howell@grover.llnl.gov (Louis Howell) (10/31/90)
An article appeared last Thursday, Oct 25, in my local paper, the Tri-Valley Herald, which I thought might interest you. It concerned a local high school computer teacher, Mark Niswonger, who had managed to send email from students in his class to US troops in Saudi Arabia. The connection was through a BBS run by Rick McLin, an American engineer working for Aramco oil in Saudi Arabia. Niswonger said he had been browsing through a directory on a BBS one night, and noticed "a Saudi hookup with an American name". He tried the phone number with his modem, and the whole thing took off from there. The thing that struck me most about the article, though, was that it was the first completely positive story about BBS's I have ever seen in the mainstream media. No talk of computer games, nerds, software pirates, or credit card fraud, just a simple human interest story about a local teacher brightening up the the lives of a few paratroopers stuck out in the desert. We can bitch and moan about rights all we want, but as long as the voting public sees us as nothing but a bunch of asocial geeks wasting time and playing dangerous pranks we don't stand a snowball's chance of getting any real sympathy for our concerns. Perform a useful service though, something the public can relate to, and we just might polish up our image a little bit. -- Louis Howell "A few sums!" retorted Martens, with a trace of his old spirit. "A major navigational change, like the one needed to break us away from the comet and put us on an orbit to Earth, involves about a hundred thousand separate calculations. Even the computer needs several minutes for the job."