[speaker001:] why don't you start this time
[speaker002:] okay uh let's see I have a Macintosh 2CI and uh I'm a graduate student in cognitive psychology uh and so I use it basically to run all my statistics and write up my reports and research and all that kind of good stuff and I'd be dead without it
[speaker001:] yeah I'm in the same position I started on a Commodore in nineteen eighty six um and moved up in eighty eight to an IBM system and I'm running on an IBM clone right now under windows which basically is the same thing I think
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and uh I've used it also I do tremendous amounts of word processing I work in radio but I'm required to do a lot of you know journalistic writing and that
[speaker002:] hm um-hum
[speaker001:] uh so I do almost everything now in Word or in some other you know word processing system and uh use it to gather news and information and put it all together for something that's usable so I've had my computer I've I I've found what's happened is that I can't write anymore on paper you know because I type so fast now that any it's distracting to try and write by hand because it takes too long
[speaker002:] exactly exactly and then I like to like go back and re-edit things as soon as I write it and and you know you can't do that very well with uh a piece of paper and a pencil you know cause it takes so much longer to change things around and and move whole chunks and all this that and the other
[speaker001:] oh yeah  and of course you know I also run a bulletin board from here and I'm involved in FidoNet
[speaker002:] hm oh okay
[speaker001:] uh I'm the I'm the net coordinator up here for western and central New York
[speaker002:] oh wow
[speaker001:] uh part of Net 260 here it's got we have eighty nodes in this city alone
[speaker002:] wow
[speaker001:] so we try we try and get everybody together and that way it you know you can exchange mail between them and you don't have to call them
[speaker002:] um-hum right
[speaker001:] and I just got into the we FidoNet's now has a thing where we can get in with the internet so I found out
[speaker002:] uh-huh yeah I've started seeing some uh internet postings from FidoNet and stuff like that
[speaker001:] yeah I it's where I found out about this through Comp DCom Telecom
[speaker002:] yeah yeah
[speaker001:] uh and I submit some messages on there I it's made things so so much easier it's amazing though that in nineteen eighty six we were all doing like three hundred bawd
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and of course you know now that's like ancient history and you think my God it was only like five six years ago
[speaker002:] yep yep
[speaker001:] and then here's what we have now I mean what's in five years from now it's just unimaginable what we're going to be able to do with these things
[speaker002:] yeah yeah well you know if we ever get any sort of uh ISDN running nationally it'll be really incredible
[speaker001:] hm
[speaker002:] if they have the amount of data we can exchange
[speaker001:] well that's good Gore's working on
[speaker002:] right yeah well that and he's talking about expanding the the internet as it stands now upgrading the backbone stuff like that
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] uh so you know it's going to kind of impact everybody everywhere
[speaker001:] well I see the phone companies are working on getting into information services so we're going to have a glut of things everyone I think we're going to see another revolution in
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] computers but I think the reason why it didn't work the first time is that they assumed that everybody would need a computer to do all these things uh when in fact at the time you know back in the early eighties uh and mid eighties you know people didn't the technology wasn't to the point where it was something that could be easily learned for everyone but now we have the things like the Mac and Windows and other things where all you got to do is point at something and push a button
[speaker002:] um-hum oh yeah
[speaker001:] and I think that the technology's catching up to the point where we're going to be able to do things and make it a lot easier to for people to understand how to do these things
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] so I'm hoping that we will see another type of revolution but one that will be a little more friendly to the end user
[speaker002:] yeah yeah um I think what's going to happen is it's going to sneak into the consumer market uh through the television and through the cable industry and telephone industry
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] um I was just reading in the Washington Post this morning they've got an article in the business section uh about how AT&T has just announced that they plan to offer uh cable TV systems with five hundred channels by nineteen ninety four uh you know
[speaker001:] well they're working on that I'm a satellite dish owner and we've been fighting like mad to have these suckers re-regulated you know because of the uh because they've stomped on us
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] and so now what's happening is the phone companies want to get into cable and introduce all these kinds of computer services over fiber optics
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and the cable industry now wants to get into the telephone industry through these personal communication things
[speaker002:] right um-hum
[speaker001:] but I think everyone's working now I I mean I'm seeing this we're going to see a lot more in the way of keyboards with electronic program guides and and everything else and ordering systems they have this thing called TV
[speaker002:] um-hum