Podcast Series: Control, Alt, Innovate: Perspectives on Technological Advancements
Podcast Title: 	Logging On: Histories of Life Before and After Computers
Producer: Cali Cooper (Class of 2026)
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Cali Cooper, Narrator 

In the past few years, society has seen an incredible rise in artificial intelligence technology - a development that has forced almost all fields to adapt while sparking global debate about the role of artificial intelligence in our lives. In late 2022, Open AI released ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence tool that, as of August 2025, hit a benchmark of 700 million weekly users. As astutely noted by Stanford University’s 2025 Artificial Intelligence Index Report, “AI is rapidly moving from the lab to daily life.” 

However, artificial intelligence is just the latest technological change that has led society to readjust our ways of living. In the past century, changes in telecommunications, media forms, transportation, agriculture, computing, and health technology have redefined our systems and habits. In this podcast series, Control, Alt, Innovate: Perspectives on Technological Advancements, this Uni High Oral History Project sets out to understand how the rise of new technologies have impacted our lives over the past century.

From Uni High, I’m Cali Cooper, a member of the Class of 2026.

This episode in our series is Logging On: Histories of Life Before and After Computers. In this podcast, we will explore the shifts in how technology has shaped our work, communication, and accessibilities over the past century. Through firsthand accounts, we’ll examine the early days of manual typewriters, the advent of personal computers, and the rise of the internet and social media.

The journey of technology has had far reaching effects – from typewriters, which required a strong touch to push through ribbon ink, to floppy disks and hard drives, to the revolutionary graphical web browser, Mosaic, created at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These tools not only simplified tasks like word processing and communication, but they also fundamentally changed entire industries such as science, farming, libraries, and graphic design. Along the way, the internet blew doors open for many people to access information, connect, and communicate at speeds they never imagined. Along with these technological advancements, new questions would arise about accuracy, privacy, and safety. 

Champaign-Urbana resident Celia Elliot regularly used a typewriter for her schoolwork as a high school student in Tolono in the mid-1960s.

Celia Elliot
The summer before I was a freshman in high school, my mother decided that I needed to learn how to type.  I took typing at Central High School here in Champaign, and there was one other of my friends, who also had a progressive mother. The two moms took turns carpooling, driving us into Champaign every day, and picking us up, and driving us home, so we could learn how to type. They had these giant Underwood manual typewriters that you really got to push on the keys to get them to work. And my old Smith Corona was such an improvement over those big manual underwood typewriters. I really, really felt like I had won the lottery, and I had my own typewriter, and it was portable and usable. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
Urbana resident Margaret Lovell recalls using a manual typewriter as a 1960s high schooler in Washington, DC and later transitioning to an electronic typewriter for work. 

Margaret Lovell
When I was in high school we took a class in typing, girls and boys both took a class in typing. And we had manual typewriters, so that means it had no electricity involved at all. It was a device that sat on a desk and had a roller and a dial on both ends, a handle on both ends, and you would put paper on the backside of the roller and then you would turn the little handles and the paper would come up the front side of the roller. And then you would begin to type and actual little pieces of metal that had the letters on the ends of them would smack the ribbon that had the ink on it and then put the impression on the paper and then move over one character at a time. So that was what I learned to type on, and I was very bad at it. I typed 12 words a minute and that was a ridiculously low number of words per minute. So I never really got a job as a secretary as a typist, as a result of that. And then they came out with electric typewriters where they went faster. You didn't have to hit the keys as hard. And then they got more sophisticated and they had a ball instead of a key and the ball would rotate as you press a key. So you’d press “w” and a little ball in the innards of the typewriter would move so the “w” was what was impressed on the paper.


Cali Cooper, Narrator 
Paula Kaufman, the first Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at the University of Illinois from 1999 to 2013 remembers the challenge of making a mistake while using a typewriter. 

Paula Kaufman
It did not have an undo function, it did not have a delete function, and you had a ribbon in it so you had, you know, to keep replacing the ribbon in it as it ran out, or dried up or whatever. And you could get a ribbon that was just all black or a ribbon that had black on the top and red on the bottom. I worked a couple summers in an accountants office and we needed the red for deficits on the ballot sheets. To undo a mistake, you had to use white-out or there was a piece of paper, too, some sort of papery thing that you could put in and it would white out if you just had made a mistake with like one letter. Otherwise, you had to use this stuff that came in a bottle that looked like a bottle of nail polish.

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
Several interviewees lived through the introduction of computers - first used in places of work starting in the 1960s and later for personal use. Early computers operated very differently from computers we use now. 

Margaret Lovell

… computers used to be as big as this room! And they used to have to have their own air conditioning system because they generated so much heat. And the way you talked to computers back then was either through tape that had little holes punched in it or cards that had holes punched in them. You would program the hole puncher. You didn't program the computer. You programmed the hole puncher and then the cards were fed into the computer and the computer did whatever computations you'd ask it to do. So my first computer experience was working with the punch cards.

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
Retired university librarian Paula Kaufman also recalls using punch cards in the early days of computers - cards pierced with holes representing data that would then be fed into a computer to be read and processed. Here she reflects on early mainframe computers. 

Paula Kaufman
So when I worked at Columbia as the head of the business library the punch card machine was right outside my office. It was not fun. It was very noisy. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
The advent of computers revolutionized the workplace, transforming how professionals communicated, stored data, and performed tasks. For many, the shift meant more efficiency. But for others, it presented a learning curve that required adaptation. 

Lovell recalls her first personal computer, acquired in the mid-1970s. 

Margaret Lovell
I would guess it would’ve been maybe 1974. My husband and I bought a IBM - what they called a PC, a “personal computer” - for our business and the programming was still in DOS. I had to learn how to talk to the computer and then I did. And then there were these applications and I don’t even remember, and you didn't download anything you bought the disk. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
John Dudley, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Crop Sciences, remembers the first time he acquired a computer at work to assist with research.  

John Dudley
At the university, we had access to a mainframe that we could use. And I had graduate students who worked on that mainframe. I decided, “Well, I’ve got a good deal here! I’ve got all these people doing work for me – why should I start using a personal computer?” But then one of my students managed to get some money with a grant, and what he wanted to do with it was buy me a personal computer so I’d start doing some of the work. And, actually, that was a good thing. It meant that I could do a lot more in terms of calculations. And, for my research, that was a big deal because we dealt with a lot of numbers. And it made it a lot easier for me to communicate with people. Now, on the negative side, it meant that I did a lot of my own typing, because I used to have a secretary that did all the typing for me.  But, it was better that I did it myself because it was quicker. I was saving time that way. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
Paula Kaufman recalls her first work computer when she worked at Columbia University’s library in New York City. 

Paula Kaufman
I applied for the job as the Head of Services at the Columbia Libraries, which was like the second person in charge. And, all of the public-facing services reported to me. And, part of my negotiations of 1982 for my job was for a computer because we did not have computers in our offices. And I was given a DEC computer, Digital Equipment Company computer that had all of the software integrated into it. We didn’t have PowerPoint and nothing was in color. But there was a word processor, there was a spreadsheet of sorts, there was an unusable database system. I mostly used it for word processing. And it had eight-inch floppy discs and no backup. So, I wrote my first annual report very proudly on this thing, and it crashed and it got lost.

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
Kaufman also shares how in the early days of digital library systems, institutions struggled to implement technology that was functional and user-friendly. 

Paula Kaufman
At Columbia, we implemented an integrated online catalog system. Catalog records did not magically get into these systems, they had to be entered. And we contracted with a company called Bibliotech, which had six big customers. And Columbia’s one of the major libraries, so it was one of the customers. And they went bankrupt because they tried to personalize or customize for each of its customers. And, tell us you can customize, and yes, we’ll ask for it. And they never charged us to customize, it was just part of the package. So they went bankrupt, and then we had to figure out what in the world we were going to do. 

Other libraries tried to build their own systems. And, in fact, we did here. I wasn’t here at the time, but we did. I was still at Columbia back in the 80s. We worked with a big publisher called Elsevier that had an experiment to put science and medical journals on CD-ROM, and we found I think there were a half a dozen or so faculty members and asked them to try it out. So each one had this big computer thing. And, they hated it. It was much easier for them to use the medical journals in paper that they were used to using than this thing that was always breaking down and they always had to find the right disc to put in. And, it was a pain. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
The introduction of the internet and email would become another technological revolution. The internet, first developed in the 1960s by the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), and email, first invented in 1971 by American Ray Tomlinson, was introduced more widely to American society in the 1990s,  providing a new gateway to information. With the internet, access to knowledge rapidly began to shift as information became available at the click of a button. 

Local Central Illinois farmer Dennis Wenger of Fairbury reflects on his early memories of using web browsers to access the internet. Web browsers, first launched in the 1990s, played a crucial role in integrating the internet into American society by allowing people to easily access the world wide web.

Dennis Wenger
I was probably at an age old enough that it was just hard to comprehend what we’re actually accessing. My mother, who’s much older than me, would say, “Well is it a big book?” or “Is it an  encyclopedia?” or “Is it a dictionary?” “What is it?” And, those things were probably almost were going through my head when they first talked about accessing the Internet. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign played a crucial role in creating one of the first widely available web browsers, Mosaic. Developed on campus at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and released in 1993, Mosaic pioneered integrating text and graphics and, overall, improving usability, a crucial step for allowing non-computer geeks to also access the web.  Colleen Bushell, now a Senior Research Scientist at NCSA, worked for NCSA as a graduate student on the development of Mosaic. She reminisces about the complexities of sharing information on the internet before the development of an easy to use web browser. 

Colleen Bushell
So there were, at that time before Mosaic, there were several different methods for sharing information over the internet. And so, it could be something called FTP, which was File Transfer Protocol. That was a way to share files. There was something called WAIS, W-A-I-S. There were a few others now that I’m forgetting. And there was HTTP, which is what the web uses, or the markup language. So, there were all these different ways that you could move things around on the internet and each one had their own kind of tool to use, their own software to use. So, part of the goal of Mosaic was instead of it being that you had to use all of these different pieces, how about creating one tool that you could use to use all of those techniques and then be able to more easily share files. And we were thinking of it primarily for supporting scientists in sharing documents that they needed to share. And so, what was decided is that http, the world—the “www,” the markup language, http language, was gonna be the basic basis of how that browser would show information. And so, it was the first one that then combined all of those and created one way to kind of look at all those. So, each of those were individually created by some other group, but it was brought together in the first browser called Mosaic. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
The team faced key design challenges, like keeping the interface clean while including branding. They solved this with an animation logo. Another challenge was helping users create web pages, leading to the “view source” feature, which encouraged learning. Mosaic also had to work across Windows, Mac, and Unix to ensure its accessibility. 

Colleen Bushell
At the same time, some of the leadership at NCSA wanted us to put the NCSA logo on the software. But, at that time I was fighting that a lot because I thought it would add too much clutter; we didn’t want a lot of clutter on the interface. And so, the compromise was that we used the logo as the way to show that information was being transferred. So, we had kind of an animated globe spin when the information was being transferred. So that wasn’t so much challenging, but it was one that we had to debate and promote and ended up creating. 

The other one I would say, a big challenge, was that we were afraid that people wouldn’t know how to create web documents and be able to then use the tool, and we did not want to create an entire editor for creating documents. And so, what we did as a compromise, is we put a feature in Mosaic that was called “view source,” which meant, click on it and now you can open up that same document, but see all the coding that was done for that document to make it look the way it looks as a way to help people learn themselves how to create documents. And that I think really helped it grow fast because people that wanted to do it could just share examples and kind of figure it out on their own. At that time, we would also have to have software that would work on different kinds of computers. So a Microsoft Windows computer, an Apple, and then something called Unix. And so, one thing that was tricky was how much to make them all look the same or different. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 
Instead of waiting for a formal launch, the developers released new features as soon as they were ready. Early users provided rapid feedback which helped shape the browser’s development. As popularity grew, coordination became more structured.

Colleen Bushell
Marc Andreessen, who was leading that effort. He just started releasing it as soon as he had different features ready to go that he wanted to share. And, he put it out there to the public for free and a lot of people adopted it very quickly. And so, in the beginning, he was getting hundreds of messages a day from people saying that they liked this and, “try this, try that,” all giving suggestions. So, there wasn’t really a plan of, “okay, we’re not going to release till a certain time.” Initially, Marc would just release it as soon as he had something ready. Eventually, when we had to start coordinating the different features and the different software across different platforms, then we had to coordinate more. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 

Soon after the release of Mosaic, Bushell and her colleagues sought to showcase examples of the kinds of things you could do with the internet. Before she knew it, she was working on a project requested by Al Gore, the Vice President of the United States.

Colleen Bushell
At the beginning, most of the kinds of things people would do would be almost like a small brochure—the kind of short information on one page, or it would be a place you could go to find files. And so, we wanted to do some projects to show how you could do more with it. And so, I do remember getting an email from our director, Larry Smarr, who said,“Can you work with the vice president on creating these ideas that we had had of doing a virtual office?” And the whole time I thought when our director was talking about it, that he meant the vice president of one of the companies that worked with us, like Eli Lily or Caterpillar. And it wasn’t ‘till I got the email forwarded that said “Albert Gore” at the end, I thought, oh, that vice president! So, it was very exciting. We worked with someone from his office. We created a virtual office space so it was a way to kind of show another way of how you can use the internet. And the scenario was people working on policy development—how they could share documents, so like an archive of files. But then, they could also chat with each other and that was something new too. We called it “the watercooler,” which was supposed to mimic the idea of just running in people in the hallway and having casual conversations. Which is now just what you do with texting and iMessage kind of thing all the time. We organized them into more like an office space kind of virtual building. So, it was fun to do that. Then we used that as a model to create other sorts of environments for people. 

Cali Cooper, Narrator 

By December 1993, The New York Times featured an article about Mosaic on the cover of its business section. The article trumpeted that [quote], “Mosaic’s many passionate proponents hail it as the first ‘killer app’ of network computing – an applications program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch.” Other web browsers would follow - Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and today’s dominant browser, Google Chrome. Access to the world wide web would transform almost every profession. 


The journey of computers and the internet has dramatically changed from primitive mainframes and punch card systems to today's advanced, sophisticated digital networks. Regardless of technological changes, its main purpose has always been to improve the accessibility and efficiency of communication. Computers have reshaped the world of work starting from transforming libraries and academic research to changing publishing, design, and engineering. While opening up endless possibilities–they also introduce new challenges in credibility, security, and accessibility. The influence of technology will continue to expand in the future, so its functions in simplifying processes, enhancing collaboration, and increasing knowledge will continue to strengthen. 

Thank you for listening to Logging On: Histories of Life Before and After Computers an episode in the series, Control, Alt, Innovate: Perspectives on Technological Advancements, a student-produced podcast by Uni High’s oral history project team. All interviews featured in this podcast were conducted in Spring 2024 by Uni’s eighth-grade class. If you’d like to listen to previous episodes of Control, Alt, Innovate: Perspectives on Technological Advancements, check out the WILL website at will.illinois.edu/illinoisyouthmedia.