And here, holy smokes it’s a different world from 1996!

I had some work to do at my real job today. But, I couldn’t do it, because it is all online. I needed to write this post today, and I had a funny one in mind for over at my other Substack, CMBailey. I couldn’t write the funny one over there, and this one is coming to you via my cell phone. How clunky and slow is that?

Not to mention, the TV! We are without TV, so no World Cup (would we watch that anyway?) and a couple of years ago we moved the old DVD player down into the basement where I presume it will remain until I’m dead.

The biggest change is, I imagine, work.

In 1996 I couldn’t imagine how the internet could possibly help me in my work. Work was a place I went to do work stuff. Now it is impossible for me to work without the internet and virtually all of my work is done inside my home.

30 years. So much change in so short a span of time.

Yet in an hour or so, I’ll run down to Lodge. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries.

There’s comfort in that, I think.