dos days were better 18 of september, 1998 by johnmichael patrick monty monteith

It has been a while since I have written a column, so I decided to try something original for this one. Well, original for me, at least. I pulled out of the basement an old Tandy 2800HD notebook computer that I think I purchased at the turn of the century (that would be the year 1900 for those that read this column in 2001 and miss the joke.) I think I paid somewhere around a million dollars for this thing. Truthfully, I believe it was a $2000 computer back in the early eighties. It has an old blue and white LCD screen 286 with a 15 meg hard drive, 640K RAM and plenty of ports for upgrades that have never been used. I even noticed a math co-processor slot anxiously awaiting an upgrade. What do you suppose the chances are of me finding one of those? The battery in this bad boy died years ago, so it is now limited to plug and play only (that is 'plug into the wall' and play. Considerably more reliable than today’s version of plug an play.) However, the power cord option is not really a loss since the sucker weighs over twenty pounds anyway. Hardly today's definition of portable.

Well, I pulled it out of the basement and plugged it in, and sure enough it works great. Well, as great as it ever did. I remembered a day and age when I would write plays and other creative projects on this beast. Never the less, I still was unable to find the word processor I used on the hard drive. At some point when I moved to my blindingly fast 386SX 25, I must have wiped the hard drive clean.

So, off I went to the Pentium system in the other room, and on my first Excite search (this has never happened for me before, I might add) I was able to find exactly what I wanted. A shareware word processor called QEdit. Downloaded, unzipped, and installed on my Tandy in less than a couple minutes (far less time than anything I have installed recently, and that includes downloading, copying to floppy, and copying to the old system.)

I spent a few minutes playing around with QEdit last night, getting the hang of the old DOS word processing days. I was quite surprised that, short of not having a mouse, it was surprisingly similar to the majority of my experiences in modern day word processors. Except this one was far quicker. No waiting for graphic re-draws, windows to pop up, and the endless search for the right font.

I realize this is a long winded story, but I actually will reach a point. At least I hope so. After all, I am typing on an old DOS word processor. Perhaps it will stunt my creative content? You be the judge.

Have you ever heard someone talk about the days before television? About how families would spend hours talking to each other, or reading a newspaper, or gathering around the radio to listen to their favorite programs. I have heard stories about how much better things were back then, and how much better people communicated and learned. Essentially, the message was that the content of people's lives and communications were more enriched with the old methods than the new.

An older friend explained that it was not so much that the products were better. Certainly the technology behind a radio is not as good as the technology behind today's hi-fi stereo big screen televisions. Newspapers surely can not compare to the technology used in even an old vacuum tube radio. But as you go back in technology, the better things seem. Partly based on nostalgia, certainly. But, as he explained, in many ways it really was better.

As technology has progressed we have moved from being an active part of learning and discussion, to being passive recipients of information. Today's passive material is no where near the content rich information of the past.

In my teenage years I would have blown off the comments as those by a senile old man. Obviously as technology has progressed we have become the recipients of more information than ever existed in the past. So, how could the content have been better back in the dinosaur years?

Then last night I was sitting around mindlessly watching Larry King talk to somebody or other about the only thing anybody talks about anymore (the Starr Report, of course.) I thought about how I must have been one of the first to read parts of the report on the Internet while was at work (on a break, of course.) It occurred to me that this report was probably the biggest thing to ever happen to the Internet since the invention of the web browser, and actually legitimizes the web as yet another major source of news.

Then, I realized, the biggest thing to ever happen to the Internet could have been read on my old Tandy 2800HD. In fact, back in the early days when I first connected to the Internet, using Delphi or one of the countless Internet gateways out there, everything on the Internet was text based. I would spend the hours telnet'ing and gopher'ing and FTP'ing and PING'ing every address I could find. And it took nothing more than this old DOS based 640K junker to do it. You did not need an 8 megabyte video card to cruise the library. No need to free up 200 megs of hard drive space for Internet Explorer 4 so you can surf to the latest news. Any old CGA, monochrome, Pepsi stained, five and one quarter inch floppy based PC will do just fine, thank you.

Perhaps there are still a few hold outs in Internet land that use a text based system to download juicy tidbits like the Starr Report. But I doubt it. The Internet today is pretty much an ‘8 meg 3D graphics card only’ club.

As I ponder why Larry King just completely missed the point of that caller’s question, I am reminded that a transition happened on the Internet that paralleled when television entered every American household. We went from reading Internet material, to looking at Internet material. We transitioned from print to pictures. Much like newspaper to the good old boob tube.

Has the Internet improved since the days of Delphi? Certainly it has. The pretty pictures make browsing the web considerably more enjoyable. (And, although pornography publishers reaped some great rewards with the transition to graphics based web pages, one could easily make a case that the Starr Report is more offensive than any 'X' rated site on the net.)

Still, the best of today's content, including the Starr Report, can be enjoyed on yesterday's technology just as easily. Reading it in the newspaper would probably even be easier than reading it on the web browser. Of course, you could not search the document for kinky terminology, but usually the press highlights those for you in the paper anyway.

Which brings me back to this Tandy tank. Even though the technology is older, I would say the content on this little computer is probably better. Although this article is not the best I have ever written, that is no fault of the computer. But, while writing, I have not been bothered with moving a mouse here and there, or changing fonts and styles, or accidentally clicking on this or that. To write good content, it does not take today's technology. Yesterday's works just fine, if not a little better. And, I would be willing to bet that this fifteen meg hard drive could hold as many QEdit documents as Microsoft Word documents on my 9 gigabyte Pentium system, thanks to bloated Microsoft programming. Yes, this is progress boys and girls.

Once again, I am reminded of something. I am reminded that I said I had a point to this. Perhaps, like our President, I lied. I probably did not have a point to this article. Except to say, I think all the old men with their "yesterday was better" talk might just have a point. The Internet was better in some ways. Computers were better in some ways. The way people communicated was better in some ways, too. Those old folks are right. Things were better back then.

Still, you will not see me giving up my 8 meg 3D video card any day soon. Now, you will have to pardon me. Doctor Laura is being interviewed on Larry King in a few minutes, and I would hate to miss my evening dose of passive entertainment.