The concluding chapters of this book were a complete blast from the past. My parents signed up for internet access in 1994 when I was nine. They had signed up with, at some point or another, all three of the major internet service providers mentioned: Prodigy, Compuserve, and America Online. (p. 121) The section which mentioned Windows 95 and WordPerfect, which were some immensely impressive bits of technology in their days, really put me back into a different time.
In the last chapters the technology that was mentioned earlier in the book began to morph into something a bit more recognizable. In the previous chapters, the technology described seemed so primitive that it was difficult to relate it to my laptop, which I am using now, or to the machines that I grew up with. It was fascinating to learn about the evolution of the personal pc; to learn about the growth and sometimes the downfall of the major computer and software companies. The fact that many of these companies, which became popular in the 1990's, existed fifteen to thirty years before the initial internet boom was new to me.
IBM has always been a company of interest to my family. My father grew up in Endicott, New York, birthplace of IBM. It was nearly impossible to drive through the town without being able to see some part of IBM's massive complex. I found it fascinating that IBM was essentially the reason that personal computers caught on with the general public; that IBM was so well trusted, that consumers would essentially buy a product simply because it was manufactured by IBM. (p. 95)
These chapters reminded me of how much technological advancement I have seen in my relatively short lifetime, and how much the internet culture has grown, in spite of the fact that I only weened my parents off of WordPerfect around three years ago, and I am still pleading with them to stop using AOL today.
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