Webexperience

Backblip: This may be the dullest photo I've ever blipped - my colleague Lou's laptop in a meeting room at work. Today, I took part in my first Webex meeting, a way of joining several PCs and phone lines together for a video or telephone conference, with the power to share a view of one of the PC screens, so each can see the same documents. Big deal, you might think but this new facility made me reflect on the fact that my secondary school education and working career spans the entire history of personal computers. The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe, owned by the Maths department at school. At University, during my undergrad degree, our department had no form of personal computer. Only Postgrads were allowed access to the University mainframe. By the time I was writing my doctorate, my next University department had a room full of Apple Macintosh Classics, indeed a true classic. My then girlfriend, now wife, bought one of her own, on which I prepared all the graphics and text for my Ph.d. I had a computing shock to the system then, when in 1993, I started work for an environmental No.-Departmental Public Body where rudimentary computing was available on PCs running Windows 3.1 (I think) - remember that? After Apple Mac, it was a God-awful user experience. Internet access was through a single standalone PC that had an internet connection which we we had to book in oder to surf the early internet (another God-awful experience). Since then, it has been twenty years of gradually increasing complexity and functionality, leading to my first Webex conference. Whither next? And apologies for the dull photo!