[arachne] OT
- From: "L.D. Best" <l.d.best@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arachne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 21:30:00 -0500
Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!
I'm sitting here in my front room office, in SW Ohio, watching a moving
panorama of the surface of Mars ... the *real* surface of Mars, not some
Science Fiction show.
When I was born, RADAR (in caps, because it was still an acronym) was
high tech.
When I entered college for the first time, a computer was the size of
four football fields, and was hardwired for each specific task.
Less than 25 years later, after graduating from (my 3rd) college,
working and setting up a business of my own, TI had the only 16-bit
processor and a DOS computer with 256K, monochrome green monitor, and
two 320K floppy drives (no hard drive), plus an 8-pin Epson printer,
bookkeeping software (written in BASIC, *not* compiled), and simple word
processor, set me back 5,000 hours gross pay; I had to get a bank loan!
Ten years ago it was nearly miraculous that I could link into IBM with
my DOS computer, set up my Unix emulator, and run test programs for
analysis & debugging on a 'Big Blue 31xx' more than 25 miles away at the
'local' NMAC office.
Five years ago people were still convinced we'd need to use Freon to run
anything as fast as 1GHz ...
Now just about anyone in a developed country can get a multi-GHz system.
(And they are throwing out machines like the one I used for remote links
to mainframes -- as laughingly outdated and "worthless" ..)
And today I can sit in my front room office, and watch moving panoramic
pictures of the surface of Mars on my TV set.
The OTHER Side of The Story:
Today a blind friend in South Africa is still using DOS and Nettamer and
a screen reader that no one has supported in ten years ... and he's
trying to figure out how he can possibly afford a system that will run
XP, for he fears that XP will be required to do just about everything
soon.
And I can't even test Arachne with a screen reader to see if it could be
futher modified for the blind ... because a) the screen reader isn't
available and I don't have a speech synth and/or b) there are no
current screen readers for DOS.
So, while I can see the surface of Mars ... there are people in a large
part of the world who can't see at all, and can't read or write e-mail
because technology has passed them by. [BTW, if I wanted to get a screen
reader for 98/2k/XP it would *only* cost me $895 plus tax, and I could
use my soundcard as the voice synthesizer.]
l.d.
-- Arachne V1.71;UE01, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --
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