While sipping my coffee and mostly procrastinating about the packing up chores that I must work on today I remembered my first purchase of an item online. Strange that enough time has passed that not being able to buy something online while sipping your coffee is unheard of to many people. With the likes of eBay, Amazon, and Google, many likely cannot fathom the concept of this not being available. People buy and sell through these venues on a scale unimaginable not that long ago. We do this with such regularity today that it seems as if it is nothing remarkable at all. How many of you can remember the very first thing you ever bought online?….what was it?….when did you buy it?
For me, the VERY first thing I ever purchased online was a Kraft Joystick Control for my home computer so that I could run my flight simulator program. This was in 1984. Yes, that’s right. 1984. Purchased online. In 1984.
In those days, I had a homebuilt Apple II computer. Not homebuilt like people do now (“I bought all the parts and plugged them in together.”)…..but actually homemade from a bare board, chips, capacitors, resistors, wire, and LOTS of careful soldering.
“Going online” was much different then too…..the DARPA inspired internet concept existed, but a public internet that anyone could go on was not available as it is now. What was commonplace were so-called “bulletin board systems” …the BBS was often an electronic equivalent of the cork-board with notes and ads stuck on it that you often still see at the grocery store. You connected your modem to the phone line in your home–often by placing the telephone handset into a cradle that had a microphone and speaker to acoustically couple the modem to the telephone network….then dialed the number of the BBS you wanted to connect to…….wait……listen to the variety of bleeps and hisses as the computer on the other end performed its handshake with yours….wait some more…..and “Presto!” Connected. As if by magic. …and at a blistering 300 baud speed if you were lucky. Once connected you could read the various postings, news, or chat with others on the system. In this regard, it would be rather familiar to kids of today. Just much slower and requiring much more manual input and understanding to make it work. If you wanted to go to another site, for example, you disconnected, hung up the line….and dialed another phone number. Those of us who were into this sort of thing often had a long list of such phone numbers–pounded out on reams of punched fed paper through a horrifically loud dot-matrix printer that seemed to beat the copy into the page with the ferocity of thousand buzzing hornets….Hmmm…how many people who had to be around these printers day in and day out have permanent hearing loss now?–the whole setup was captured with great realism in the 1983 movie, “War Games”, with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. If you want a fun movie with a good look at what a typical nerdy-kid’s computer cluttered room looked like at the time, I’d recommend it.
In 1984, a few were just starting to take the concept a little further. One such bulletin board was hosted by a place called Paige Computer Consultants in Houston, TX. They were a computer store and had some of their offerings listed on their bulletin board. Perhaps they were not the first, but certainly by definition they were an early online retailer. On their board you could select an item (in my case, a joystick) and place an order for it. Since I lived nearby, shipping was not needed–and besides, I was a kid who had no credit card and in those days no one in their right mind would have sent their credit card information over a computer connection anyway. Not in 1984. So…after placing the order, we drove over to the shop to pick it up. This shop was in the garage of someone’s house. And that bulletin board they hosted?…..it was a rather large array of computers, very bulky storage, and cabling everywhere that completely filled a room. After the visit, we went home and I proceeded to hook up my newest computer accessory, adding one more cable into my cluttered nerdy room…….and at the time, completely oblivious to the significance of the process by which I had obtained it.
So what?…..well…today, those who find 3-d printing to be of interest may be equally oblivious to the likely significance of what they are doing at home….for one day it may be commonplace to order something and have it be created and spit out of the box in the living room in a fashion not much different than one of Gene Roddenberry’s replicators from the Star Trek shows.