Thanks for your comment…

Like others who’ve left comments, I enjoyed the way you segued away from Ollie’s blog into your first memories of the internet. It’s a bit like, where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot? It’s that important, isn’t it?

I know exactly the first moment that Eric Shackle proposed to me helping Olive to blog. My reaction, “what’s a blog?” then finding out, explaining the same to Ollie, all followed in quick succession.

Then I was struck by what Neil Maxwell wrote above, namely about showing Ollie’s blog to his students. Can you make sure that he gets what I’m about to report as to where we are going with the blog, now that she’s gone?

There’s a girl in upstate NY, M…, 14 years old, who wrote back to tell me she’s reading all of Olive’s posts from the very beginning!

I was rather impressed and even more so by her feisty comments. M was revolted of course by Ollie having all her teeth pulled when young, and on the same day! How could she do that?

I enjoyed M’s curiosity as to what was an Aussie meat pie, to which both Ollie and I were addicted. It got even more confusing when I told M our pies contained mince which to her meant chopped fruit and to us means ground meat of course.

I suggested to M that if she wanted to organize her responses in terms of differences she saw in culture and time, I’d post them on the blog in the hopes that they might encourage other kids to discover the delights of Ollie.

As to why M was especially taken, I think I’ve found a clue. She tells me she lives near the Amish. Anyway this might help Neill with his students if M does come online, which will be soon.

It’s sad that Ollie’s following was much larger overseas, esp. in the US, than here. That’s due to the fact that the Aust. media decided, until she died, to have a grumpy response to the story

“She’s not the oldest blogger because she doesn’t type,” sort of thing. Consequently Australians were denied knowing about their wonderful compatriot till her death, at which point she was reported and apparently suddenly acceptable as the oldest blogger.

ABC regional radio was always good. But our broadsheets did not want to know about her, nor big city radio or TV.

The fact that Jay Leno wanted on his show, that she was on the BBC and Good Morning America, cut no ice with our media.

Ollie did not care of course. But I did. Her story was/is capable of doing so much good in terms of inspiring older folks not to be scared of the internet, and in terms of pushing nursing homes to get computer and internet facilities. They’ll have to face this soon because their upcoming intakes will be compter literate and demand it.

We offered free internet to Ollie’s nursing home but there was some bureaucratic stumble and it never happened.

Secondly, she was very interested in what Epuron will be building near her home town, Broken Hill. They are due to start next year on the biggest wind farm in Australia next, 2 billion dollars worth of slender propellors, slowly spinning in the red heart.

We are so far behind in this technology. I’ve just been to Europe and you see the turbines everywhere there. I had the idea that her interest could be turned to benefit of wind energy. Epuron could make her a patron and that would weirdly inspirational, a 108 year old worried about the future energy needs of her country.

Epuron was indeed interested in hooking up with Olive and if death had not intervened, it might have been. The fact that she was not high profile in Aust. did not help of course.

That’s my one regret, that Aussies did not know her as they should have. Never too late I guess.

Cheers, Mike the scribe.

My first online experience would have been connecting directly with dial-up BBSes and interacting with other users connected at the same time. In 1994 I was working at a job where we were getting business referrals through something called “Prodigy”. At the time Prodigy was a bigger online provider than America Online; I tried both of them out and those were my first true experiences on the world wide web. There was no local internet provider so I had several months of very large telephone bills from spending hours connected over long distances just to go online with Netscape Navigator.

I can remember adding network adapter cards to PC’s running MS Windows 3.1 around 1993. That OS didn’t even know what a network was, let alone the “Internet”. We had to install a 3rd party TCP/IP stack (via floppy) so those machines could go online. We thought Win95 was pretty cool since it was ready for networking.

For a while, I was an avid user of IRC chat. I thought it was really amazing to be able to communicate with others around the world in real time. (I still do.) While I love the blogosphere, I sometimes do miss the real-time chats I used to do.

You might find it interesting that I was just using the Lynx browser today on my Linux system. I still like to use it from time to time to test usability of websites for text only browsers. If you can’t navigate with Lynx, people using assistive technologies can’t navigate either. (Haven’t tried out edublogs.org on Lynx. Will have to try it.)

Great post! I like looking back on how far we’ve come. Sometimes, it really doesn’t seem that far at all and other times it seems like we are light-years ahead of where we were.