Communicating with 23 People Simultaneously!

With all this talk about Elon Musk buying Twitter, tonight seems like as good a time as any to reflect on this undated journal entry of mine. Typed up and taped into my journal sometime in the fall of 1994:

My life has been disrupted, probably permanently, by a little black box.

My wife and I bought the little black box at a Staples Office Supply store one Saturday afternoon. We went into Staples to buy a cork bulletin board. Instead we bought this little black box. Plugged it into our computer and now it seems like half the world is at our fingertips, via America OnLine and the Internet.

Probably in the future, people won’t give much thought to buying a modem, hooking it up to their pc and entering the “information superhighway.” It’ll be like entering the onramp to I-95, the way you do every day. In the future, it won’t boggle people’s minds, it won’t change the way people perceive the world, to suddenly have the capability to communicate simultaneously with 23 people who are spread out all across the country.

But right now, my head is exploding.

It would be silly now, in 2022, to say that I wish we’d bought the bulletin board instead. The little black box was bound to happen.

~217~