I’ve lost another old, online friend from GEnie.
People today don’t remember the days before the Internet, when we all paid $4.95 or $9.95 a month, plus hourly charges of $3 to $15, to argue about TV shows, movies, books and of course politics. We dialed-in after work on modems that screamed along at 2400 baud and we were nothing less than changing the world.
I’ve written of Cheryl a time or two. She of Canada, who took over my RealTime Conference—a chat room, today—and built and trained a staff of helper-outers to get people quickly up to speed on how GEnie, the General Electric Network for Information Exchange, worked.
We had a regular crew of SysOps, too. Systems Operators for other RoundTables (forums) on the network. The folks from the Apple II RoundTable popped by, the folks from the Travel RT were popular visitors, the Investment RT folks and so on. Claire Wudowsky ran the Law RoundTable. Lawyers, law students and people interested in this or that case would pop in to discuss in very broad terms how the legal system worked. I just heard last night that Claire had died. She joins a long list of SysOps and helpers and dozens of people I never got a chance to actually even meet. Two of our helpers met in the chat and started talking and… long story short, they got married. She wanted me to give her away at the ceremony and I was proud to—driving all of the way to the bottom of the pointy end of Texas to do just that. He’s dead now. Another of our helpers is gone. The guy who ran the Macintosh RT. The list is long, and growing.
My grandfather once told me I’d know when I was old when I knew more dead friends than living, and knew more closed restaurants than places you could actually go to eat. I’ve long past that number.
Take care of yourselves, folks.
