Welcome to The Neighborhood Pub

MuddyUm. Where Everybody Knows Your Name

And Reads! And Claps! And Laughs!

I’ve noticed something here on MuddyUm. It’s not like anything else I’ve experienced on any of the other platforms I type on.

Okay, you caught me there. I don’t type on any other platforms.

But I DO participate in social media. And I’ve been using computers in groups since the 1980’s.

Working for IBM back in the day, standing up in front of people and telling them, “hey, there’s this thing called the internet! It’s gonna be HYUUUUGE!!!” was just not a very exciting story. People looked at me like I was a chicken with 2 heads. What is all that squawking about?

When I would pitch state of the art telecommunications equipment and high speed telecom T1 rates to an enterprise’s entire workforce, well, let’s just say, it was too soon.

There were no apps. There was barely an email system. There were no cell phones, at least not practically speaking.

But I had a vision. I had read up about the Minitel experiment in France.

I knew about smart cards and smart chips and how they were being used in Asia. Even though in the United States, nobody seemed to have a clue.

I had learned to program and I got myself an early programmer’s access ID to get access outside of the IBM intranet and into the outside internet.

And for the most part — everyone I was speaking with was right. It wasn’t very exciting. To see anything that was there to be seen, mostly in university servers — you needed to be a programmer and be able to speak with HAL directly.

I was able to do that.

I could write in APL. And GML. And some other languages too.

APL is two generations before C. The functions are all Greek characters.

But I knew Fortran as well. APL was more powerful. And beautiful to write in.

And GML was a predecessor to HTML. GML eventually morphed into HTML.

So there were no browsers. No Google. No email outside of the corporation.

Heck, even AOL wasn’t fully birthed yet.

It was peaceful, and quiet, and exciting. A lot like being in a library.

But I imagined what it would grow into. The same way we, as writers, do world building in fantasy or science fiction, I was imagining what it would look like.

I imagined that it would have the power to connect people, to connect humans. And that it would be used for good purposes.

I never really dreamed that it would be used for bad purposes. Yeah, that was just naive.

After my programming stint I became a systems engineer. I remember telling management that we needed a wall of faces. The branch office was so big, I told them, that if someone said, “go see Larry” about that, I was clueless. Who was Larry? Where did he sit? Is he tall or short, or what? What’s he wearing today?

So I recommended a bulletin board with photos and names. And they put that up. It was so helpful. It was the first ‘facebook’.

I imagined that the brand new internet, which no one could envision HOW we would use, would be for things like that — to connect people.

Apparently some smart people agreed. And today we have facebook. And social media.

Anyway…. I’m glad I got to be a part of all that early building. Because it means that today I get to sit on my computer in my PJ’s at home and write fun stories. About my life, experiences, historical and current. I get to meet fun people and share funny stories.

Like, A Horse Walks Into a Bar.

This is MuddyUm. Where everyone knows your name. And guess what? You are always glad you came.

And everyone reads. And claps! And laughs. And has a good time.

Welcome to MuddyUm.

© Susan Brearley, 2019 All Rights Reserved

Susan Brearley is a brilliant strategist, a published book author, writer, seasoned editor, essayist, occasional comedy writer, and an accidental poet. She is currently working on her second book, a murder mystery about an OCD detective, who’s been called a “young version of Monk.” She’s a retired systems engineer and salesperson from IBM, a serial entrepreneur, and a survivor of a stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer since 1995. She’s also working on her US Coast Guard Captain’s license, has her US Sailing keelboat certification, and is the creator and elder teacher of a new program, “VisionQuest” that mentors and teaches adults of all ages how to create the life they were born to live. She is currently based in the mid-Hudson Valley, New York.