After writing close to a thousand of these weekly essays, I won't bury the lead on this one: It's my last column for The Sun.
There. It was hard to say that out loud, and I spent two nights on a half-dozen elegant openings before I decided to get right to the point. Now I can talk about how much fun it's been, and how much I'll miss all of you.
But first, I'll let you in on a secret: I've been faking it all these years.
I am not a computer expert, or a nerd, or a techie by training or aptitude. I was a liberal arts major who barely passed high school math, snoozed through science and never saw a computer, much less touched one, until he was well into his 30s.
But I had a problem. It began with a new assignment on The Evening Sun - one that involved long hours and a longer commute.
With a 3-year-old and an infant at home, I was desperate to find some way to do my job well and still spend quality time with my family.
It occurred to me that I could do this by shifting some work hours around the clock a bit - writing stories late at night after the kids were in bed and filing them electronically by our 7 a.m. deadline.
People were already filing remotely from bureaus, but they were using $5,000 terminals. To make this scheme work within my meager budget, I thought I'd try one of those new home computers I'd been reading about.
Unfortunately, the only thing I knew about these machines was that RadioShack sold them. So I dropped into a Shack in Glen Burnie, convinced the guy behind the counter that I wasn't loco and exchanged $800 for a TRS-80 Color Computer - a gray box with a built-in chiclet keyboard and a cable that hooked up to an old TV set.
Even that seemed like a fortune at the time. But the salesman threw in a 300-baud modem, a tape recorder to store my stories and a phone number for Mark Rothstein, a brilliant electrical engineer who figured out how to make the gadget send my prose to the paper - and inspired me to investigate all the other things the magic box could do.
That was in 1983. And I was right about one thing - the computer did change my life. It certainly gave me more time with my family and made me one of the earliest casual telecommuters, although nobody used the term in those days.
The computer also opened doors. Late at night, after I'd filed my stories and the rest of the family was asleep, I got hooked on the wonderful BASIC programming manual that RadioShack packed with those early machines.
