Central Collection Company Financial


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Central Collection Company Financial

Central Collection Company Financial

When we baby-boomers first got into personal computing, it was at about the same time pagers [“beepers”] were all the rage. Not that we swallowed the bait of Don Estridge, the father of the IBM PC [model 5150] hook, line and sinker. After all, how many games of pong could one play? Most of us chose to keep our trusted Selectric II word processors handy just in case of that calamity called a crash. Next in a cool calculated modus came two thingamajigs; dial-up modems and facsimile machines [“fax” for short] and the world had its initial glimpse of “online” communication. Tens of thousands of beta-testers, crash test dummies, etc. literally became low tech geeks and gurus virtually overnight.

Recalling my initial experience with a hacker is like recollecting my first kiss, as both times had other-worldly feels about them. The difference being, of course, getting kissed by that Miss then was everything a 13 year old boy thought kissing a girl could, should and would be, but the hacker and the hacking was unimaginable. It was a lot like the opening scene from 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie by Steven Spielberg and John Landis based on Rod Serling’s TV series. As car driver Albert Brooks and his passenger Dan Aykroyd cruised along at night, Aykroyd asked Brooks “Do you want to see something really scary”? Brooks pulled over and Aykroyd turned away. Aykroyd then turned back as a demon and attacked Brooks.

Silicon Valley Of Heart's Delight

Those were the pre-Windows days of DOS, XT and AT clones, Bulletin Boards, floppy disks and the user-friendly tools of Peter Norton’s Utilities. Computer users seemed to have a fighting chance then against the mayhem of merely mischievous hackers and/or the gremlins within friendly-fire floppies. It was right about when it became clear that PCs were here to stay, that Paul Allen and Bill Gates introduced their purported idiot-proof Windows platform. Unfortunately, as millions of new users would come to learn, they would be at the mercy of Microsoft tech support services to debug and/or fix whatever was broke because it wasn’t so much a case of K.I.S.S. [keep it simple stupid] as it was an example of the development of software being ahead and beyond that of hardware [and from time to time, vice-a-versa].