Holiday Conversations

This is a 1200 byte modem - about 10 times
as fast as my first one (which I still have)

Years back, a generation or so, (well before the Internet by the way), our access to information was limited to the public library and images of far away places was either gathered first hand on a disposable camera, from Aunt Edna's trip to Greece or a fortuitous National Geographic.

A phone call to Moscow had to be booked hours in advance and one sat up all night waiting for the operator to call and say the the connection was being made. Calling India was virtually out of the question. Can you imagine?

There was telex communication. It worked by sending a message over the phone line where it was retransmitted almost like a telegraph or short wave by TWX, and received on the far end and routed by a phone connection to what passed for the Internet to your machine or computer. Everything was dial up and you connected by the minute, usually at $1 or 2 per.

Ukraine Hotel in Moscow, not
far from the people I was telexing with.

I had a Hayes 150 modem connected to an Epson computer with NO memory ($3,950 state of the art) and away I would travel. My nightly destination was Moscow and to overlap communication time frames, it was midnight to 5am to get anything done.

My first trip there was in about 1980 (that's 40 years ago....40!) and I stayed at the Ukraine Hotel. I had no idea what to expect other than Red Square looked like it did in the films.  Now I'm talking daily it seems with some new friends from India.  We have found a convenient time (7am) for a call that I take on a cell phone. The connection is as clear as day. I would recognize them if I ran into them at the grocery. I can their voices and know who it is after one word.

I know who I'm talking to because of Linkedin and Facebook "friends" and I know who their friends are, what they are interested in, and pretty much the whole shebang so it isn't a string of alpha-numerics crawling out on a screen at a few bytes a second. They might as well be next door.

My India friends work in the tall towers up on the right

I bring this up because of the realization of what I take for a communication miracle in my lifetime and science fiction a generation ago.

An absolute miracle.

Before you buy a kid a cellphone 6G type, they need to go through "ancient" communications.

They will appreciate it much more.

Trust me.