14 WDL (Working Days Left) Last Lecture

Bend Bulletin, 9/3/1995

I started my last lecture tonight thinking about cake.  A rich, dense fruitcake I bought from somewhere in Texas in 1991 through AOL.  No pictures appeared on the screen showing how delicious the cake was.  Just lines of text.  Perhaps I'd heard about the cake on NPR.  Or perhaps I was just scrolling through the descriptions of online retailers provided by the folks who liked to tell me, "You've Got Mail."  I don't really remember and goodness knows there are no photographs of the younger me sitting in front of the computer screen at 10:15 p.m. after a night of grading papers, thinking about how wonderful it would be to have some cake. 

I don't think I was still using the ancient ITT with its yellow lettered screen.  I'm sure its brain wasn't big enough to access even what passed for the web back in those days.  I believe I had bitten into my first Apple by that time. 

I was thinking about old tech times because my very last lecture as a college professor was about "Virtual Groups," a lecture based on Chapter Eleven of the wonderful but horribly overpriced textbook I've been using since its first or second iteration in the early 90s:  In Mixed Company by J. Dan Rothwell..  Not steadily.  I have done due diligence to try and find a cheaper book that was just as well written and documented, but to no avail.  Rothwell tells good stories, covers the material thoroughly and has a well constructed text that works for the ten-week quarter. 
He works at Cabrillo Community College and is a nice guy.  This year at WSCA he got the "master teacher" award. Still, his book, now in its 8th edition, is $135 at Amazon ($77 Kindle).  But I've always had one or two copies on reserve in the library for those who can't pay the extortionate price.

But I digress.   At the top of this column I pasted a scan from an article I found in the "top drawer" of my rapidly emptying office file cabinet.  Written by Barney Lerten (now at KTVZ), the article was entitled "Local computer users discuss future of online services."  In it, I call myself a "geek" and say one wise thing about the internet:  "It has the power to connect people who might otherwise be isolated . . . For example, the Southern Baptist in the middle of a Catholic city, or the homosexual in Rigby, Idaho, may want to connect with people they find more accepting."

This comment (combined with my early shopping history) shows that I was well ahead of Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel.  Rothwell opens his chapter on Virtual groups with a story about the Today Show pair who, during a break in 1994, talked about the internet beginning with Gumbel's question, "What is the Internet, anyway?"