Roy Exum
I distinctly remember one Saturday night in Athens almost a half-century ago when I dashed out of the Stanford Stadium press box, my five-page account of the game I had just witnessed in my hand, and rushed downtown. I parked in a loading zone and handed my story to a Western Union operator, who then wired it to my still-beloved Chattanooga News-Free Press.
It arrived in the form of ticker-tape, and a Linotype operator fed it into a great big machine chock full of the alphabet, and my words were cast in molten lead, at the rate of nine lines of type per minute, so the people of Chattanooga could get my version of what happened in the newspaper the next morning.
I laughed about that yesterday when I read that my dear friend Internet Explorer was headed for the scrap heap. My goodness, what I’ve seen in my lifetime is dazzling and, as a child, I would have never dreamed that in the year 2015 the very second my story of the day is posted on Chattanoogan.com, it immediately appears on browsers like Google and Yahoo for all the world to see. As a result, I get emails from all across the country. It is mind-boggling.
I just Googled “Roy Exum” and 323,000 “results” came up in 4.3 seconds. I don’t say this boastfully but rather in a sense of awe. My daily emails include personal notes from people all over the United States who happened to read a story that I have written. Is that beyond belief or what? Our younger generation takes it for granted but having seen it unfold and watched it happen, it is to me one of the most modern wonders of the world.
Further, to read that Microsoft is scrapping Explorer means the wizards in Silicon Valley have something better to put in its place. I’m several weeks away from my 66th birthday (I know, I look much younger) but I think that is really exciting. I’ve seen today’s technology save lives that we once lost and make the world we live in today the most dazzling in the history of mankind.
When I started out, we used manual Royal typewriters. I don’t think my kids ever used a typewriter and I know my grandchildren have never seen one. Then we went to IBM Selectrics that had a special ball instead of typewriter characters. We would type a story on special paper and then it would be fed sheet by sheet into a “reader” which would create the ticker-tape. By then the “cold type” era had begun, and the old Linotype machines were extinct. (My family sold two for $500 to some guy in Paraguay and I bet he paid $2,000 each in shipping.)
Instead there were machines that could produce 120 lines of type per minute on special photographic paper. You would then trim off the excess paper, run it through a waxer, which was kind of like glue but you could easily reposition the type on a make-up page. (Today they create whole pages in a matter of minutes!)
By then the newspaper industry was awash with tele copiers, where you’d lug a suitcase-sized device to games – this when Vanderbilt didn’t yet have an elevator to the press box -- wrap your story on this cylinder and then plug a phone into this cradle. The thing would spin and beep and hiss and sometimes even smoke but an exact copy of each page would arrive at the newspaper every four minutes. Next came Tele Rams – big machines that had a six-inch square screen.
Finally Radio Shack came out with the first affordable computer. I think it was a model P-1006 where you could see three lines on what you just typed. When you would hit the “send” button, it would go directly into the computer and – bingo – now the industry really took off. It was inevitable that Internet Explorer would make its way into oblivion. While the computer changed everything, America still has geniuses that invent something new almost every day.
One of my favorite computer stories from those first days was when I was covering some football game and a very inebriated colleague showed up just before kickoff. So we hatched a plan when once I sent my story to Chattanooga, we would erase my byline, type in his, and send it to another Southern city.
Everything would have worked swell had his managing editor not decided to look at the changing foliage in Gatlinburg. On the way home that Sunday, that editor happened to stop in Chattanooga where he bought a newspaper to read about the Auburn game. Once he got home, he read my colleague’s account and called him in since the two accounts were one and the same.
My friend admitted he was too drunk to write and I lent him a hand. The editor, an old-time guy, banned my buddy from drinking the night before a game and – believe it or not – sent me a check for 50 bucks as a stringer’s fee!
I know this is terribly old-fashioned but I still use AOL.com – which the experts say is a dinosaur – and Internet Explorer has been my “home page” since it was introduced. My problem is that because I am so interested in news and events I pay poor attention to technology. Understand, I can keep up, and I can write a story very easily to send to Chattanooga.com. But let’s just say that while I proudly carry an iPhone 6, I’ll also admit I haven’t the foggiest idea how to take a picture with it, this despite the fact I have 26 photos of my lap, the car seat, and one of my shoe.
The biggest mess I have gotten into is Facebook. I enjoyed it for a while but people kept wanting to “friend” me. Deeply flattered, I “accepted” everybody but then it got to where I had 5,400 “friends.” It became unwieldy. I was getting so many “updates” it was ridiculous. So I opted out – cancelled my “page” – and created a near-riot when 5,400 people learned I had “de-friended” each of them. Many took it as an insult … what a mess that was.
Put me down as one who is eager to see what Microsoft has come up with that is better than Internet Explorer. This old dog may well learn a new trick or two!
royexum@aol.com