Sunday, January 8, 2012

No one asked me ..if I knew Steve Jobs!

This blog has taken a life of its own, as I suspected it might.  As a writer I want to produce a readable, interesting blog and ultimately one that I can monetize. Even the man of the house, who is not very savvy with social media, was telling me about the impact of  Mommy blogging.  I have decided to make friends with Twitter, and tweet about my blog.

At sixty past you might think I am a neophyte to the electronic medium.  No, I have been involved since its conception.  In the early eighties I was part of a Think Tank whose mandate was "To consider the possibilities and applications of an electronic medium of connectivity". Duh?  We were discussing applications for the Internet before it even had a name.  Our Think Tank was twelve strong, we met in Toronto and I represented rural Canadians.  After the first few sessions we had special speakers and one was an intense man, Jobs was  his name but he pronounced it Jo obs.

The Steve Jobs I met
I do not remember much about his presentation, I only understood half of what he said.  We were a small group so there was mingling. I had no notion of the tycoon he would become. In fact I had forgotten he was one of our guest speakers.  Time went on, our Think Tank met for the best part of a year. We decided that these "computers and programs" would be too expensive and complicated for average Canadians. Best suited to academia and business purposes. And we made our final recommendations.


I moved to Saint John and by the end of the eighties we had a local Internet between public libraries and City of Saint John departments.  My daughter purchased a home computer and obtained dial up Internet.  And we hopped on the electronic highway. 

As I work on my blog I remember that Think Tank;  I wonder where the members were now, and what did I do with my notes? Perhaps I had something signed by Jobs?
I reccount this because I was asked.  Those applications of which the Think Tank dreamed, Video conferencing? Electronic banking? Grocery Shopping from home? All we imagined has been realized and so much more.

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