Tuesday Night Tunes – Freebies
The internet economy changed everything. I remember getting my first email address back in 1994. I just wrote that number down and realized it was 20 years ago. It was a Compuserve address and I have no clue what it was. I remember something like 72456@compuserve.com but I am pretty sure that is not right but it was something like that. No one knew how much things were going to change but they did.
The first thing I did with it was write my friend Dan. He was working in Quito Ecuador in a power station in the jungle. I had his email address and I wrote to him from my basement office in Indianapolis. In a couple of minutes I got the ‘ding’ of my first email message and it was Dan!! Now that was cool! We got to catch up a bit since he had been living down there for months with his family.
Lots has changed since that day.
Take Austin Plaine for example. His music is below and it’s free from NoiseTrade.com He gets to reach out to his fans and future fans for what is I am sure little to nothing and build a following that will come see him when he’s in concert somewhere. To get his music you give up your email address and zipcode and then download his music. You can give him a ‘tip’ if you like but you don’t have to.
Check it out.
You can click right up there and play his songs for free while you read the rest of this. Try it.
Here is another change. Education online. I love TED Talks. This one came in my inbox today and since it is music connected I thought I would share. Pretty cool what you can do with a snare drum.
So those two things have changed because of the internet. Think about Napster, AOL, Prodigy, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google, iTunes, Google All Play, Amazon and a host of other things. It is all different. Not sure it’s better but it’s here to stay.
What are some of the big changes it has brought to you?? Would love to hear from you. BTW, if you were born after 1994 then maybe this won’t mean as much to you and is does to me. I remember a 110 baud modem with an acoustic coupler to download 4K of core memory in one of the first industrial controllers to a central storage location in Andover, MA from New Stanton, PA at the Volkswagen plant I was working at in 1978.
By: Digital Game Museum – CC BY 2.0
It looked a little like the picture above. Yes, that thing with the dial on it is a phone. Yes, it’s connected with a wire to the wall. Yeah, I’m that old and I’ve been around technology for a long time. How about you?
Thanks for listening,
Jerry Robertson