Chapter 28

Tuesday, December 21, 1999

Emily had been a freshman at Bradford High School when the first computer came to the school -- an Apple II, which seemed so incredible with the stuff it could do. She really didn't get a lot of time with it -- there was only the one computer for the students, and there was a long line of people who wanted a chance to play with it. Since she was a freshman she was down toward the tail end of the pecking order, although she did get a little time with it.

But the fact there were more kids who wanted to use computers than there were computers to use soon came to the attention of the administration and the school board. When she returned the next fall there was a new computer lab, all fitted out with ten brand spanking new IBM 8088s. The 8088s weren't quite as good as the sole Apple -- which occupied a corner of the room -- but they were a whole lot cheaper, which had something to do with the decision to buy them. In fact, even by standards of the day it was a little on the limited side, but the humble 8088 was the foundation upon which most computers to follow were laid. Years later those kids who got their first real exposure to computers on the machines in the Bradford High computer lab could say justifiably they were "present at the beginning."

Emily wouldn't admit to being one of the most enthusiastic of the kids who kept the machines going from the minute they opened the doors in the morning until the custodians ran everyone out at night. But, she spent more than her fair share of time staring into the old green and black screens. She did a little programming in BASIC, never enough to get good at it, learned how to use primitive database and spreadsheet programs along with primitive word processing programs, and played some games. By the time she left high school the old 8088s were getting pretty obsolete, and an upgrade was planned for over the summer. But she thought computers were pretty neat, and figured she'd have to get one some time.

Things were a touch on the tight side the first winter she and Kevin were married -- there were a lot of newlywed expenses. Kevin was working at the old Bean-Chamberlain plant, running a machine for peanuts and giving some consideration to going back in the Air Force, but not wanting to while Emily was pregnant with Kayla. But they had some wedding present bucks left over and decided that rather than just giving normal type Christmas gifts, they'd splurge. Splurge they did -- there was a guy out at the plant who assembled computer clones on the side. He could save them some bucks, so there was a brand stinky new AT sitting under the artificial Christmas tree that had been handed down from Emily's grandmother. The AT -- the same thing as an IBM 286 -- was so far ahead of the old 8088s Emily had used at the school it wasn't funny. It even had a color VGA screen, was screamingly fast by comparison, had a spiffy new Epson dot matrix printer, and could do a lot more.

Kevin hadn't used computers much in those days, but they wiled away some time playing primitive computer games like Jill of the Jungle and Pac-Man, until Kevin discovered two interesting things: for whatever reason, the guy at the plant had included a modem, an old 2400-baud thing. Through some aberration of the phone company, Hawthorne was a local phone call, and one evening the guy came over and taught him how to get on CompuServe. That opened a new world -- e-mail, forums, online games, lots of other useful stuff. The first time they took a real vacation together, after J.J. was born, they'd bought the airline tickets over EasySABRE, the early online ticketing agency, and saved a bundle.

The 286 had been fun, but it had also proved its worth. The only problem was that one evening it wouldn't come on -- something had fried. Kevin had moved over to Macy Controls by that time, but the guy at Bean-Chamberlain was still building computers. Since he had some parts to start with, he upgraded the old 286 to a 386-33, three times as fast as the old machine, with a bigger hard drive, a 14400 baud modem, and some funny operating system called "Windows". The old monitor got flaky after a while, and was replaced with a new one. Three years before, something new had been under the Christmas tree -- a small oblong box with the word "Netscape" on it.

The old machine was still sitting over in the corner of the living room, but despite the modifications it was getting really obsolete now. Although it had been in the works a while, a few weeks before Emily and Kevin had gotten their heads together and decided the time for something new had come. That meant there was a brand new Pentium 300 sitting in boxes under the tree, along with a new monitor and a laser printer. After some discussion, they had decided that the old machine wouldn't be retired, but moved up to their bedroom, where they could do a little web surfing of places that might not be quite totally appropriate for the kids. The new machine, when it was set up, would be in the living room where Emily and Kevin could keep an eye on the kids using it, with an adult-site blocking program backing them up. Both of them had used the old machine for that a little -- curious about Eve's battle with gender identity, Emily had spent some time hitting websites on the subject in the weeks following the reunion to learn a little more about it.

But for now, the old machine was still in use, and Emily had put out her annual Christmas letters on it back at the first of the month. Letters, plural, since there were two different versions. One was to relatives and close friends, updating them on the normal family things like how the kids were doing in school, and where they took their vacation. Emily had more than one alarmed phone call from some distant aunt at the thought of her and Kevin riding motorcycles, Harleys at that, out to South Dakota for the bike rally. But there had been more congratulatory phone calls at the news of Emily's election as mayor of Bradford! That had been particularly satisfying. They'd already decided to get a digital camera like the one Emily used down at the Courier when she did stories for Mr. Weber, so in future years the annual letter could include a photo or two.

The other Christmas letter was an outgrowth of the first, and went only to classmates from the Class of '88. In time, it had become something of an annual class newsletter, mostly exchanging news of what Emily had been told other classmates were up to. Emily knew in her gut it wasn't right to put pure gossip into the newsletter, but considered something directly from the person or their parents fair game. Much of the class had scattered in the years after high school graduation, although some, like Vicky and Scott and Aaron had Bradford as a home base until their college graduation and marriage, which for a majority of them happened in 1992. Since then, the newsletter had been the tenuous thread that kept the class together. Sometimes, it reported marriages and births and divorces -- thankfully, no deaths yet -- and sometimes it had a little more detail.

Of course, Emily's election as mayor was grist for the mill, but Emily made a point of not headlining the newsletter with it -- in fact, it waited until the very last item. Vicky made the newsletter, mostly on the strength of her new job at Macy Controls, but Emily also mentioned that the two of them liked riding their motorcycles and had taken some trips on them.