On a recent visit to California I was given a curious document by family friends. They’d found it while cleaning out some files, and thought it might have some historical appeal.
TimesFax was the title on the cover of the stapled, eight-page document. "A special service brought to you by The Manele Bay Hotel in conjunction with the New York Times."
Behind that cover was a faxed mini-newspaper. Inside were some interesting tech gems, a little 20-year-old time capsule to remind that, if a week is a long time in politics, two decades is a couple of geological ages in technology.
Some context: the Manele Bay Hotel is a particularly luxury hotel on Lanai, a small Hawaiian island next to the better-known Maui. At the time this document was faxed – faxed! – on November 23th, 1993, the hotel would have been one of very few or perhaps the only hotel on the island. It was accessible by infrequent ferry.
So, getting newspapers across would be a delayed process. The fax service was clearly a handy idea, in a pre-email, pre-web world, to give your well-paying guests something to read over the eggs benedict, papaya and breakfast mimosas.
One front page story would not be out of place today: “China Leaders Favor More Growth”, which ponders whether China’s “soaring economy could be brought in for a landing”. A “Western diplomat” noted “there is no austerity program right now”.
Oh, to have that problem, rather than be Ireland after yet another belt-tightening budget.
In other news war veterans were starting to complain of something called “Gulf War Syndrome”, the “language debate was still alive in Catalonia”, the US government was fretting about North Korea, and law enforcement officials feared a new law requiring a waiting period when purchasing a handgun would be little more than a symbolic act, with no real impact on gun violence.
Clearly the world has a Groundhog Day inability to get things right and thus move these topics off the international storylist. Transplant them into the news right now and they would not look amiss.
The technology stories, however, seem so archaic as to induce knowing, indulgent smiles in a reader 20 years later.
Technology reporters
In one a then-young journalist named John Markoff – eventually to become one of America's best known technology reporters – had filed a little story headlined "Sun Microsystems to Join Next Inc".
The formal style of the New York Times noted "in a surprising alliance of former rivals", Sun was due to announce a $10 million investment into Next, described as "the struggling brainchild of Steven P Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer".
Were they rivals? That makes sense as they both had high-performance workstations, but I don’t recall; I had only a mild interest in the technology industry at that time. I did have a friend who had a black NeXTcube computer back then, though, and clearly remember it was just about the coolest PC I’d ever seen.
The idea of a rivalry seems odd now, especially as not too long after Jobs and Sun founder and chief executive Scott McNealy were often described as friends. Rumours regularly went around that Sun would perhaps buy Apple, which was nearly the walking dead by the mid-90s.
'Bitter enemies'
But back then the companies were apparently "bitter enemies, quarrelling over the rapidly growing market for corporate workstation applications".
This was the article my family friends knew I’d find interesting.
But I admit I also enjoyed another timewarp piece called “Sex and the Single CD-ROM” (children, CD-ROMs are what came before DVDs and Netflix. People used to view them on computers).
It was all about the excitement at Comdex – the forerunner of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas – over “multimedia products” for your PC.
“We’ve been waiting for the cost of hardware to fall to the point where the average person can afford it,” said one industry analyst.
And now, as the PC entered the home, demand was there for things to do with it, and "CD-ROM brings unimaginable quantities of knowledge to those for whom information is the most valuable asset", said one Bill Kelly, president of a company called PC Compo Net Inc.
Contrast the polite grammatical construction of that sentence with Mr Kelly's merchandise, "which includes such knowledge bases as LA Strippers: Bikes & Babes & Rock 'n' Roll". A "traffic jam" of men was congregating around the CD-ROM aisles where a number of companies flashed slideshows of such X-rated CDs. Ah, yes, pornography has always been the early adopter of new technologies, famously contributing to the success of both videotape and CD-ROM.
With that, I’ll now return you to 2013.
Oh, but one last little tech connection. That Hawaiian island Lanai? Oracle founder and chief executive Larry Ellison bought it last year. I don't think anyone would have predicted that in 1993.
