James A. McClure

I’m fascinated by the tiny-house trend. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’re probably aware of the growing interest in downsizing one’s home to the size of a food truck. Lilliputian residences are showing up in magazine articles and even reality TV shows. The dinky dwellings are kind of cute: I could imagine one in my family room.

Some tiny houses carry torpedoes

The tiny-house enthusiasts are ingenious in finding creative ways to miniaturize a lifestyle. I marvel at the discipline of people who can fit an entire wardrobe into a gym locker and bathe in a coffin-sized bathroom. Tiny houses have come a long way since the  Unabomber pioneered the trend in the 1990s. But picturesque and stylish as they are, they look about as comfortable as the crew’s quarters on a submarine and could get tiresome for long-term living.

I am not tempted to move into a tiny house because I grew up in a tiny apartment in Chicago. Our family of four lived in three rooms on the third floor until I was 12 years old. My parents unfolded a sofa bed in a living room that also contained an upright piano, a chest of drawers with fold-down desk and a chair or two. A corner of the room next to the radiator was my favorite place to read in the winter.

My younger brother and I occupied a small bedroom with bunk beds, and we could all fit around the kitchen table with a little squeezing. Somehow, there was enough room for everything we owned in a couple of closets and a storage enclosure in the building’s basement.

The apartment didn’t feel that small at the time, at least not from a child’s perspective, but in retrospect I marvel at my parents’ ability to create a comfortable home in minimal space. We were by no means poor, but living small was what many families did in the 1940s and 50s when it took years to save up the down payment for a house.

I was grateful to leave that apartment and have lived in a succession of bigger houses ever since. I have no desire to live in a mansion but my four-bedroom house is just the right size for me, the cats and the occasional house guest. I rarely use my living room and formal dining room, but the space will come in handy next week when I host a social club dinner for 20 people.

Eventually I may move to a smaller home or condo as age catches up with me. But my next house definitely won’t be tiny.

Bruce Jenner for president

A lot of us voted for Barack Obama because he’s African-American and are ready to vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman. If we are committed to identity as a major factor in electing a president, we’re in for a tedious succession of Hispanic, Asian, Muslim and gay/lesbian candidates in our noble quest for equal opportunity.

Instead, let’s go big on diversity and elect Bruce Jenner as America’s first transgender president. Think about it: Jenner’s already a celebrity, traveled overseas as an Olympian and won more medals than any Nobel laureate. If anybody can defeat the Clinton campaign organization, I’ll give the Kardashians better odds than the Republicans. Wouldn’t that campaign be fun!

Eat the prairie chicken

Yum!

There’s a big federal program to preserve the lesser prairie chicken as an endangered species. That’s controversial because the oil and ranching industries could take a big hit. I’m all for saving the prairie chicken. It looks tasty and I’ll bet it’s good to eat.

Nukes for Ukraine

At the end of the cold war, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons because Russia, the United States and Great Britain signed a treaty in 1994 to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. All three countries welched on that deal. So we’re obligated to give those nuclear weapons back to the Ukrainians. Fair is fair. Then we’ll really see a cease-fire.

Motorcycle helmet law

New Mexico made another attempt to pass a law requiring motorcycle riders to wear helmets with the usual arguments of individual liberty vs. safety. I think motorcyclists should have the freedom to go helmetless if they choose. But first they should be required to register as organ donors.

I finally broke down and got an iPhone a year ago. I carry it when I’m out and about, but most of the time it sits on the kitchen counter. Some days I don’t use it all because my retirement lifestyle doesn’t require much instantaneous communication.

I’ve been using cell phones almost since they were invented. When I was working for Illinois Bell in Chicago, I handled publicity for the first customer trial of cell phones in 1978. Those phones were permanently installed in cars with a suitcase-sized electronics package in the trunk and twin antennas on the roof. They cost thousands of dollars but were quickly snapped up by busy business folks.

During the trial I participated in an informal brainstorming session to suggest a name for the new service. “Bell on wheels” and “ring-a-ding-along” were quickly rejected. AT&T decided to call it Advanced Mobile Phone Service, or AMPS:  the kind of name you night expect from a company dominated by engineers. The name did not stick.

Full commercial service did not start until 1982 because it took longer for the Federal Communications Commission to allocate frequencies and figure out how to regulate the service than for Bell Laboratories and Motorola to develop the technology. (Yes, that’s the same agency that now intends to regulate the Internet.)

As a telephone company guy, I occasionally used cell phones at work. The first portable model, which we called the “boat anchor,” had a battery pack about the size and weight of a bowling ball. Then came the handset-on-steroids “brick.” “Hey, your briefcase is ringing,” someone told me.

The convenience of carrying a phone was a big deal in those days. My work often required me to keep in touch with the office and made me a frequent user of pay phones and pagers — both of which have practically disappeared. I still make it a point to stay reachable by forwarding calls from my home phone to my cell whenever I go out.

Apart from business calls, I was never a heavy cell phone user. I used to marvel at the folks who seemed to spend most of their time shouting into their phones (in the supermarket checkout line) in the days when a lengthy cell phone call was a ten-dollar holler. I’m just as puzzled by people who walk into light poles while gazing down at their smartphones. One of my pet peeves at the gym is people who get engrossed in their phones while occupying the Nautilus machine I’m waiting for. I leave my phone in my locker.

In 1992, about the time cell phones became widespread, a personal-injury lawyer introduced the theory that cell phones cause brain cancer. Since then, scores of studies have failed to establish a link between phone usage and cancer, but alarmists and lawyers remain hopeful. If cell phones really did cause cancer, thousands of the most annoying phone addicts would have removed themselves from the gene pool by now. We should be so lucky. Brain cancer fear should become a non-issue as text messages outstrip voice calls, but may be replaced by some sort of carpal-thumb syndrome.

Early cell phones came with a stern warning to not use the phone while driving — which was universally ignored and quickly dropped. Laws prohibiting driving with handheld phones have not fared much better. I may be the only person in Albuquerque who uses a Bluetooth headset behind the wheel.

Cell phones were second phones for most people in the 1980s and 90s because dropped calls and poor voice quality were common. That’s changed as cell phone service has improved and landline/cable service has deteriorated. I now use my iPhone, rather than my home phone, for conference calls and eventually may scrap the home phone entirely.

I don’t communicate much with my iPhone but like having my contact list, calendar, email and photos synchronized with my iPad and Mac. I used a smartphone app to navigate the subway system on a recent visit to Washington, DC. Other apps lead me back to where I parked my car, help me calculate the tip in a restaurant and check prices at nearby gas stations. iPhone apps promise to be even more useful as senior moments occupy more of my waking hours.

It’s easy to take the Internet for granted. I keep in touch with friends on Facebook and check random facts online the moment a question pops into my head. My generation may be among the last to remember what life was like before Google became a verb.

I began using email around 1980, and in 1983 a colleague in the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) launched the Public Relations and Marketing Forum on CompuServe (a predecessor of America Online). The forum, which included email and a chat room, eventually grew to more than 20,000 members.

At about the same time, information began moving online with services like Lexis, a legal database for lawyers, and Nexis, a database of news articles that immediately became popular among journalists and public relations people. None of this was interconnected: We had to rent a separate terminal to retrieve and print Nexis articles, and could not download them or share them on our own corporate network.

The promise of the Internet was exciting, even in those days, but technical limitations got in the way. Memory was limited, processors were poky and using a modem to send data over ordinary telephone lines was painfully slow. The draft of this blog post – a 120KB Microsoft Word document – would take 53 minutes to transmit with a 300 bps modem vs. a fraction of a second with the 50 Mbps cable broadband connection I have today.

So the online chat sessions I enjoyed on the CompuServe PR forum ran at a snail’s pace and encouraged multitasking. I would post a comment to the chat room and go downstairs to get a cup of coffee. When a response eventually appeared on my screen, I would type another comment and then read the newspaper for a while. It was what Citizen’s Band radio might have been like on Quaaludes. A telephone conference call would have been faster, but our commitment to the technology outweighed the inconvenience.

In the early 1990s, technical limitations meant that the desktop-publishing file for an employee newspaper I edited was too large to fit on a floppy disk. To work with an outside designer I would set up a modem connection to transmit the file, then get in my car and drive 45 minutes to arrive at the designer’s house about the time the file reached his computer.

Getting online with a modem involved listening to a series of squeaks and squawks until a fax-like scream indicated a successful connection. When I connected a modem to my first Macintosh in 1990, the modem kept emitting a faintly musical chirping and failed to connect. I wondered if it might be picking up a local ethnic radio station a half-mile from my house and turned on the radio to compare the sounds. Sure enough, my modem was receiving the Polish Hour. So I called the modem manufacturer’s help desk to complain that my modem was playing polka music. That’s never happened before, I was told. The solution was to wrap the modem’s phone cord in tinfoil. Honest. And it worked.

Online chat rooms and email listservs created a new kind of community, a precursor of today’s social media. In the Compuserve PR forum I got acquainted with my peers around the country, and about 20 of us met face-to-face for the first time at the 1984 PRSA national convention in Denver. In the 1990s several listservs for people who stutter gave me a multinational circle of friends who occasionally had “eyeball” sessions at the annual National Stuttering Association conference.

The Internet also changed the end product of my work. After a career of killing trees, most of my writing in the last decade has appeared online rather than on paper in the atoms-to-bits evolution that is beginning to dominate the economy. So I can no longer call myself an ink-stained wretch. One thing I like about publishing online is the ability to incorporate Internet links that amplify and clarify what I’m writing: something you can’t do with dead trees and a Linotype.

Best of all, the technical limitations I endured for years have practically disappeared. I no longer worry about filling up my computer’s hard drive or spend long minutes gazing at a whirling beachball on the screen. The Internet satisfies my news-junkie appetite for the latest information – unless I get distracted by cat videos.

I don’t think about my computer, at least not consciously, because it’s integrated into my life almost seamlessly: my calendar, checkbook, photo album, newspaper. Best of all, it’s an extension of my mind that allows me to express myself almost effortlessly.

The process of putting words on paper for a living was what eventually led me to computers. In my first newspaper job in the 1960s I used a manual typewriter, carbon paper and a jar of rubber cement to literally piece stories together (hence the cut and paste word processing commands). As a speechwriter, media relations manager and publication editor I filled wastebaskets writing and rewriting thousands of words a week. It was a lot of work, often followed by a frustrating wait as a typist produced the finished news release or speech manuscript just in time for the deadline.

So the invention of the word processor was a big deal for me. The Navy office where my reserve unit met got a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) word processor in 1979, and I went in after hours to teach myself how to create and edit documents and store them on 8-inch floppy disks. It took an entire evening to figure out that the machine would not print unless I turned on the printer before powering up the word processor, and that pounding on the equipment did not help.

A few years later my company, Illinois Bell, assigned me to project-manage a computer system for the 200-employee public relations department. We chose a DEC system driven by a couple of minicomputers with an array of computer terminals and desktop word processors (before the IBM PC came on the market). It took a year to get the project approved by a corporate IT establishment that was accustomed to mainframe mega-systems and could not understand why we wanted a terminal on every desk.

The system was an immediate hit because word processing and email streamlined the cycle of writing, editing and approval that dominated our work. Some folks learned faster than others. A short-tempered colleague would appear at my office door ranting when his machine would not respond to invective. When I sent one executive an email, his secretary printed it out for him and I received his handwritten answer via interoffice mail the following day.

The people on my project team were the first to use email, and our communications were extremely informal and often irreverent. Shortly after we opened email to the rest of the department I noticed one woman recoiling from her terminal in shock. I asked her what was wrong and she pointed to an email on her screen from one of my team members that included a barnyard epithet. “That man… swore,” she exclaimed. Email quickly evolved into a more conventional corporate memo.

In those days everybody was talking about the paperless office. Wish I’d bought stock in a paper company. At first everybody used dot-matrix line printers that sounded like ripping paper. Our system at Illinois Bell had an early Xerox laser printer that was the size of a Maytag, cost about $25,000 and rarely worked. By the mid-1980s we were using better-functioning Canon desktop laser printers that cost about $8,000. These days I replace a printer when a new machine costs less than a replacement ink cartridge for the old one.

I began experimenting with portable computing in the 1980s with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop: an ingenious three-pound machine with an 8-line LED screen, 8KB memory and full-size keyboard. It was popular with newspaper reporters because it had a built-in modem, ran on flashlight batteries and was practically idiot-proof.

Meanwhile, I got an Apple II at home and upgraded to a Macintosh in the early 1990s. I programmed the Mac to meow like a cat, which fascinated my cat and amused me. Until, that is, a technician told me my malfunctioning disk drive had a hairball. After I left corporate life in 1990, home computing made it easy for me to start a freelance business because the technology in my basement was as good as the computers in my clients’ corporate offices.

Over the years I’ve had a succession of Macs, printers and assorted peripherals. I’ve opened computer cases to add RAM chips and even gave one Mac a processor upgrade. Each successive generation of computers, including my current Mac laptop, has been easier to use and more trouble-free than the last.

Most of all, I appreciate the way computers have made writing easier and more fun than ever. I can put words together quickly and edit relentlessly without the mechanics of the process getting between me and my readers.