Every spring for the past 55 years, the homeowners on both sides of my block have gotten together to clean our alley from one end to the other. With our brooms, rakes, shovels, clippers, and trash cans, we work as a team to find and dispose of every last scrap of debris and yard waste. To complete the day, we gather again in the evening for a potluck dinner in our now immaculate alley. As strange as it might sound to the average person, this is one of the social highlights of my year.
As part of the decluttering process, I did some spring cleaning of my own and rooted out quite a bit of trash and unnecessary treasures from my extremely messy basement. One of those treasures was a March 1996 copy of Computer Telephony magazine. For those of you too young to remember Computer Telephony, it was once the source of information on the burgeoning field of unified communications. It was where most of us old-timers learned about everything from Microsoft’s initial foray into telephony (TAPI) to the latest and greatest voice processing board for our IBM XT computers.
In my latest article for No Jitter, I look back at the year 1996 — what it was and where it took us.
Unified Communications Time Capsule
The 2018 Alley Cleanup Crew
Tao, Zen, and Tomorrow 