Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 21, 1994 TAG: 9401210016
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Lon Wagner
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MikeW described the eerieness: "You can hear car alarms everywhere."
Kimberly7 reported the first disaster: "Possible major freeway collapse - I think it's the 10."
Chantelle gave this personal account: "Oh, I felt it real good . . . threw me out of bed. This one really scared me."
"It felt like a boat rocking back and forth," Chantelle continued. "This kinda makes me want to move out of this state."
This is another Information Age story by, admittedly, someone who is awed by it all. Those reports came a few minutes before 8 a.m. EST, which put it less than half an hour after the West Coast earthquake.
They came through my home computer on America On-Line, one of the three major services that link computers through phone lines.
The amazing part is not that I signed on to see what I could find out, but that it was the first instinct of people who had been rattled out of bed by an earthquake.
One guy had no electricity, but was reporting from his battery-driven laptop computer.
Lately, media stories about the "Information Superhighway" have speculated that the whole thing is hype, that it will never be accessible to the general public, how access is too cumbersome.
Certainly, the term "Information Superhighway" is a misnomer; it implies a smooth, efficient, existing gateway.
Right now, there's a lot of rudimentary experimentation going on and people are running into dead ends. But that's the pattern when an invention becomes available to the masses.
Yet the demand is there. Internet, a network of mainframe computers the U.S. government linked years ago for national defense purposes, is the primary infrastructure for this information highway.
The Internet is clunky. A pain to get into. A hair-pulling experience once you're there. But the amount of information available is so massive that a million people a month are joining Internet - if for no reason other than to send electronic mail.
For now, think about what is easy to use. The on-line services cost $10 to $15 a month - for five hours of is easy to use. The on-line services cost $10 to $15 a month - for five hours of use - and aren't much more difficult than using a phone.
Whereas the networks took less than an hour to get live reports of the earthquake, the story was 24 hours old by the time most newspapers printed it.
But the San Jose Mercury News filed stories into its computerized paper as it got them. Those who bought the Mercury News' online service had fresh quake reports throughout the day. It's not often newspapers can beat television these days on breaking news stories, but most of the Mercury News' stories were filed before the evening news.
Computer screen communication won't take over the world, but it does add another option. Like after the earthquake.
By Monday evening, someone at America On Line had set up "Earthquake rooms."
In the earthquake rooms, high-tech samaritans in California were checking on relatives and friends of people from other states. Because of overloaded phone circuits, Pacific Bell earlier in the day had started blocking calls into Southern California.
Similar rooms, I'm told, were established at CompuServe and Prodigy, the other big services.
Chico Kid called Hina's friend in Livermore and found out everything was fine. Someone asked DAP1612332 if he/she needed anything.
"No Kevin, I'm fine, picked up a 12-pack last night," DAP responded. "A cute redhead would be nice, though."
Even on a computer screen, Southern Californians' fabled laid-back nature comes through.
Lon Wagner covers economic development, labor and industry for the Roanoke Times & World-News.
by CNB