Old Friends (and new ways of connecting)

I enjoyed a special treat this afternoon: 90 minutes chatting with two old friends via Skype. The three of us met as green graduate students at Cornell University around this time of year in 1983. Wow - that was twenty six years ago! Hard to imagine. That was the first year I used a computer; at that time we were required to write all our course papers on the mainframe terminals available in computer labs around campus. I'm sure we never imagined that one day we'd be talking to each other across continents via laptops. For most of the intervening years we've been separated by thousands of miles, only meeting up occasionally. Today Sue and Jacki were together in Boston and took advantage of that rare event to talk to me. I love the way that Skype allows us all to chat together at the same time. Hope we'll get together in person one day!