Dial-up Dinosaur

Our home Internet access is still via AOL dial-up. I've been resisting signing up for cable or DSL for admittedly flimsy reasons:

Each member of the household already has broadband at work or school.

DSL and Cable have the annoying habit of going down at critical moments. The POTS (plain old telephone service) lines never go down.

People leave their broadband-connected computers on all the time and consequently have to worry about hackers, maintaining firewalls, etc. That’s one of the reasons I run our personal finances off a 7-year-old Macintosh (system 9.1). It’s not connected to the Internet and has never been hit by a virus (because no one bothers to write one that will affect it.) I painstakingly load the data manually into Quicken but am comforted by a feeling of security and control.

It will tempt me to spend even more time on the Internet. I already waste too much of my life staring at glowing boxes.

As a dry-run for the inevitable day when we upgrade to broadband, I worked on my sister-in-law’s system when we visited her in Salt Lake City two weeks ago. Comcast had recently installed a cable modem, but something wasn’t quite right, so she couldn’t access the Internet. After fiddling with the modem, I connected a Linksys wireless router to her HP desktop PC and popped a card into the E-machines laptop. Voila! Two machines with broadband access. A visitor turned on his Powerbook G4 with its built-in Airport card, and now we had three machines on-line.

First application? Warcraft III, which the under-25’s played to the wee hours. Rueful observation: games and porn were two principal drivers of technology in the 1970’s and 1980’s (VCRs, cable TV, videogames), and they’re in no danger of being dislodged from that position. [Update - 5/28/04: wargames still have quite a way to go before they simulate reality.]


Warcraft III collaborative battle. I don't think this is what Mrs. Clinton meant by "taking a village".