Editor's Corner
Must-see PC

By Bob McFadden
Web Editor
My father recounted the story as a typical family yarn, but I look back on it as an episode illustrating the arrival of a new epoch.

The place was Covington, a paper mill town nestled in Virginia’s western mountains a few curvy miles from West "By God" Virginia. It was about 1950 or so, when someone carried one of those new television gadgets over to my grandfather’s garage.

My grandfather was a ham radio operator who had a good-sized antenna to facilitate his far-flung communications. Given the terrain and distance from the nearest transmitter, connecting the television to it offered the best chance for a respectable signal.

As expected, the ad hoc demonstration was a catalyst for convening the neighborhood men. This assemblage had come of age alongside radio listening to Fibber McGee, "The Shadow" and Edward R. Murrow, but there they were, standing for hours before the glowing picture tube, staring in rapt attention at — a test pattern.

Today the Internet often triggers that same head-scratching, puzzled response. Since television’s introduction, we became used to a parade of technological marvels. But the Net, with the mind-numbing pace of its evolution, can still simultaneously amaze and amuse.

The Web genie has been unleashed and the world will never be the same. In the blink of a few years, our vernacular has been punctuated with cyber-this and dot-com-that as we wade through a sea change in human history.

I was working as an editor at the Danville Register & Bee when I first encountered the Internet about seven years ago. I was clueless then, having heard only that it was a remarkable conduit for electronic messages and pictures of "nekkid" women. After a demonstration and some aimless surfing, it seemed like a pleasant enough diversion with some vaguely inherent possibilities that I couldn’t quite grasp. Then the husband of one of my colleagues turned to the computer. He was seeking an online ad for a particular used farm tractor. Evidently this model had rolled off the assembly line about the time Eisenhower exited the White House.

Fat chance, I thought, as he began searching. But then I found myself as transfixed as those men outside my grandfather’s garage when he effortlessly uncovered a half-dozen ads for the tractor in question, including one with a picture attached!

That moment was my online epiphany. Call it empowerment or what you will, but it was clear to me then that the Net was the vehicle needed to bring people together in a marketplace of disparate ideas and information.

Ultimately, that’s the name of the online game: information. Toward that end, we recently finished revamping the Virginia Business Web site. If you haven’t visited www.virginiabusiness.com lately, you need to come back for another look. You’ll find daily updates of major statewide business news, in addition to our back issues, market research and reference resources. You can even glean sales leads from our popular "For the Record" section several weeks before your competitors read it in the print version of Virginia Business.

Ideas are flying fast for our next Web site features. It’s a lot of work, but the most fascinating aspect of the Internet is its constant flux of styles, content and technologies.

Even now there’s a lot of dubious buzz about datastreaming television shows right into our computers. Don’t get me wrong. Progress is usually a good thing, but I’m not so sure that I’m ready to face those inevitable commercials for "Must-See PC."