communications

When I was born, back in the dark ages, there were2 or 3 methods most people used. One was send a letter. If you dropped by on the spur of the moment, you sent your card via a servant, & you were graceously invited in. (How do I knoe, we didn't have a servant, but I read a lot). If you lived in a small town, or had wealth, you could notify the local paper of your tea, or party - what you served & who you invited. If you were new to a small time (as we were once) you got to know who were the 'in' people were.

My parents always knew when a certain couple would drop in unannounced, as they always seemed to do so after she had made liver & onions for dinner. The Mr. of the couple hated the aroma of liver & onions, so they always seemed to come by on that day. Of course whenever the house was unusally messy, you had someone stop by. It was inevitable. (With 6 kids when was the house not messy?)

Then during WW2 airmail bacame popular. If you wanted your GI overseas to get mail it went by air. They invented the extremely thin tissue paper & envelopes to use because it didn't have much weight to it. Then they began to sensor the GI's mail so the enemy wouldn't get ahold of any secrets. (Try writing about your girlfriend named Virginia, or Marilyn or abbreviations of such names, & see how fast they can be blacked out. You could be talking about a place or a ship or a sub etc, so it got deleted.

If you had the money you had a phone. Of course it was connected to a land line so you had to be home to get your call. When I was real little & a crisis came about, a newsboy walked up & down the streets calling--'extra - extra - read all about it' Then you bought a paper to find out all about it. (Not everyone had a radiio or turned it on)

Now you don't even have to leave your home to communicate with others. You still write, but you send an e-mail which is almost instantanious. You don't have to stay home to get your phone calls,they can follow you wherever you go. You can get so dependent on your comunication system that when it goes haywire, you are paralized.

That happened here when our internet server changed. We knew it was coming because they told us so. But they assume if you use the internet, you are internet savvy, which I'm not. I went thru the procedures as requested & finally got a notice that I was in & Ok & just print out the 'receipt', which I did. Well, guess what, it still didn't work. So my in-house computer guru checked it out & said something like 'you have to indicate which one is the main server'. I don't recall being asked that question before. It's all greek to me, so maybe I should go back to sending letters & staying home to answer my phone. Life seemed much simpler then.