Three decades ago today, my wife and I were on the road somewhere on U.S. 60 in south-central Missouri, on our way to Washington, D.C., from Springfield, Mo.
We turned on the radio. There was network special coverage on. The space shuttle? What happened?
When Australian funny lady (and psychologist) Pamela Stephenson went on Britain's TV-am in December 1986, no one knew eggs-actly what the hell she was doing.
But at least weather presenter Wincey Willis was an egg-cellent ducker.
THAT YEAR, the independent-TV morning show crew got off easy.
In the fall of 1986, a new prime-time news program hit the ABC airwaves -- Our World.
It was a news magazine devoted to the news of days past, with Linda Ellerbee and Ray Gandolf as hosts. I minored in history, so I was a sucker for this show.
Sadly, not so many others were.
Anyway, direct from the fall of '86, Our Worldlooks at the summer of '69.
Long ago, in a universe far away, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web.
There was a primitive Internet in this primitive universe, and there were extremely slow telephone modems, and there were Commodore 64 computers, too. Likewise, there was a service called Quantum Link.
A few years later, you would know it by a more familiar name -- America Online. Which is now AOL.
Which is kind of peripheral to what we do on the Internet.
Once upon a time, though, this promotional video was selling us what we imagined to be a George Jetson world, and today was barely imaginable.
