Technology

I never specially wanted a computer but when I started at Newsday I was chained to a terminal with the rest of the the high school sports operators and after I stopped crying, was hooked. Soon I bought a 286 for my own, but the big revelation was "multitasking" with the 386DX -- using XyWrite under OS/2 1.3 in 1991 while FaxWorksPM was sending in the background was jawdropping -- like owning slaves, without the guilt or expense. The next step, joining Compuserve, was enough to make me a smug expert. I scooped the golf world when Jim Frank put me on the internet case for Golf Magazine, got some fun work for Yahoo! Internet Life, wrote a thing or two for Suck, the great anti-cultural virtual toilet-wall graffiti takedown of the internet culture.

I would like to take credit for the information revolution but it would be truer to say I destroyed the tech economy, at least it felt that way. In early 2000 I went out to Basking Ridge, NJ to interview the head of Lucent for an airline magazine cover story. She had shown up late and woozy, like someone had nailed her with a tranquilizer dart, so her publicist and I had to prop her up through my cuddly questions.  That was January 5 -- the next morning I turned on the radio and heard that Lucent had missed its 1999 quarterly, the beginning of the end of the tech bubble. A few months later, after my post-Deja News screed came out in Suck, they went down in flames. You're welcome .