So part of, the evolution began with the card stuff by, I got there at the tail end of the card, in terms of my professional career, Academics had, you know, they were running three or four years ahead of administrative systems at that point, in terms of use of, you know, they were doing many computer things and even microcomputers were emerging. I was fortunate in my undergrad career to take a couple of courses on, um, microcomputer programming and usage. Well there was hobbyist usage, and that was a guy named Connelly, I think in CS, who, um, was getting into using chips to do personal computer type things. They were are all kind of all in the early product... there was like the Altair computer, and they, so that was one end of it. However, there were, uh,  real applications being leveraged in research departments at Tech, like especially chemistry. as it turned out. There was a guy named Ray Dessy. He and some other people in the chemistry department were doing laboratory automation using microcomputers. Which evolved into something that was very sophisticated and powerful. Kind of a rack size unit called the LSI 11, which was a PDP computer in one box. And there was a class on working with those things, which was like, oh, here's how you grab data from the mass spectrometer and, uh,  do boxcar averaging and stuff to get rid of some of the noise on the signal processing part of it and dealing with different aspects of that technology. However, administrative systems at Tech had not, you know, they they were still in the card area like in 77 and but we were migrating into keeping, uh, things in terms of online disk stuff. That happened, that was a big step. Then there was the emergence of the interactive online tools for system management administration operations. That was the IBM VM 370 system. A little bit before the VM system, there was the, you know, widespread use on campus of the, what were called the  IBM 3270 terminals, which were these big white things with a, you know, 24 by 80 screen that administrative processing could be done on. And that was the beginning of data capture from people at desktops. They were in use by the time I graduated in 77. I want to say maybe I don't know exactly. I'd say, you know, they were probably in use by 75 or 76. I don't know how widely, but it was a kind of thing, you go into the departmental office and, you know, there be somebody had one at least. And that meant once you had people typing data in directly, that was a huge step away from the paper form processing stuff. Because previously, like when I worked in accounting, there was a crew of key punch people who it's like you want to buy something, you'd fill out a form or process any accounts receivable stuff or whatever. There were clerical staff who would process the forms, write them up, or, you know,  edit things that came in from the departments or whatever on paper. And then that would get passed to the key punch people. It would be a batch because you could check it that way and say, well here's this batch of 40 things and, there's, the total is this much. And then the key punch people would punch it all in. And then somebody else, another key punch person, would verify it. By re-punching everything and there was automated things to compare how they were punched. So the reliability of this was incredible in terms of the accuracy of the data. And, you know, they get into the, oh, I can't read this, I can't read that. They try to call people up and figure out what they intended to type and stuff. And sometimes there would be arguments between the key punch people and the people in the other offices. And my boss quit at one point to go to work at Radford and they were, kind of, trying to limp along with me running things. And I found myself in the role, at times, of being the diplomat [laughs] between groups. So in that terminal connections thing, there was the hardware terminals like the 3270 things, then there was, uh, modems where you did the dial up thing. Um, and originally those were, you know, the acoustic coupled modems which had a couple of suction cups, and you put the telephone receiver into it, and if you were lucky and everything worked great, you had 300 bits per second, which was or close to that, which was incredible. And then you got 1,200 which was like, oh that's amazing! You know? Um, so the modem evolution, then you had early LANs, uh which were, they were serial connections that ran around campus, and they did that with, um, it was a thing, one of them was called Datakit I think. It worked pretty well most of the time. And then there was the CBX thing that I mentioned, which was a, that was a big step forward because it was deployed as part of the phone system, which meant everybody had access to a data connection. That was a huge step forward. That enabled a lot of these other technologies eventually. Uh, Ethernet was the thing that came after the CBX type stuff. And along the way, you had, I mean, even back in the time of the modems, you had the emergence of the wide-area networks which was like the BITNET thing, which was, uh, educational institution connections.