Dialing up the future: CompuServe, Tandy’s TRS-80 at RadioShack, and the San Jose Mercury News

The “digital divide” is a term usually used to characterize the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and the internet, and those who do not.

I like to think of it in a more archival sense with the digital divide being a demarcation line between online full-text access to today’s, yesterday’s, along with the year and decades before that’s newspapers, and a world, where even if we all are blessed with a plethora of computers and internet service providers, accessing those newspapers of yesteryear for free is in most cases next to impossible online, unless you are fortunate enough to have access to digitized older newspapers such as can be found at the Thompson Public Library: https://thompsonlibrary.insigniails.com/Library/Digital. Otherwise, archival newspaper research for 1978 still  means scouring bound volumes in a musty newspaper morgue or library, or spending hours in a dark cubicle with one’s head’s buried and eyes straining, spinning reel-after-reel of microfilm or sheet-after-sheet of microfiche.

Does it matter? I think it does. While I can call up verbatim copies of stories I’ve written for most newspapers since 2001, I cannot as easily access stories at a distance in space and time I wrote for the Peterborough Examiner back in 1985 on Paul Croft Jr., who had been a brilliant computer scientist in the late 1960s for Control Data in Minneapolis, but later, while suffering from paranoid delusions stemming from late onset schizophrenia, in 1972 shot and killed in a company parking lot in Canada a co-worker, after hearing voices telling him to do so.

Later, after being released from detention in a mental health institution, but having a relapse into more  mental illness again, largely triggered by not taking his anti-psychotic medications because of their unpleasant side effects, Croft wound up wounding two OPP Tactical Rescue Unit (TRU) officers in 1984, who had arrived at his home in a remote part of Haliburton County, Ontario to execute a warrant under the Ontario Mental Health Act, alleging he had breached the conditions of the lieutenant-governor’s warrant he was subject to, namely by not taking his prescribed meds. By the time I encountered Croft in October 1985, he was on trial in Lindsay, Ontario in what was then the Supreme Court of Ontario, being tried on two counts of attempted murder.

Croft shot the two officers with a high-powered rifle. Both, while injured, recovered and survived.

Again found not guilty by reason of insanity, Croft became among the rarest of the rare among what were then often referred to as the criminally insane: a man detained on not one, but two lieutenant governor’s warrants.

Ditto the 1987-88 series of stories I wrote for the paper on the so-called Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy, which had several dimensions, including a number of police investigations, involving civilian and military police, several court cases, two very tragic suicides, and finally a coroner’s inquest presided over by Ontario’s deputy chief coroner at the time.  Names like Andrew Webster, Ian Shearer, Jeffrey Atkinson,  Lloyd Jackson and Michael Noury have largely been lost in the pre-internet mists of time, recalled only if one happens to have a scrapbook of newspapers clippings, or access to bound volumes of the Peterborough Examiner or its microfilm for 1987-1988.

Without that kind of research access, 30 to 35 years after the events, one’s memories of such stories have a sort of sepia tone or looking through the glass dark quality to them. Although oddly enough you can find a good summary of the Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy story through a June 17, 1987 story headlined “Cyanide deaths a Peterborough nightmare” by Southam News reporter John Kessel, which appeared in among other places, the now Glacier Media-owned Prince George Citizen, which has digitized its older newspapers with the PDF available online at: http://pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca/fedora/repository/pgc%3A1987-06-17-24/PDF/Page%20PDF

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is there no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I also remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. Today its online archive goes back to June 1985. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California. In its brief shining moment, the San Jose Mercury News had 400 people in its newsroom, revenues of $300 million and profit margins of more than 30 per cent, a bureau in Hanoi, and netted a Pulitzer Prize for foreign news.

In 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

I realized in July 1995, as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, that my class would likely be the last Queen’s University history class where students, including me, had few online citations in their footnotes or included in their bibliographies, and the style of such citations was still very much in development.

While the San Jose Mercury News is often thought of as pioneering in its online venture, the first newspaper to go online was The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio way back on July 1, 1980.  It was part of a unique CompuServe and Associated Press experiment about the potential of online papers. Eventually other AP member newspapers were part of the project, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, The Virginian-Pilot, The Middlesex News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But it was The Columbus Dispatch that published the first “online” newspaper when it began beaming news stories through the CompuServe dial-up service. The paper was the first daily in the United States to test a technology that enabled the day’s news to flow into home computers at 300 words per minute. Users paid $5 per hour for the service. “To become a subscriber,” the paper reported at the time, “a resident will have to have a home computer.  Such equipment is now available in electronics shops.” If you had Tandy’s TRS-80 from RadioShack, founded in 1921 as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, and a modem with access to the online CompuServe dial-up service, you were ready to go, or at least until the pioneering online experiment ended in 1982.

Launched in November 1977, the $600 TRS-80 was one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

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Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch and the all-consuming butter and brown sugar, corn and oats Cap’n Crunch

During my numerous years from the 1970s through the 1990s living in downtown area neighborhoods in Peterborough, Ontario, if the wind was blowing just so from the east on a damp day in particular, your olfactory receptors would be treated to the smell of what seemed to be the Cap’n Crunch corn and oat breakfast cereal being manufactured at the Quaker Oats plant on Hunter Street West on the west bank of the Otonabee River. I suppose it might have been one of the numerous other oat-based breakfast cereals they make at 34 Hunter St. W., but to my nose it was the Cap’n Crunch I always seemed to smell.

The Cap’n Crunch from Peterborough’s Quaker Oats also happens to be Kosher. Rabbi Sholom H. Adler, the Kashrus administrator for the Kashruth Council of Canada in Toronto, issued the most recent Kosher certification April 7.

The American-owned Quaker Oats Company mill started out in 1902 on the banks of the Otonabee River during a period of rapid U.S. branch plant industrialization in Peterborough, spurred on by generous municipal bonuses and concessions. Little more than a decade earlier in 1891, the Edison Electric Company (later Canadian General Electric or CGE)  had opened its “Canadian Works at Peterborough.” Both the Quaker Oats Company and Canadian General Electric plants in Peterborough were designed by Port Hope-born architect George Martel Miller.

While a fifth-floor oven fire April 2 at Quaker sent nine employees to Peterborough Regional Health Centre to be assessed for smoke inhalation, a much more serious fire on Dec. 11, 1916 saw the northeast corner of the Quaker Oats plant all but burned to the ground in a devastating fire in Building 11, which began around 10 a.m., and was believed to have been caused by a spark ignited by the passage of a foreign object through a grain-rolling machine that ground oat hulls, situated in the grain dry house next to the boiler room, which set the grain dust on fire and triggered the dust explosion that followed. The fire, which reached a temperature of about 2,300°F – a temperature about 100°F hotter than the point at which cast iron melts and brickwork reaches the stage of incipient fusion – burned actively for four days and smouldered until the following March. Twenty-two workers died within days or weeks as a result of injuries, including shock and smoke inhalation, suffered in the fire and explosion. Another man died later in 1928 as the result of injuries sustained in the fire 12 years earlier. The fire caused about $2 million in property damage.

The alarm went out to neighboring Lindsay, Lakefield, Port Hope and Toronto to join Peterborough firefighters with men and equipment in battling the inferno. Quaker went on to rebuild the plant on condition the City of Peterborough build a higher Ashburnham Bridge, now known as the Hunter Street Bridge.

PepsiCo purchased Quaker Oats in August 2001 and it is part of their business unit known as PepsiCo Foods Canada. Pepsi has been in Canada since June 12, 1934, when it opened a bottling plant in Montreal.

Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch. He first set sail in 1963 from Crunch Island in the Sea of Milk – “a magical place with talking trees, crazy creatures and a whole mountain (Mount Crunchmore) made out of Cap’n Crunch cereal.” Crunch, who truth be told, wears a Napoleon-style hat and displays on his uniform the three bars of a navy commander, not the four bars of a captain, which is one rank above commander, at least in the United States Navy.

Crunch later assumed command of the S.S. Guppy and spent decades battling his arch-nemesis, the pirate known as Jean LaFoote, according to the backstory from his PR people.

Pamela Low, a New Hampshire flavorist, who died at the age of 79 in June 2007, developed and created the flavor coating for Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal.

Low studied microbiology at the University of New Hampshire. She went on to work as a flavorist for the Arthur D. Little consulting firm in the Boston area for more than 30 years. As the story goes, she was asked to develop a flavor for the new Cap’n Crunch corn and oat breakfast cereal in the early 1960s. Her inspiration for the flavor coating was a recipe flavored with butter and brown sugar that her grandmother, Luella Low, used to serve her as a child in Derry, New Hampshire.

Cap’n Crunch was officially unveiled in 1963 and the original recipe has been unchanged since its launch. Lowe also worked on the flavors for Almond Joy and Mounds candy bars while at Arthur D. Little.

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