Aha, I was busy scanning slides this week and I forgot to post any Big Pictures. I spotted this interesting shot from 1993 at the first apartment I had all to myself in New York at 5057 Broadway in Upper Manhattan. This is a picture of the first computer I used to connect to the Internet, and before the Internet I used this workhorse to find BBSes and commercial dialup services. This was the most reliable computer I ever owned. Through this little screen I discovered ANSI and RIP graphics; I learned modem AT commands and configurations; I discovered Usenet, IRC, WHOIS, WAIS, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, talk, ntalk, WWW, Lynx, and all those other blades from the Swiss Army Knife of command line protocols that underlined the early public Internet. I also used the XT for word processing and spreadsheets with the great Framework software by Ashton-Tate. This is the screen where my mother first saw the Internet. She was captivated by it and its walls of Usenet text, IRC channels that updated right on the screen, and non-Internet FidoNet echoes and BBSes. I don't think she had ever seen a computer before, and I know she had never seen anything connected to an interactive network. When I got a "better" computer I mailed this IBM XT to my mother as either a birthday or Christmas gift and this thing changed her life. She tuned in to local BBSes and game sites in her area and made friends in the neighborhood, and once remarked to me that "life would be pretty grim without XT."