The final episode of the television series “MAS*H,” titled “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” aired Feb. 28, 1983, and was watched by more than 106 million viewers.
That title feels right for my last weekly “Bits and Bytes” column.
I started this column in 1995 to help promote WBBS, the Winsted Bulletin Board System.
WBBS was my dial-up hobbyist bulletin board system, or BBS.
People used it to chat in real time, send emails, play text-based games, take polls, and share public-domain software.
The chat rooms were the most popular part of the BBS, giving people a virtual venue to connect, talk about what was new, and build friendships online, back when many people who heard the word “web” still pictured a spider.
As I learned more about computers and the internet, I began sharing what I learned in this column, “Bits and Bytes.”
I chose the title because a bit is the basic unit of digital information, represented as a 1 or a 0, and eight bits make up one byte, the building blocks behind everything we see on our screens.
Don’t get me started on qubits; those give me a headache.
I fondly recall Sept. 21, 1995, when I brought a taste of e-commerce to a luncheon table at the American Legion Club in Winsted.
There, I used two computers and two phone lines to demonstrate an idea that caught people’s attention.
Residents could shop at a local business’s BBS from their home computers with a phone call.
My demo setup paired a Dell 486DX2 66 desktop, running the BBS software as a simulated online store, with a Hewlett-Packard OmniBook 300 laptop standing in for the customer dialing in from home.
I handed out a two-page overview explaining how the BBS worked, how a business could configure the software for its own products, services, and customer records, and how a customer could connect to browse and place orders.
Many at the luncheon came up afterward to examine the setup, view the information displayed on the monitors, and dial into the BBS just as their customers would.
This demonstration came at a crossover point, as dial-up BBSs, used from the late 1980s into the mid-1990s by businesses, suppliers, and broadcast and print publications, were beginning to give way to the fast-growing websites of the internet.
In my March 25, 1996, column, “Voice Calls Over the Internet,” I described VocalTec’s Internet Phone software.
It enabled primitive voice conversations over the internet, known as VON, or Voice over the Net, using a sound card and headphones connected to the computer rather than a regular telephone.
A friend and I installed and tested VON on our computers and “called” each other over the internet, which convinced me that real telephone calls using the internet were not far off.
As I recall, large telephone carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, and MCI dismissed VON as a novelty, with one calling it “a joke.”
As VON spread among computer hobbyists and drew more attention, America’s Carriers
Telecommunications Association (ACTA) asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban the sale of VON software.
The FCC took comments on the petition but never adopted ACTA’s requested ban, and internet telephony continued to grow.
My Oct. 7, 1996, column covered IDT’s Net2Phone Direct service, which let a call originate and terminate on ordinary telephones while traveling over the internet, with no computers required.
This technology quickly moved internet voice from a computer hobby toward mainstream phone service and gave traditional telecom carriers real reason to worry about subscribers using the internet instead of their long-distance lines.
“Bits and Bytes” ran on the front page Nov. 10, 1997, under the title “City of Winsted on the Web,” about the city’s first website at .
“Currently, eight separate web pages of informational links are provided for the user to choose from to learn more about Winsted and what it has to offer,” I wrote.
I ended with, “Winsted, welcome to the World Wide Web of the internet.”
In a “Bits and Bytes” column Dec. 22, 1997, titled “A website for seniors,” I highlighted a website for older adults, their families, and caregivers. Now, I am old enough to use it.
AT&T was operating its own internet telephony trial in Atlanta, May 1998, offering long-distance calls over the internet for 8.5 cents a minute.
At the time, AT&T’s long-distance plans ran 10 to 15 cents a minute, making the internet trial’s 8.5 cents a clear sign of where prices were heading.
Today, internet phone service, called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, sends voice traffic as digital packets over IP networks, often through high-speed fiber-optic connections.
Now, the per-minute meter is largely gone. Many home VoIP plans include unlimited long distance.
In a July 20, 1998, column titled “Year 2000, a complicated issue for computer users,” I wrote about a congressional hearing in Washington, DC.
At that hearing, industry leaders, lawmakers, consultants, and federal officials met to discuss the looming Year 2000, or Y2K, problem.
People worried that when the calendar reached Jan. 1, 2000, older computer systems that stored the year with only two digits would misread “00” as 1900 instead of 2000.
Many feared this could cause billing programs and other software to process dates as if they were in 1900, not 2000.
“On my personal computer, I went into DOS and typed in ‘date.’ The computer responded by asking me to enter the ‘mm-dd-yy,’ which I did as 01-01-00. The computer responded with ‘invalid date.’
“Uh-oh! But wait a minute. I then typed in the four-digit year 2000, and it worked,” I wrote.
I was at the TDS Telecom Monticello office Dec. 31, 1999, helping ensure its DMS-500 digital telephone switch, optical networking software, and billing system would record the date and time correctly Jan. 1, 2000.
When the clock struck midnight, everything worked as it should, showing it was the year 2000 without any Y2K issues.
In my Aug. 3, 1998, column, I described the dawn of the “interplanetary internet” and highlighted Vint Cerf’s opening keynote at the Internet Society’s INET 1998 Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.
There, he told the audience the time had come to think “beyond the Earth.”
Cerf described early talks with NASA scientists about an interplanetary internet, complete with space-age email and protocols built to handle communication delays between planets.
He predicted that by 2028, we would have colonies on the moon and Mars, plus research stations in orbit, and all of them would need a way to stay connected.
NASA’s Artemis IV mission is targeted for 2028 and aims to send two astronauts to spend about a week near the moon’s south pole, a region of interest because of water ice in permanently shadowed crater floors.
The space agency is also developing LunaNet, a system designed to bring internet-like connectivity to the moon.
If fully implemented, it would keep astronauts and equipment online, though whether it will be ready in time for Artemis IV remains uncertain.
Cerf’s 30-year prediction about internet access on the moon might actually come true.
Another column came from the Coco Moon Coffee Bar in downtown Brainerd Oct. 2, 2006.
“It’s a beautiful fall day, with clear blue skies, sunshine, and cool autumn temperatures. The northland trees are cooperating by showing off some of their stunning fall colors of orange and red,” I wrote.
I wrote the column “Are we becoming web couch potatoes?” Sept. 17, 2007.
In it, I talked about studies from Cisco and the Online Publishers Association that predicted consumers would soon use the internet more than business and government.
With video sites like YouTube driving the change, I came up with the term “web couch potatoes” to describe what we were becoming, a term that surprisingly never caught on.
In my Oct. 6, 2008, column, I wrote about the Trans-Pacific Express, an approximately 11,000-mile fiber-optic submarine cable linking the United States with mainland China, South Korea, and Taiwan.
The US-to-mainland China portion was activated in July 2008, and the broader system was completed later that year.
The column also addressed TAT-1, or Transatlantic No. 1, the first transatlantic undersea telephone cable.
It went into service Sept. 25, 1956, and ran about 2,240 miles from Clarenville, Newfoundland, to Oban, Scotland, near Gallanach Bay.
For the history buffs, the first successful undersea international telegraph cable crossed the English Channel between Dover, England, and Calais, France.
The roughly 25-mile cable was completed in 1851 and opened to the public for telegraph service in November 1851.
In my Nov. 23, 2018, column, I shared a 1968 photo showing employees of the Winsted Telephone Company laying copper submarine telephone cable across Winsted Lake.
They laid over half a mile of cable across the lake bottom to bring phone service to new homes being built on the east side.
The telephone crew lowered the cable off a wooden reel on a pontoon boat and into the water, weighing it down with heavy steel bolts about every 10 feet as they crossed the lake.
This underwater cable served those homes until the early 1980s, when it was replaced with a buried cable around the lake.
My June 21, 2010 column was dedicated to Lynda Jensen, editor of the Herald Journal and Enterprise-Dispatch, who had passed away June 15, 2010.
Lynda supported me so much during the years I wrote these columns. I’ll never forget her sense of humor or the conversations we had.
I truly valued Lynda’s wisdom and friendship.
After her passing, Ivan Raconteur became editor, and I had the pleasure of working with him for many years.
I always read his columns, which were filled with stories about his younger days, his family, and his work, along with thoughtful insights on current issues.
Ivan passed away March 5 of this year, and I miss him.
Today, many of us are weighing the opportunities, challenges, and concerns that come with AI platforms we now use in everyday life.
Some of the best-known examples are ChatGPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic, Gemini from Google, Copilot from Microsoft, Grok from xAI, and Perplexity from Perplexity AI.
My hope is that, over time, people do not hand too much of themselves over to AI.
Before I sign off, I want to thank you, readers, for your emails, suggestions, kind words, and questions over the years.
You made this column better and kept me writing it much longer than I ever expected.
I also want to thank the editors, publishers, columnists, and everyone I interviewed.
All of you helped make this column rewarding.
Many “Bits and Bytes” columns are archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and at bitscolumn.blogspot.com.
The column is also indexed across the Herald Journal Publishing network, appearing under Mark Ollig for the Delano Herald Journal, Dassel-Cokato Enterprise Dispatch, Arlington Enterprise, and Herald Journal.
A Google search for “Mark Ollig Bits and Bytes” will link to many of them. Add a year after “Bytes,” such as “Mark Ollig Bits and Bytes 2008,” to find that year’s columns.
Unfortunately, many of the early “Bits and Bytes” columns were never digitally saved online and only exist in print.
Fortunately, my mom gave me each week’s newspaper when I visited her in Winsted on Saturdays to do her grocery shopping.
I still have plastic bins full of those newspapers. Thank you, Mom.
From here, I plan to spend more time with family and friends, travel, and work on my telephone memorabilia collection.
While this is my farewell to the weekly column, do not be surprised if you see an occasional opinion piece from me now and then.
My curiosity about technology, past, present, and future, continues.
Thank you for reading “Bits and Bytes.”
