Day: May 27, 2024

WDP — Permit Me to Repeat Myself

Fandango13 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?
View all responses

As I said when I responded to the question last year at around this time….

Sorry, WordPress, but I think you’re asking the wrong question. It should be, “Do you remember life before the World Wide Web?” Why? Because very few people had access to “the internet” before April 30, 1993, when the World Wide Web was released into the public domain.

I think it’s time for a little history lesson.

“The internet” started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers back then were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, people had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.

The first workable prototype of the internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network.

But it wasn’t until January 1983 that the internet actual came into being. Prior to that, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to “talk” to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the birth of the internet.

But unless you worked for the Department of Defense or for a university as a researcher, you didn’t yet have access to the internet. It wasn’t publicly available for another ten years until the the launch of the World Wide Web in 1993.

So, let’s agree that the question is really asking is about life before the World Wide Web. But to simplify answering this question, let’s assume the “the internet” means the “World Wide Web” for essentially every one of us. Thus, you have to be over 30 years old now to even have existed before public availability of “the internet.” 

I’m well over 70, so more than half of my life was spent before the internet. My short answer to the question is yes, I do remember life before the internet. It was analog. It was slower. And it was simpler.

Share Your World — 05/27/2024

Fandango8 Comments
Share Your World

Di, at Pensitivity101, is our host for Share Your World each week. Here are her questions for this week.

1. What frustrates you the most about modern day living?

It’s a 24×7, always-on world. Most of us are suffering from information overload, and in many cases it is misinformation or disinformation that we’re seeing and hearing. And with our smartphones and tablets, accessing all of the news feeds streaming on our devices, it is hard to turn it all of. I don’t know about everyone else, but I find it exhausting.

2. What was your favorite decade and why?

The pre-internet days, pre-social media days, when we had to communicate with each other face-to-face or by telephone or by written and mailed letters. Maybe the 70s.

3. What was your ‘best buy’ (for example: house, car, clothes, computer, etc.)

I don’t know. Maybe it was the first house I bought, a fixer-upper, in Riverdale, Maryland. A friend of mine and I bought it for $15,000 in 1970 and sold it for $95,000 two years later. That was a lot of money at the time. The equivalent of about $713,000 in 2024 dollars

4. Do you have any non medicinal allergies?

I am fortunate to have no food allergies and no allergies to airborne things like ragweed or polling. But I am allergic to Trump supporters. They all make me sick.

Coffee Wars

Fandango20 Comments

I like my coffee black with one Splenda packet. My wife likes her coffee with International Delight flavored creamer, either hazelnut or caramel macchiato. For years we’ve been using a Cuisinart grind and brew coffee maker using organic French roast whole bean coffee. And we have both been fine with that. Or so I thought.

Recently my wife has been saying that she likes our son and daughter-in-law’s Nespresso single-cup coffee machines with disposable pods. She likes the “crema” foam top that comes out with every cup. And she also likes the idea of having a milk frother so she can make her own flavored lattes when she wants them.

So, for Mother’s Day, I surprised her with a Nespresso coffee maker. I bought a bunch of pods — regular coffee, espresso, and double espresso size — and a frother where she can make froth from milk. She was pleased.

Mrs. Fandango has embraced the new coffee maker. She likes some of flavored coffee pods (to which she still adds her flavored creamer) and she like the foamy crema top. I think she’s only made espresso one or two times using the frother. But overall, she is happy with the Nespresso.

I am not. I have sampled about a dozen different coffee pods and haven’t yet found one that I like as much as my grind and brew whole bean French roast coffee. I find the Nespresso coffees too strong or too weak or too bitter.

So, after a month of, shall we say discussing what to do. We have reached a solution. Separate but equal! I will go ahead and brew a small pot of my organic French roast coffee in th the Cuisinart grind and brew machine and she will continue to maker her crema-covered coffee from her single-cup Nesspresso pods.

And that kind of compromise, boys and girls, is how to make a marriage work!

FOWC with Fandango — Telephone

Fandango19 Comments
FOWC

Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “telephone.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, ÿplease manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.