SIMPLE TIMES BY SU Z Y Mc C RAY
Technology Improving Big and Small Farms
THE CO-OP PANTRY
I have never physically met my editors at this magazine and met previous editor Jim only twice, even though I have written for this magazine since 2007! When I first started reporting for newspapers in 1980, I wrote my articles on a manual typewriter and then hand-delivered or mailed them to my editors through the U.S. Postal Service! Photos were made with a 35 mm camera with then-black-and-white film developed in-house at the newspapers in a darkroom filled with smelly chemicals and clanging pans. I can remember how excited we were to get our first fax machines giving us “instant” access to our editors and those in other cities! When I started plinking out my articles on a “word processor,” we again rejoiced! A more technically adept co-reporter began sending his articles to the Gadsden Times with an old Radio Shack laptop and
modem he rigged up to send information over phone lines in the early 1990s, but it was a couple of years later before technology allowed us all to just send articles, as well as digital photos, over the internet! Technology has changed so quickly through the years most of us sometimes yearn for those simple times of years gone by. But even on our simple farm we can see ways in which technology enjoyed by the bigger farmers trickles down to us in ways so
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