I was in a panic, already hanging up the phone from the computer modem cradle and stashing under the bed the TI-700 computer terminal Lewis De Payne had lent me for a few weeks. Back then, before the days of the personal computer, all I had was a terminal and a modem that I was using to connect to a system at a company or university. No computer monitor: the responses to my commands would print out on a long roll of thermal paper.