It wasn't exactly plug-and-play the way the modem box promised. For one thing, we have SABRE sets, not just ordinary PCs. American Airlines rents us the equipment, and we happen to have stuff that's several years old as well as not having sound cards, more than 16 colors, or extra serial ports. My boss Betsie went through a ton of trouble to find out what she needed to do to get online with the computers we have, only to find out after several weeks of waiting that all we needed was an external modem. Sheesh. American Airlines makes money on their CRS equipment so naturally they didn't want to help.

Anyway, I ordered a modem, puzzled over the 9-pin serial port and my modem's 25-pin plug, got advice from Allen Baum to go buy a serial cable, fiddled with the phone lines, got advice from Doug Hanke about the phone jacks, tried and discarded two different trial CD-ROMs, and finally got us organized on AOL. I haven't ever used AOL before. It's certainly easy to use compared to BellSouth or AT&T. I sent myself email. We all cheered. Then we went home for the weekend, so I haven't tried browsing the Internet on it yet. I can't wait to see what it looks like in 16 colors instead of 256, she said sarcastically.