G is for Google (of course!)

How in the world did I survive the first 55 years of my life without Google, spellcheckers and my own personal computers?  It was difficult, but somehow I did it!  But I don't want to go back to the old ways.

I feel like a dinosaur. In high school, I was the nerd with the big K&E slide rule on his hip. When I started working, I typed using a manual typewriter and to make copies one had to either use carbon paper or type on vellum paper and run it through the Ozalid machine.

I enjoyed writing and I had to have a Webster's Dictionary (in, gasp!, book form) at my elbow. Some of the pages were dog-eared so I could easily and quickly find the words that I frequently screwed up.  Some words, like occasion I cannot to this day remember how to spell. Is it two C's or two S's? Darn if I can remember. Thankfully, just about everywhere that I type on a computer will give me a heads up with a red underline that I should do a right click on the word and fix it.

And, yes, I frequently lamented, "How the hell can I find the word in the dictionary, if I don't know how to spell it!"

Research back then meant looking in the encyclopedias. Yes, the book version. Not nearly as broad as Wikipedia and often out-of-date. Although, the door-to-door salesmen would always pitch the sale of their yearly updates.

But the arrival of the web and search engines changed things forever. My first search engine love was DogPile.  They went out and grabbed info from multiple early search engines and displayed them for you. (I just went to that site for the first time in 15 years and it still exists. In fact, I tried their image search and that's how I found the Ozalid machine picture above.)

Google, however, came out and it soon surpassed every other search engine. And, I use it every day multiple times. Type in your symptoms and it will suggest sites you can peruse to diagnose and doctor yourself. Want to read the latest political indictment? Within a couple of hours of it being put on the web, they'll point you to it. Want to see how many Darhl Caylor's there are in the world, just ask. See this to understand who Darhl Caylor is.

Man, we sure have come a long way, Baby!

Postscript: When I was typing this blog post, I fouled up the spelling of dinosaur so badly that both the spellchecker and Google gave up on me.  After all, T-Rex and his cousins weren't popular with I was a kid. I need for Google to add a FWIM -- Find What I Mean -- button to their web page.