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At Issue
The Computer Revolution Continues to Move On
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
My first experience with computers was in the late 1970's. I was an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph. I was taking a course called "Production Economics" and the professor was projecting on screen, a computer generated image of the total product curve. In other words, he was projecting what happens to corn yields as you add nitrogen.The computer image was generated by a huge mainframe computer which was housed across the road in another building. If you wanted a printout of the corn yields, you had to cross the road and peer into the computer room, while being blasted by cool air. It was even money. Sometime you got the printouts and sometimes you didn't.
In 1986, when I went back to graduate school, the IBM XT 80086,(the forerunner of the 286, 386, 486 and Pentium) had started to come into vogue. I remember clearly, my early recollection of these little machines. I thought the secretaries in the Agricultural Economics building had TVs in front of them. This myth was broken when I was asked to purchase a "floppy disk" at the bookstore and bring it to class. I was about to learn Wordstar( a predecessor to WordPerfect) and Symphony, (an early version of Lotus 123). The rest is history, as they say. We still had to cross the road to get the mainframe to do our heavy duty number crunching.
In November of 1986, I wrote my first column for the agricultural press called Under the Agridome. There is only hard copy of that scribbling, because I didn't have a computer back in those days. As time went by, along came a small Macintosh computer which helped build me a couple of careers. A few years ago, I mothballed that first Mac to get another one, to ready me for something called the Internet. Again, the rest is history.
Most of you who read this are the converted. CKTimes.ca readers are at the forefront of the computer revolution. Reading an on line newspaper has become part of your nature . The Internet, though in existence in those bad old days at Guelph, has really come into its own. And the choices for consumers are multiplying daily. And when it comes to e -commerce, the buying and selling in the local economy is just starting.
There are new web sites everywhere, including www.cktimes.ca. A new price for a lawn mower is only a mouse click away. Need parts for that washer and dryer? Get on the web, third party suppliers are only too happy to ship it to you over night. Forget that for a minute. How about getting rid of the junk you don't use anymore? Get on the web and put it up for auction. You might even meet a buyer for that stuff who doesn't live in North America. In short, e-commerce has the potential to change the way we do business.
It's a big deal, but unfortunately, the Internet soothsayers who preach the virtues of being on-line, don't have all their ducks lined up in a row. For most of us, the Internet is still painfully slow. The problem is the delivery vehicle for the Internet doesn't have the capacity to handle the data bits quickly. For many of us reading cktimes.ca in the morning could
easily be cut by half if we had a decent connection. As it stands now, I have no other cost effective alternative to connect. Until that changes, the Internet for many people will have limits which will effectively quell the financial maximums for e-commerce.
Having said that, I recently had a dealer look over my big red monster of a combine. He is from far away, so actually hooking up took some work over Christmas. In our initial conversation, I couldn't find time to get up and look at the used combine he had for sale. I asked him if there was a picture of it on the web. He said, yes, and promptly gave me his web address. After a couple of clicks and a painfully long wait, I was looking at his combine while talking to him at the same time. Good thing it was his nickel! Call it e-commerce, call it good business, the Internet made that all possible.
I have always resisted any notion of a personal web page to flog all of my writing. In time, maybe. But until that happens, the web needs to get cheaper and faster. Along with that, it needs to lose the computer as a conduit for its delivery. Add a little on-line security into the equation along with a standard $50 piece of hardware to access the Internet and
you'll finally have something which will deliver what you're paying for.
Until that happens we'll be just like those people driving cars 100 years ago. They knew this was the future but until Henry Ford built the Model T, they weren't going anywhere fast.
Philip Shaw, farms 830 acres near Dresden, Ontario. He holds a Masters of Agricultural Economics and Business Degree from the University of Guelph and is a well-known commentator on agricultural issues in print, on radio and over satellite in Canada and the United States. In the Chatham-Kent Times, Phil will use his frank and forthright writing style to address political and economic issues from the local to the international stage. He is a keen observer of political life at all levels, reads widely and has travelled the world to gather fodder for his column. See what's At Issue this week.
