Work in Progress

I was, believe it or not, a fairly early-adopter of working on-line. In my first (pre-journalist) lifetime I was in fact a computer geek.
My first home computer was a lovely Epson QX-10. If I dragged it out of the garage and fired it up today, I know for certain it would work perfectly.
Try that with your old MS-DOS PC or Apple II.
My first laptop was a Tandy 102. It ran on four penlight batteries, and I could send a story to The Star with about four keystrokes from any phone in the world with a dial tone, using the old ear-muffs style modem (you kids have no idea what I'm talking about).
Plus, the thing was so tough that in a pinch you could use it as a jack stand.
The transmission speed was 300 bits per second, but if it took five minutes to transmit a 1,000 word story, that was essentially instantaneous, compared to typing up four double-spaced pages and driving an hour and a half to deliver them to 1 Yonge Street, which is how I did it when I started.
My transmission speed isn't a whole lot better now - I am on rural dial-up, so if I get 40k I do handstands.
And now I'm blogging on-line!
Holy cow.
But it will take some time before I figure all this out.
I am starting to get posts from you readers/viewers, for which I thank you. Keep 'em coming.
I have figured out how to correct some, er, spelling misteaks (yes, that was deliberate) but not yet how to actually respond to your posts. My blogging coach, who is also editor of wheels.ca, will be helping me out as we go along.
As for my transmission speed, rural Milton is supposed to get microwave high-speed Internet next month. I can SEE rural Milton from my home-office window, about two hundred metres away, across the town line boundary. I just hope the signal can leak that far.
You will be among the first to know.

***

Oh yeah - as soon as we can make it happen, we're going to replace the photo of the fat old guy over there with one that actually looks like me.

Comments

[Jon]

Keep up the blogging Jim, despite the slow speeds. I know you've never been a big fan of low speed limits where it wasn't necessary. I remember well the days of 300 baud modems when I would dial the phone # on our rotary phone and then put the data-audio-coupler over the handset and mysteriously connected my Commodore computer to wonderful far-away things which I could read faster than the text arrived. So you aren't the only one from that generation.

Still watching the Motoring 2008 repeats on TSN and checking out your other articles,... Keep up the good work. It seems to be an interesting time to be an auto-journalist.

Hope to see you down this way later this summer at Targa 2008!

Hi Jon:

Thanks for the memories! We had a Commodore 64 too - Frogger!!!

I had the microwave dudes out here the other day and maybe that'll work.

And we will be back with Ol' Red, the 2002 MINI Cooper S JCW for this fall's Targa. This will be that car's fifth annual Targa. With two Unlimited Class wins and one third in the past three years, it's been a great car, and we hope to be back on the podium again, although the competition gets tougher every year.

Targa is still the most fun you can have in a car with your clothes on.

Cheers,

Jim

[Jörg (George) Kranz]

Hi Jim, perhaps you should consider using an ISP that has satellite access and can be used anywhere on the globe even while traveling in a moving vehicle? It is available in the US from Verizon or AT&T.

PS I do remember and still have a 300 baud modem (just a board and some wires) which worked with my Sinclair PC and later Timex/Sinclair.

Have fun with this blog!

Hi Jorg:

I don't think those ISPs are offered in Canada - not yet anyway. If you know differently, let me know!

Sinclair! Wow, that's even better than my Epson!

I had the satellite people out here a year or so ago, and they said their satellite was too low in the sky to be "seen" with all my trees.

The microwave guy says he thinks I'll be good to go that way by the end of June but if not, he'll have HIS satellite people have another look.

One way or another, this 40 kpbs nonsense has got to stop.

Cheers,

Jim