Lots of snow here at Strauch Fiber Equipment Co. in New Castle, VA

Twenty fourteen. Sounds so Sci-Fi doesn’t it? To all the younger folks this is just how it is. But to the older generation, of whom I am one, this is so Sci-Fi sounding. Let’s go back in time, maybe 30, or 35 years. Imagine… having to find a telephone booth to make a call. If the person isn’t home, oh well. Alright, alright I know you heard this before, but I remember the first copy machine. It was the size of an office desk and all it did was copy, 1 page at a time. We didn’t have to use carbon paper anymore, yippee, and the first calculators, which were big bulky things. Then one day the company I worked for at the time, brought in this amazing new fangled thing called a …FAX. Whoa, it was a tube that spun and was attached to a phone set. We all stood around and watched it go round & round until a whole page was printed. Now we could get orders from anywhere with just a phone call instead of by the noisy, big, slow teletype machine. Remember, this was when computers took up entire floors of an office building and the functions were limited. You had to know a computer language and be able to program it to even get the most elementary results. Now let’s jump “back” to two thousand and fourteen. I’ll write this on my new iMac which is just a screen on my desk then send it out in an instant to the web for all to see. No programing necessary. I can order anything I want online and not use the mail. Now that we have DSL, I can share pictures just taken lickity split with anyone, anywhere. I can even see and talk with my sister, Jean, who is 500 miles away. We can show each other patterns we are working on or would like to try and the progress we are or are not making on our latest project. Just some thoughts about where I’ve been. Welcome to twenty-fourteen.