Love at First Sight,
but Hooked on the Block

At the headquarters of the Harris Corporation, I tested the state of the art "Information Storage and Retrieval System Machine." It was useless for managing orange groves. But that hardly mattered.

The epiphany: There is such a thing as love at first sight. After two hours with the clunky Harris work stations I knew I didn't want one of these new computer things: I needed one. After New York, I always wanted to have a computer.

When I was away from electricity - in the Israeli orange groves, Amazon mangroves, Roi-Et rice research - I missed instant retrieval of information more than any other comfort. Remember, there was no such thing as a Personal Computer yet. But I knew lust.

When personal computers first hit the market I was intrigued but not in a position to own one. Finally, after a life change that dumped me in Thailand, came the chance to become the first child on my soi to own a computer, a real PC that belonged to me.

That PC entirely changed the way I could write and change and store stuff. The change from the typewriter to the computer was vast. I always had a nice typewriter - my last one was an IBM Selectric - but the switch to the electronic keyboard was a huge difference.

More important by far were two advantages that changed my writing life: storage and retrieval of both current and archive material, and The Block. Typeover and Insert are nice, compared to white-out. But The Block is what makes computers - or even word processors - special.

Once I started to mark, copy, move and delete blocks of copy with a word processor, I never wanted to change back to pen or typewriter. And I haven't. The Block was enough to hook me on computers. But the main change - changes, plural, really - that computers wrought on my life came through the networks.

I think most of the writers gathered here today agree that the computer network influenced them in important, even excruciating ways. In a fascinating, always-changing decade-plus voyage of networks, I have seen the world, or at least the e-world. I have met and e-met some of the sharpest, most exhilarating, most testing people - people I never would have been aware of without my computer and a connection.

Hard to believe now - perhaps impossible for some - but the Bangkok BBS scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s was one of the most exciting, stimulating social and intellectual experiences of Asia, ever. The names are legends, to some.

Khun Prakan of DX BBS, Post Database's own Khun Woody and the incredibly helpful Bill Thompson were the pioneers of the electronic Bulletin Board System, where real people mingled with geeks and "talked" about everything under the sun in the earliest form of email - the BBS messages.

It never stopped getting better. David Hanks' Guacamole BBS brought the first real international messaging to the local Bangkok network. Through his Fido service, people in Bangkok now could talk to others around the world.

The weirdest, strangest political beliefs and fetishes, it turned out, were shared by someone, somewhere, who also was on the network looking for a kindred spirit. Today, on the Internet, we can find newsgroups and interest groups on any subject. The young people take it for granted, which is natural. All they owe us is to develop new, better and faster ways of doing all this.

The Toys

There have always been two kinds of people in the world: Geeks, and those who can dance. My first computer wasn't a Sinclair or even an Apple, and I never programmed an HP calculator to print the "3" upside down to resemble an "E." In 1982, while the nice young men on these pages were spending Saturday nights with Elisa and her Apple, I was working out my earth shoes with the eight-track tape version of Eye of the Tiger, by Survivor. And by the way, I Wouldn't Have Missed it for the World (that was by Ronnie Milsap). My addiction didn't begin until 1987, in a hole in the wall in Sim Lim Square, where a kindly Singaporean computer dealer handed over a DOS 2.1 laptop computer with slots for an amazing two diskettes of 720KB apiece, along with a 1200-baud modem. I smuggled that machine through Customs by the simple step of smudging the carrying case to make it look old and within 48 hours I had learned the single phrase that all computer users need to justify their passion: "I'll be right there, dear." That laptop travelled far and often, and went through box after box of diskettes (800 baht per box of 10, if you could find a sale). It ate fewer than any machine I ever owned. I have trashed a few computers since then, but that laptop still serves a second generation of Spouse's family for notetaking in school class. It has been upgraded all the way to DOS 3.3. With a couple of exceptions, my upgrades have followed the Microsoft-Intel route, just to stay popular. Recently, for less than one-third of what I spent on that original luggable, I bought my current 700Mz Intel desktop computer with 256KB of RAM and a pair of 20-GB hard drives. And for one-quarter of the price of my 1200-baud modem, I use an excellect 56K modem and fax combination.

The network has already changed the lives of most people. They carry and use an ATM card, which is their entry to an old-technology computer-driven modem network. They send email to colleagues, bosses and underlings at work.

Hotmail is popular and ICQ is almost a youthful obsession. Next year, you can pay your taxes on the Net. The parts in your car were supplied by the lowest bidder in a new style of Internet auction known as business-to-business.

This may be hard for some, but the pioneer in a real sense has been Post Database. We all have been at the centre of a real network, us and our readers. Our features are very interactive, and we highly value our mail, email and similar contacts with readers.

When it started, the supplement was an oddity to many at the downmarket, parent daily. Most of the folks on the daily paper were more absorbed in cleaning the keys on their typewriters or making sure no one stole their hoard of carbon paper.

I had the honour of appearing in Post Database within its second year of publication. Away back then in those dark ages, I thought I detected a certain derision for the idea of a review of a graphics program. Or maybe I was just too sensitive.

But up here in the opulent, yet exceedingly tasteful Post Database suites, one thing has never changed in 12 years. Then, as now, I require the desk with the modesty shield.