Inter-County
RECC
Entering
the Internet
February 1996
Jim Jacobus went
downstairs about 10 o’clock one evening to do some work on his
home computer. “The next time I looked at the clock it was 2:30 in
the morning,” he says.
 This is a typical
story of how people, and businesses, get involved in the worldwide
network of computers known as the Internet.
Jim is vice
president of member services and marketing at Inter-County Rural
Electric Cooperative, which serves some 18,500 customers outside its
Danville headquarters in central Kentucky. Inter-County is taking
its first steps toward communicating electronically with its
consumers. What is typical about this story is that organizations
that have Internet addresses or home pages often get those features
as a result of an employee getting bitten by the computer bug.
Jim had been
talking with Inter-County’s Vice President of Operations, Steve
Souder, about how Steve hooked his computer up to a telephone modem
and a phone line to read information from the thousands of other
computers and information banks that make up the Internet. At about
the same time, Jim, who is on the board of the local Chamber of
Commerce, had to line up a breakfast speaker. He called on Leonard
Childers, the owner of Computer Mart, a local computer store. One
thing led to another, and Jim invited Leonard to get Inter-County
signed on to Searnet, which is a local connection to the Internet.
Now that
Inter-County is hooked into Searnet, for the cost of a local call,
employees can call up important business information, such as
frequently updated weather forecasts. They can send electronic mail
that whisks messages to people with other electronic mailboxes.
Other electric co-ops in Kentucky are beginning to explore ways to
use the Internet, such as reading about the latest scientific
research to improve electric service.
“This is going
to be the way of the future,” says Jim. “You can essentially
access the world at very low cost.”
Inter-County is
considering whether to start a home page, which is a kind of
electronic magazine about a company or a person, that you can access
through the Internet. For now, the co-op has an Internet address
that allows you to send electronic mail from your computer to
theirs. To send Inter-County an e-mail message, its Internet address
is: ICRECC@Searnet.com.
So what does Jim
do while he’s “surfing the net” for 4-1/2 hours in the
evening/ morning? He says it’s a powerful way to do genealogical
research, and that he has enjoyed looking up information on the
Civil War. But he’s especially fascinated these days by a section
of the Internet called Live Cam. It seems people have set up outdoor
video cameras and hooked them into the Internet in a lot of
different places around the country: Pikes Peak, the Grand Canyon,
Hawaii, Boston, Atlanta, New York, Boulder, Colo.
“I like to take
a look at those and see what the weather looks like at that moment,”
says Jim. “Any subject you want to look into, it’s out there on
the Internet.”-Paul Wesslund |
