People will still control people, Lori, whether they use the internet or do it face-to-face. In some ways the internet has isolated people, and in other ways it has taught isolated types interpersonal skills. Kind of reminds me of the isolationism of this country before the interstate system was built, or the days before word processors when their emotions would flow into the ink which dried to the cursive style of the day.
IBM's first PC 5-1/4 floppy was a single-sided 320K, which obsoleted the 8" floppy of computers which you could build yourself, and was eclipsed by the 360K before the advent of the 720K double-sided floppy which the 1.2Meg 5-1/4 then obsoleted.
I remember three ways to program computers in the early days. The last of the three was to roll a strip of black paper with holes punched in it, around a cylinder, feed the other end into a slot, similar to loading a new roll of film (remember film? That stuff before digital cameras, right?). The second was to flip 8 toggle switches on a front panel, and when convinced the settings were correct push a large red button to enter the single line of code into the computer.
The third is still a vivid method. I would spend months penciling in characters on a piece of paper at MIT Lincoln Labs, which was to become my programs. when complete I would take this paper to another building. Within two weeks I would get a call to pick up a bunch of punched cards, similar to index cards except larger. Then spend a couple more weeks comparing the listing to the cards. One mistake and the whole batch (batch processing, know the term, heh, heh), had to be keypunched with another several week wait.
The vividness? I had a whole box of these cards, which represented my stunning accomplishment of the day, in my arms as I started my ascent up the stairs while looking up instead of where I should have been looking.
Now, once those cards have a spec of dirt on them, or have been shuffled, the whole operation had to be restarted from day one. Oh, yes. Those were the good old days when programs did only one thing: crunch mathematical formulas to run the automatic flight control subsystems of long sleek black airplanes which can fly into space, of nuclear powered satellites or to catch radio signals sent straight through the earth to a submarine sitting quietly on the bottom of the ocean several thousand feet down awaiting her next orders, and not wimpy windows stuff which requires several thousand lines of code just to present a dialogue box on the screen so someone can put a check in a box. Those were the days when real software engineers didn't eat quiche and didn't drink bud-lite.
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Allen, Home:
http://www.ury2k.com/ mirror:
http://home.ici.net/~uechi/
I can imagine triping on the stairs with a box of cards. Yes, now adays we have O/S's that clock in at 2 million lines of code. They take away 700 megs of a drive and we think it's just great. Yet there are people out there with a DOS 5 or lower machine running on a 386 w/4megs and 5.25 floppies and loving it.