Message from Charles Aulds

My wife and I were married in January 1990, 35 years ago. She confided in me, later, that my mother took her aside and told her, "Please try to get Charles to spend less time on that computer of his ... he spends too much time alone on that thing; it's not healthy."

And it was true. That was several years before there was anything like a publicly-accessible Internet. There was a fairly tight-knit community of technophiles who shared information, mostly through the dial-up bulletin board systems (linked by FidoNet, which I am very surprised to see is still in use in some parts of the world). That's where I learned the techniques that allowed me to make long-distance calls for free, and dial up BBSs in major US cities. Piracy, I guess. Hacking. Phreaking. Whatever, but never with malicious intent. It was a technical challenge, not driven by greed. 

A lot of my time was spent in computer games, too ... before there were any "game consoles", I played Microsoft Flight Simulator (the longest running PC game in history) in real time. I remember once flying from Chicago (Midway International Airport) to New York City in a small Cessna, then flying along the Long Island Sound, landing at Martha's Vineyard to refuel, then taking a little tour of Cape Cod. Took most of a Saturday, and I'd actually plotted the flight on genuine FAA charts I'd ordered. What a geek, huh?

But here's the irony. Now that I am willing to accept my mother's belief that my obsession with computers was totally unhealthy, I look around and see millions of people doing it.

So, that presents a small dilemma for me ... if my obsession with computers was unhealthy for me in 1990, it's an unhealthy obsession for millions more today, right? And if this digital obsession is healthy today, for all those millions, I guess I was a perfectly normal, well-adjusted individual 35 years ago.

So, which is it?

Charles