The Blog - who would've thunk it in 1988?!

When I was fifteen, I was furiously dedicated to keeping my journal. My dad would get those industrial-sized daytimers – usually dated the previous year, but what did I care? – and I would scribble feverishly into them all year, redating as I went along.

Flash-forward almost 25 years later (argh, I’ve always hated people who wrote that in their articles, but will let it stand for the sake of the organic nature of the blog) - and we find ourselves in the age of the blog.

At the same time I write this, people all over the world – or at least, in the developing part of it – are writing in their electronic ‘journals’. Many of them may not even know, or care, that blog is short for Web log. Like "IM-ing", "e-mail" and Web before it, this word has slowly slid its way into the collective vocabulary.

Back in those first days in the mid-eighties - when I would battle with the typewriters, sewing and adding machines I was being taught to use in high school - I could not have imagined a world where we could write to people and have our messages go to them through the phone and cable lines.

The idea that people would also be typing and publishing their journals into a place everyone all over the world could potentially go to see them...no way, I would have said, mustering all the wisdom of my fifteen years on earth.

Heck, at that point in my life, and in technology's evolution, I could barely imagine the fact that one could type something and then erase it completely. And all before even printing anything, too.

Has anyone ever had their white-out got old but you'd try to use it anyway? I don't know about you, but I would end up leaving a gooey, rough-textured phantom that often still gave clues to the error underneath. The appearance of the full error would often happen over time, as each new slice of cracked Liquid Paper fell off.

I got a typewriter with a built-in correction tool in 1986. I was about 18, in my last grade of high school. I marvelled as I pressed the Erase button, and watched the automatic correction tape kick in under the clear plastic that protected the high-tech digital display - another new feature that perhaps foreshadowed the onscreen text format that would overtake it only months later.

That first computer would be the Vendex Head Start, the first computer I ever bought, purchased for 1,800 in 1988. It came with a black and white 14" monitor, and two, impressive-sounding 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. Its spokesperson was King Kong Bundy, the giant, coneheaded wrestler who in that time would still be highly recognizable.

My first impressions of that experience were that it intimidated the heck out of me. For example, I learned a couple years later that my first PC only had a 'virtual' hard drive. It really sucked when it came time to do my resume. And don't even get me started on the dot-matrix printer...

But I was also thrilled to discover that it was possible to Block and Move entire paragraphs of text. Wow - what a boon to improving the logical order of a paper! And I could look at the paper, once written, time and time again onscreen, print and edit the hard copy (did we even have that technical term back then, "hard copy"?), and then go back and edit onscreen again. It sure made second-guessing one's writing an entirely new enterprise.

But here we are now, writing our journal onscreen, and maybe editing it, too. Or, we might leave it looking like the old paper versions of the journal: a ragged, awkward series of observations on the most zen-like now.

Except these days, we're sharing our dear diary with anyone who'll bother to open it. We might even give people the key.