User's Guide to the Future

During the summer of 1995 I presented a series called A User’s Guide to the Future on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program in Prince Edward Island.

Here’s the third (and final) of the recovered lost episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in Prince Edward Island in the summer of 1994 (exact broadcast date lost to time).

In this episode, titled A User’s Guide to the Present, we left the future and concentrated on the present: how could “regular everyday people” get hooked up to the “information highway.”

The first thing you need is a modem. This is something you can buy for your computer that allows you to communicate with other computers — like the ones that form the Internet — over normal telephone lines.

When this episode was first broadcast, our local ISP Island Services Network was still several months away from being born: we got our Internet from the now-defunct partnership of Online Support and [[Island Tel]] called PEINet.

This was also pre-Google (still several years away), the first summer of Yahoo!, and we searched the “web” by searching “Gopherspace” using Veronica.

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Here’s the third (and final) of the recovered lost episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in Prince Edward Island in the summer of 1994 (exact broadcast date lost to time).

In this episode, titled A User’s Guide to the Present, we left the future and concentrated on the present: how could “regular everyday people” get hooked up to the “information highway.”

The first thing you need is a modem. This is something you can buy for your computer that allows you to communicate with other computers — like the ones that form the Internet — over normal telephone lines.

When this episode was first broadcast, our local ISP Island Services Network was still several months away from being born: we got our Internet from the now-defunct partnership of Online Support and [[Island Tel]] called PEINet.

This was also pre-Google (still several years away), the first summer of Yahoo!, and we searched the “web” by searching “Gopherspace” using Veronica.

Here’s the first of the recovered lost episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in Prince Edward Island in the summer of 1994 (exact broadcast date lost to time).

Back in 1994 the Internet was new enough to be called “an experimental information highway” and words like “email” weren’t yet in common use. One of the goals of the series was to give Islanders a basic “new technology vocabulary” and in this episode, to that end, we talked about email, and Usenet newsgroups.

I think this episode also marks the debut of my favourite radio phrase: “regular everyday people.”

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Here’s the first of the recovered lost episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in Prince Edward Island in the summer of 1994 (exact broadcast date lost to time).

Back in 1994 the Internet was new enough to be called “an experimental information highway” and words like “email” weren’t yet in common use. One of the goals of the series was to give Islanders a basic “new technology vocabulary” and in this episode, to that end, we talked about email, and Usenet newsgroups.

I think this episode also marks the debut of my favourite radio phrase: “regular everyday people.”

Here’s the second of the recovered lost episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in Prince Edward Island in the summer of 1994 (exact broadcast date lost to time).

In this episode, Wayne Collins and I talked about computers in cars. This was a rather novel thing back in the early-1990s: I’d just sold my 1978 Ford F100 pickup truck, a vehicle so simple that I could replace the brakes by myself and that had electronic nothing.

We talked about onboard engine computers, service bay diagnostic systems, and early in-car GPS navigation systems.

Flash forward 11 years: it can cost hundreds of dollars to get the “check engine” light checked in your car, on-board GPS is standard in many vehicles — to say nothing of satellite radio and Bluetooth mobile phone integration.

Of all the episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, I think this one was the most fun to research, and the one that hit the radio most fully formed.

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Here’s the second of the recovered lost episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in Prince Edward Island in the summer of 1994 (exact broadcast date lost to time).

In this episode, Wayne Collins and I talked about computers in cars. This was a rather novel thing back in the early-1990s: I’d just sold my 1978 Ford F100 pickup truck, a vehicle so simple that I could replace the brakes by myself and that had electronic nothing.

We talked about onboard engine computers, service bay diagnostic systems, and early in-car GPS navigation systems.

Flash forward 11 years: it can cost hundreds of dollars to get the “check engine” light checked in your car, on-board GPS is standard in many vehicles — to say nothing of satellite radio and Bluetooth mobile phone integration.

Of all the episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, I think this one was the most fun to research, and the one that hit the radio most fully formed.

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