Most of the people using NCF during the first few years were college students, high school students and other young people around town. From time to time the media would discover some old folks getting involved and this was considered to be newsworthy. I became an early token "elderly computer communicator." On several occasions cameras, lights and microphones were mounted around me to record the seemingly amazing fact that a woman in her 70s was capable of manipulating a computer. The camera was invariably aimed at my age marked hands on the keyboard for emphasis.

Wandering far afield around the Internet to see what other groups were doing, I found some exclusive "for a fee" seniors' "web clubs" in the US, so I established a free and all-inclusive one on freenet, intended to be open to the world. After a few years there were so many of us old folks at home on the World Wide Web that we were no longer an "item".

REAL-TIME ON-LINE
For the first Internet Conference, held at Carleton, I set up a news system whereby Freenet organizers across Canada could know what was being discussed and decided here in Ottawa. I did it as an experiment in what then was a very new medium, to find out how it could be done and to demonstrate its usefulness. We named ourselves "Real Time On Line."

Recruiting in our Seniors discussion group I selected ten team members, seven reporters, two translators, and a transmitter, all of whom were as curious and adventurous as I. A reporter took notes at each session, went immediately into a computer room to input an instant account which was then translated into French and transmitted bilingually by email to a list of Freenet reps across Canada. This was all happening as the conference unrolled, so the report of one session would be going out before the next session was over.

Whether or not other Freenet people across Canada were sitting around awaiting our every word was not an issue. The point was that this then innovative way of getting news from one point to many points could be done. Had we paid ten professionals to perform this function it could not have been done better. My assumptions about volunteers, and about older citizens both proved to be correct. Also, we discovered that people were happy to get these reports. We received complimentary remarks during the conference and the week following.

INFORMATION HIGHWAY
The Canadian Government became intrigued by the Internet and set up some boards to plan for its development. While the Internet was growing in leaps and bounds all around the world, there was a steady stream of discussion groups trying to control, plan, and regulate. These people couldn't get through a sentence without using the expression, "information highway." The thinking seemed to be that the use of the Internet was some sort of sudden explosion that would change the world. Even though there was then no more information available on the Internet than in any well stocked library, life, it seemed, would never be the same.

JUST ANOTHER PENCIL
As I viewed all this excitement over just one more step in a steady stream of innovations, my definition became, "just another pencil". As a child in the 1920s I had learned to write on a little wood-framed, hand-held slate. From there we progressed through pencils and paper, pens with blotting, dripping ink that stained our fingers and our pinafores, fountain pens, typewriters, manual and electric, and then a series of word processors.

In the business of printing and publishing, word processors became a part of my daily life. There were times when staying on the cutting edge of the industry required the use of type-producing machinery that became obsolete before it had been paid for. The big blue Compuwriters that now rest in dumps around the world were typical. Machines resembling today's computers came and went and when modems were introduced, we linked them together. That's when the perceived need for legislation and regulation got serious.

COMPUTERS AS A BUSINESS TOOL
I was using computers to write my newspaper editorials and articles, to do the accounts for the printshop, and was figuring out how to use a modem to import features from other writers. One of the first experiments was in bringing Claire Hoy's weekly column into the Hill Times office from the Press Gallery a few blocks away, not easy considering neither he nor I were technicians and the process was undergoing change as we learned it. No system was finite. From a lifetime of experience, I knew not to expect any part of it to remain the same from one year to the next. With mental telepathy and virtual extra sensory perception around the corner, nothing will surprise those of us who have dealt with an accelerating acceleration of changes for more than three quarters of a century.

NEWSPAPERS ON-LINE
Professor Warren Thorngate of Carleton's Psychology Department helped me figure out how to put The Hill Times, and The Ottawa X Press, and THE EQUITY online with their own discussion groups as part of Freenet. The Hill Times later became the first newspaper in this region, and perhaps in Canada, to have a Web site on the Internet, an interesting feat manoeuvered with my small Macintosh laptop.

By the time they held their first general election, my involvement with National Capital Freenet had led me to become a director. It didn't take long, however, for me to realize that there was an enormous contribution possible from seniors, but not in a board room where the younger directors were burdened with an urge to control, limit and regulate a medium which does not lend itself to these things.

FREENET FOR THE FUN OF IT
As instigator of the Seniors special interest group, I helped people learn how to use it, how to cope with eachothers' obscenity and flames when necessary, how to find other things on the newsgroups and how to use email. In the process of explaining these things I wrote and self-published a book, "Freenet For the Fun of It," which went into a second edition, published by Stoddart the following year. Both editions were co-authored by Pierre Bourque who contributed useful lists of email and web addresses where readers could find material on a variety of subjects.

These books included discussions on the value and challenge of the Internet and how best to utilize it, contributed by pioneers in community webs. These sections infected me with a need to put the Internet to the best use that I could facilitate.

HTML PRIMER
To move from email and the freenet to a Web site on the World Wide Web, I needed to conquer hypertext markup language and found no easy instruction book, but I did find Rony Aoun, a young Carleton undergraduate who could explain it simply . With him I wrote "HTML the primer for people who would rather do it than read about it." This primer has been distributed through local computer stores, at conferences, and in local high schools, and made it possible for me to set up my first web site, Dickson Family, in which I have included my father's poetry and some of the Dickson and Leslie genealogy from a book I had co-authored with my late husband, David Rutherford Dickson. Although much has changed on the Internet since I wrote the primer, people still refer to it for basics and I depend on it when working with the web site I have built and maintain for the National Press Club of Canada.

EURO-STATS "SIGMA"
Shortly after the book was published I was invited to speak at a "Statistics on the Internet" conference put on by the Statistical Office of the European Communities. Notes from my presentation were picked up by officials at the conference and then published in a three page article entitled "Making your World Wide Web site Worthwhile" in SIGMA, the magazine of European Statisticians of the United Nations Economic Commission, produced in London, England, with English, French, German and Spanish editions. Although we have come a long way since then, that article in SIGMA still holds true in many respects.

THE MEDICAL PROJECT
Starting with a Health discussion group on Freenet, I soon found myself organizing the Ask the Doctors web site which involved over 100 doctors in 21 countries. This project created considerable interest and occupied a great deal of my time. I was invited to speak about medicine on the Internet at an international conference of medical people in San Francisco, and since they paid my way and the hotel fare it was a lovely opportunity which I greatly enjoyed. Insurance costs to doctors very soon changed the availability of online medical discussions so that web site is no longer as useful as it was at its inception.

GREAT GRANNY
Richard Denesiuk of Creative Retirement Manitoba invited me to create a project for their comprehensive Seniors Computer Information Project (SCIP). My segment, called "Ask Great Granny," answers questions about coping with problems arising from the increasing differences in attitudes and life styles between the generations. Questions for "Great Granny" come into my mailbox daily, followed by almost as many "thank-you" letters.

SENIORS ON THE WWW
Following links from the SCIP web site to various senior chat rooms, web sites, and other activities, made me realize that there is a fortuitous relationship between today's seniors and the Internet. There was much going both ways; the seniors contributing special value to the Internet and the Internet making a positive difference in the lives of the seniors. It's a two way influence. I call it symbiosis.

New Canadian Books was another site I had set up when I was books editor at The Hill Times, the newspaper of Parliament, and later, when I was teaching computer use at the Good Companions Senior center I opened a web site for them which is still being continued, by other members.

For several years I had been taking courses in the Graduate School of Journalism at Carleton University, in Ottawa, and felt that my Master's thesis should be a project on the Internet. This prompted me to start work on this present web site. A requirement for the thesis was that it must contain a "preamble" which is why I wrote this little essay. Why I call it "pre-ramble" needs no explanation. When it seemed that Carleton could not accept this as a thesis within the School of Journalism, it nevertheless seemed sufficiently worthwhile to complete and has remained an active web site ever since. To dispel any notion that the elderly are not comfortable with this medium, I have called it "Old Folks at Home on the Internet."

OLD FOLKS!
For those who don't like to be called old, as though being old were avoidable, reversible, disgraceful or criminal, we can refer to ourselves as seniors, mature, retired people, veterans, or whatever you like. As far as I'm concerned, I am an old person who has cranked a Model-T, baked bread in a wood stove, and feel just as comfortable now driving my Camry and downloading software onto my Macintosh. The Internet and all it brings are now regular parts of my life, along with everything that came before, and much which is yet to come. Change is a constant; we old folks know that.