Walt Mossberg; I knew nothing about engineering, but I just was fascinated by it. And I bought a little . . . I think it cost me . . . a $100 computer called the Timex Sinclair around 1981. And I began tinkering with it. Learned a little bit of basic programming, and I just did it at home on the weekends and at night as a hobby. And I began to . . . Then I bought a much more expensive computer in around, I wanna say 1983 or so, something like that. I bought an Apple IIe, and that cost me like thousands of dollars for the computer and the disk drives and all that kind of stuff. It didn’t have a hard disk, of course. Eventually I bought a hard disk for it which also was unbelievably expensive. And I think what fascinated me about it was the communications aspects of it, which were very crude in those days; but you could . . . I was very early on what used to be called bulletin boards. You know, like forums that you would . . . you see today on the Web. But they were all text, and they were just local. And then I got on CompuServe. And then I got on AOL. And almost as soon as the Internet became publically available I was on that. So it was my hobby, and that’s how I got into it. And you know eventually I came up with the idea to stop writing about serious, global, national security kind of things which I was doing, and to start a new and different kind of technology column.
Recorded on: 9/13/07
Discuss
Scott Julian on January 16, 2008, 1:32 AM
One of the greatest things about technology is the freshness it provides.
Working in the technology space I find myself always facing a new challenge, or a new opportunity to discover something.
Scott Julian on January 16, 2008, 6:32 AM
One of the greatest things about technology is the freshness it provides.
Working in the technology space I find myself always facing a new challenge, or a new opportunity to discover something.
Tom Orr on January 17, 2008, 11:19 AM
I became interested in technology (electronics) at a very early age and my family still jokes that I could read the color codes on resistors before I could actually read. Experience with building electronic puzzles lead to building heathkits which…eventually lead to interest in computers.
I remember when you not only had to pay by the hour to be on the Internet, you also had to pay to search a database. It is sad that there is so little innovation in the personal computer space. Incremental improvements yes – but no real innovation.
PS – Walt, I'm a D alum.
Tom Orr on January 17, 2008, 4:19 PM
I became interested in technology (electronics) at a very early age and my family still jokes that I could read the color codes on resistors before I could actually read. Experience with building electronic puzzles lead to building heathkits which…eventually lead to interest in computers.
I remember when you not only had to pay by the hour to be on the Internet, you also had to pay to search a database. It is sad that there is so little innovation in the personal computer space. Incremental improvements yes – but no real innovation.
PS – Walt, I’m a D alum.
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