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Teaching The Baha’i Faith Electronically

© Lloyd Madansky

Before I start my article, I would like to apologize to Suite101 and my readers for my absence over that last few months. I have had a very full summer and have not kept up my responsibility to you. I'm sorry.

My first experience with computers was at work. This was in the mid eighty's and the computers were 8088's networked together to a server. They had very limited use, but I saw then that computers were here to stay.

A few years later my wife had an 8088 donated to here Adoption Support Group. While it had a color monitor, it had no hard drive and 2 5.25 floppy drives. The only problem was that it did not come with any programs. Every computer store we called said we would have to upgrade and that would cost hundreds of dollars. The search continued until my son told me that one of his friend's dad (Jim) was into computers. I went to meet him and that is where my education in computers started. Jim had a number of programs that would work on our machine such as word processing, calendar and spread sheet.

It was after using this computer for a number of months the Caryn and I decided to purchase a new computer. Remember, this was in the late 80's/early 90's. Our purchase was a 486/25SX with a 170 meg hard drive and 8 megs of RAM. It also came with a fast 2400-baud modem and Windows 3.1. In the package we found an ad and software for Prodigy. We joined and discovered the online world. These were the days before Internet access, high-speed modems and the Web. I was in Prodigy the I discovered discussion groups covering many different subject, on being religion, and, within that group, a discussion about the Baha'i Faith. These groups were not read time. I might take hours or even days to get a reply, but this section of Prodigy had unlimited usage at that time.

I jumped into the discussions with both feet only to find that many of the posters were not friendly to the Baha'i Faith, and some were down right antagonistic. There was no moderator as such, and it was wide open. It was great fun for me, and the beginning of my experiance in electronic teaching. As I remember, the Baha'is were outnumbered by non-Baha'is and not all the Baha'is took the same kind of glee I did in open and heated exchanges. Well, all things change, and this was no different. Since much of Prodigy's resources were being used by all the various discussion groups they eliminated the unlimited access and started charging by the minute after so many minutes on line. Like many other subscribers, I left. It was then that Jim (you remember Jim) showed me the world of local Bulletin Board Services