Foreign correspondents tend to be early adopters of technology. When the first laptops came along (before the word “laptop” really existed) I got one of them–a Tandy TRS-80, which had a screen that showed about eight lines of text. I’ve heard that the code for those things was written in the early 1980s by a young geek named Bill Gates. As they say, that story is too good to check. Then along came the TRS-200, soon nudged aside by the Toshiba 1000SE. Skip forward a decade and my peer group was the first to use Thuraya satphones to transmit stories from far-flung locations that had no international phone lines (hello Kandahar 2001). But I’ve been late to the social networking party; the usual excuses apply. Now I’m on board. Give me a shout on Facebook (here’s the link for my page and here’s one for the Crude World group, or follow me on Twitter (please!).
