OTA Dispatch Issue 3, 2021

25 www.ortrucking.org Issue 3 | 2021 Nevertheless, I still recall one fateful evening in 1980 when I ventured for the first time to drive downtown to make use of an ATM machine to withdraw the cash my bride had requested, and I forgot to retrieve that day. It was dark and the street was lonely but illuminated by the light emanating from the ATM machine. I inserted my card and attempted to make the transaction. The machine did not return my card. No cash was dispensed. A plexiglass screen descended locking me out of the machine and the light went off. I went home without either my ATM card or the cash I had sought. I will share one more of my technology memories. I was working for GE Capitol TIP Trailer Leasing in 1985. I returned from a two-week road trip visiting my branch locations throughout the southwestern states. When I returned to the office, I found that the steno pool was gone, there was no more dictation equipment on my desk, and in the office, there was new, never seen before equipment. On my desk I found a TANDY TRS-80 computer. It was a one-piece unit combining screen and keyboard. It had two 9" floppy drives, although I had no idea why. It was explained to me that I would now be typing my own correspondence. What? Even while in college I dictated my term papers to my dad’s secretary, and she returned finished drafts to me. How could anybody type on this machine when the keys were not in alphabetical order on the keyboard? Instead of sending daily federal express packages containing documents to the home office I was to now use overnight batch processing to send documents to Philadelphia. Where was the slot to insert the documents? I shook my head and recall at the time I said, “Remember you heard this first from me … these damn computers will never catch on in corporate America!” Having thus established my proclivity for recognizing and adopting new technology, I will share that it is my experience as time went forward during my days at GE Capital that it seemed as if the rate of the development and introduction of new technologies only accelerated and continues to do so today. In my early career, I went out into the field with a beeper to alert me that I needed to stop and find a land line to call the office or client. That soon changed to a voice pager that allowed a brief oral message to be sent to my pager. Car phones emerged soon after with a box of electronics mounted in the trunk and a traditional telephone in a cradle on the transmission hump. Now mobile telephone communications were enabled albeit tied to my vehicle. When combined with the voice pager, this proved to be a technological leap resulting in my increased availability to customers and staff. I continued to find new technologies popping up in the office as well. First came standalone speakers to accompany desk phones. Most interestingly, another companion product to the desk phone was an automatic dialer with the capacity to store multiple phone numbers. I still chuckle as I recall the inexorable pranks played on the VP as his auto dialer was reprogrammed with numbers ringing to Dial a Joke, Dial a Prayer, Dial a Rabbi, etc., etc. to replace the numbers originally programmed for district offices, corporate departments or clients. Most everyone is familiar today with FAX machines. In my early days, instead of a FAX machine we had either a QWIP or a DEX device. To use this device, you called the number of another phone equipped with a similar device and then put the phone handset into a cradle. A single piece of paper was attached to a rotating spindle and a needle passed over the full length of the revolving paper over two minutes and transmitted a poor-quality facsimile of the document to the receiving station. A few years later, the first FAX machines came out and my office acquired one of them. It was a large rectangular box that took up half the top of a standard desk. It took six minutes to send one page, but the document quality was dramatically improved over what a QWIP machine could produce. I think we can all recollect the continuing march of evolving technology as were witness to the first cell phones—mine was the Motorola “Brick” phone which was substantial in size but groundbreaking as it enabled the user to carry telephone availability along with them wherever they might go. Those first models