Via: MBA Online I remember going into the Undergraduate Library (UGL) at UT Austin (affectionately referred to as the Ugly) in the early 90s and seeing all these weirdos typing messages into computers using a program called Eudora. I always wondered what the hell they were doing and thought Eudora was just about the stupidest name I'd ever heard. My girlfriend, now wife and not particularly tech savvy back then, tried to explain it to me as she used it to send "email" to her dad, a researcher at the Medical Center in Houston. Email? Why not just pick up the phone and talk? It sounded like a silly thing to me and I completely wrote it off as a nerd thing my girl fell into. It could have been worse I suppose. She could have fallen in with a biker gang. Or, shudder, hippies. Fast forward twenty years and we have lots of crazily named things we can't do without: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, eBay, Woot!, iEverything. Email is our lifeline to friends, family, the world. And places like Idea City and people like me make our living wrangling the strange forces of this "Internet" to our clients' advantage. So thank you Mr. J.C. R. Licklider. You changed the world, gave me a job, and made me fall in love with my silly girlfriend who looked so cute trying to explain technology to me.
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