Advances in Computer Technology & Self-Employmnent

I’m sitting here on my sofa with my feet propped up on pillows (in my pajamas—official blogger attire) watching the NOAA Web site’s display of Hurricane Jeanne sliding to the west past our home on St. Simons Island. As I nonchalantly surf the Internet on my girlfriend’s 3 pound Dell Latitude notebook laying in my lap, attached to a Motorola cable modem, it just occurred to me that 15 years ago this month I bought my first “IBM PC” compatible computer. What a long way we have come since September 1989.

It was a tumultuous time in my life—turning 30 and at the same time abandoning a profitable six years worth of employment with what would turn out be a preeminent company in the industrial air pollution control business. I thought that my wife’s head was going to explode—she was a meat & potatoes, social and economic security type personality and I’m a devil-may-care, balls to the wall type of fool. What led me astray into the great employment unknown in those simplistic, naive, childish years was the opportunity to work for “Myself.” What a bad boss I have turned out to be.

The new computer was a necessity in the infrastructure of this somewhat ill-founded but amazingly ego-enhancing endeavor. I was so excited. After carefully researching and pricing my purchase, I settled on a computer manufactured by the former printer giant, Epson—over three thousand dollars worth of hardware and software. Epson, you may recall, made a zillion dollars producing dot matrix ink-ribbon based printers that were a mainstay of the low end printer industry at the inception of the IBM PC boom which began in 1980/1981.

My new Epson PC was a shiny, full size, steel encased system unit powered by an Intel 80386 processor running at 20 MHZ. It had 512 Kbytes of RAM (the crowd says oooohhh, aahhhh) and was equipped with the coupe de resistance—an 80 megabyte SCSI hard drive with some long forgotten “high speed” data seek rate. I had SCSI when SCSI wasn't cool. I also had a Hayes 2400 Baud (that’s 2.4 Kbytes per second, ya’ll) external modem and a Hercules monochrome graphics card which supported text and vector graphics (straight lines instead of stair step shaped “jaggies”) based AutoCAD drawings. In those days, anything but a $1000 state-of-the-art color graphics card and $2000, 15” color monitor produced images which looked like something an inept 3-year-old child produced with color crayons. Can you say EGA or VGA? My budget dictated monochrome graphics.

What a truly long way we have all come since that wonderful fall day in the years of Ron Regan and my own frivolous youthful aspirations. The old Epson PC was upgraded, re-processored, overhauled, and packed full of aftermarket bells and whistles before it was relegated to the back bedroom of my Atlanta area home. A house fire destroyed it at the ripe old age of 12, along with most of my other possessions in 2001.

As to the self-employment adventure, that has simply turned out to be another name for part time, self-inflicted, un-employment. Anybody need an Architect, Builder, Designer, Engineer, Harmonica player, Lover, Philosopher, Rocket-scientist, Salesman, Singer, Writer--Ernest Hemmingway/Jimmy Buffet wannabe?

Will work for internet access…or just a friendly pat on the head.