Project Management

Communications. I could barely spell the word, much less comprehend its meaning. Yet when Mrs. Rubin made the announcement about the new club she was starting at the junior high school, it triggered something in my mind.

Two weeks later, during the last month of my eighth grade year, I figured it out. I was rummaging through the basement, and I ran across the little blue box that my dad had brought home from work a year earlier. Could this be a modem?

I asked Mrs. Rubin about it the next day at school, and when she verified my expectations, I became the first member of Teleport 2000, the only organization in the city dedicated to introducing students to the information highway.

This was when 2400-baud was considered state-of-the-art, and telecommunications was still distant from everyday life. But as I incessantly logged onto Cleveland Freenet that summer, sending e-mail and posting usenet news messages until my fingers bled, I began to notice the little things. Electronic mail addresses started popping up on business cards. Those otherwise-incomprehensible computer magazines that my dad brought home from work ran monthly stories on communications-program this, and Internet-system that. Cleveland Freenet's Freeport software began appearing on systems all over the world, in places as far away as Finland and Germany - with free telnet access!

I didn't live life as a normal twelve-year-old kid that summer. I sat in front of the monitor twenty-four hours a day, eating my meals from a plate set next to the keyboard, stopping only to sleep. When I went back to school in the fall, I was elected the first president of Teleport 2000, partially because I was the only student in-the school with a freenet account, but mostly because my enthusiasm for this new, exciting world was contagious.

Today, as the business world is becoming more aware of the advantages of telecommunications, and the younger generation is becoming more aware of the opportunities, it is successfully being integrated into all aspects of our society. Companies are organizing Local Area Networks and tapping into information resources through internal networking and file sharing, and children of all ages are entertained by the GUI-based commercial systems and amazed by the worldwide system of gopher and search services. As a result, a million more people join the 'net every month, according to a 1994 article by Vic Sussman in U.S. News & World Report.

They say that the worldwide community used to double its knowledge every century. Right now, that rate has been reduced to seven years, and is constantly decreasing. I've learned more since I started traveling the information highway than I could have possibly imagined. Through File Transfer Protocol sites, I can download anything from virus-detection utilities to song lyrics and guitar tabs. I receive press releases, proclamations and international news from the White House via a mailing list. I even e-mailed President Clinton recently and received a response the next day. And it was just a few months ago that I hung up my 2400-baud modem for a replacement six times as fast.

The essence of this international system of systems was neatly summed up by David S. Jackson and Suneel Ratan in a recent Time article: "The magic of the Net is that it thrusts people together in a strange new world, one in which they get to rub virtual shoulders