Morning Lineup - August 26

Do you remember an early Windows program called NetMeeting? It was first installed on the Windows 95 OS and when I bought my first home personal computer in January 1997, it was on there.

Basically, NetMeeting was designed to be a conferencing utility allowing people in several locations to log in together for a conference call, such as a group of regional offices. If you logged in on the same channel, everybody could see what you wrote, kind of like a group Yahoo Messenger thing. And it had a “whiteboard” feature where you could draw a sketch on it and the others could not only see it, but they could add to it or even alter it.

But what made NetMeeting really fascinating for me, and most others, was the public forums. If you logged in to one of these, your screen name and your location was entered on a page listing everybody who was also online with it. And, it had excellent sound capability where you could plug in a headset and talk directly to people. This was back in ‘97, mind you. Dial-up modems and all that.

So, the procedure would be to scan along the sign-in lists and pick out somebody to talk to (or just wait until somebody clicks on your name and calls you.) and then click. A telephone bell sound would alert you that someone was calling and then you just talked away. Suddenly the whole world was right there in your computer room. You could visit with people from all over and learn about so many different things. Sure, every now and then you’d get a dud who was as interesting as last week’s newspaper. But you’d just say “Nice talkin’ to you.” and click off.

Whereas the greatest percentage of contacts were in the U. S. and Canada, Microsoft saw to it that the NetMeeting program got world-wide distribution and before long you could just as easily communicate with people from practically every country in the world. I made it a point to try and talk to somebody from as many countries as I could. I even went to the office supply store and got one of those large world maps and started putting stickers on each country that I had “visited.” I would make a point to ask what they did for a living and then let them tell me what life was like in their town. That was just soooo interesting.

But alas, Microsoft pulled the plug on the open-forum boards a couple of years later. I’m guessing it was because they were getting overrun with weirdos and perverts. But my international cultural exchange program came to an end. And now, the new Vista OS doesn’t even have NetMeeting installed on it. That’s because they’ve discontinued it altogether. Too bad.

But we still have to get this equipment checked out. I’ll go start the coffee.