* MCR COMPANY *

** ABOUT MCR COMPANY **

Welcome to the official World Wide Web home page of MCR Company, your local computer sales, repair, and consulting specialists. We have been serving our community since 1989 from our convenient home-based location.

MCR Company was founded by Mike Yoder and operated from the side entrance of his home. What started as a passion for technology grew into a full service computer repair operation serving individuals and small businesses alike.

We operated from 1989 to 2004 -- witnessing firsthand the most dramatic period of technological change in human history. From the days of Z80 processors and cassette tape storage to the rise of the World Wide Web, we were there every step of the way!

NOTE: This domain, mcrco.com, was registered on November 22, 1994 -- making it one of the earliest small business domains on the World Wide Web. At the time, most businesses did not even know what a domain name WAS!

** OUR SERVICES **

• Computer Repair & Diagnostics
• Computer Sales & Configuration
• Hardware Upgrades (RAM, Hard Drive, CPU)
• Software Installation & Troubleshooting
• DOS & Windows Configuration
• Modem Installation & Setup
• Printer Repair & Maintenance
• Data Recovery
• Network Cabling (Token Ring & Early Ethernet)
• Computer Consulting
• Internet Access Setup & Configuration
• Custom Computer Builds

** A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERSONAL COMPUTING **

(As Witnessed by MCR Company, 1989-2004)

When MCR Company opened its doors in 1989, personal computing was a very different world. To understand where we are today, you must understand where we came from. Sit back and enjoy this trip down memory lane!

-- THE EARLY DAYS (Pre-1989) --

Before IBM made the PC a household word, home computing meant machines like the Commodore 64, Apple II, TRS-80, and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. These machines used processors like the Zilog Z80 and MOS 6502 -- chips that ran at a blazing 1-4 MHz and addressed a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory!

Storage? You loaded your programs from a cassette tape! Press play, wait several minutes, and hope for the best. Floppy disks were a luxury.

Monitors were almost universally green phosphor -- the glowing green text on black background that you have seen in countless science fiction movies. Later came amber monitors, which were considered easier on the eyes. Color monitors were extremely expensive and reserved for high-end systems.

"If it glowed green, it was computing. That green screen was the window to the digital future." -- MCR Company, 1989

-- THE PROCESSOR REVOLUTION --

The heart of any computer is its processor, and the evolution of the CPU during our years in business was nothing short of remarkable:

NOTE ON RAM: When MCR Company opened in 1989, a typical machine had 640 kilobytes of RAM -- and DOS could not address more than that! Bill Gates was famously (mis)quoted as saying "640K ought to be enough for anybody." By the time we closed in 2004, machines commonly had 512 megabytes or more -- nearly 1,000 times as much!

-- STORAGE: FROM CASSETTES TO CD-ROM --

-- MODEMS: THE GATEWAY TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD --

Before broadband, before cable internet, before DSL -- there was the modem. The word modem comes from MOdulator-DEModulator. It converted digital computer signals into analog sounds that could travel over ordinary telephone lines.

The evolution of the modem was a journey from painfully slow to merely slow:

THE ACOUSTIC COUPLER: The first modem most of us ever used was the acoustic coupler. You would call a number on your telephone, listen for the carrier tone, then PLACE THE HANDSET into rubber cups on the modem device. The modem would screech and squeal as it negotiated a connection. Any noise in the room -- someone talking, a car outside, a cough -- could drop your connection instantly. It was maddening. It was wonderful. It was 1982.

-- SOFTWARE: FROM DOS TO WINDOWS --

In the beginning, there was DOS. The Disk Operating System was the foundation of everything. No mouse, no icons, no windows -- just a blinking cursor and a C:\> prompt waiting for your command.

REMEMBER: In the DOS era, you had to know commands. To copy a file you typed COPY C:\FILE.TXT A:\. To list files you typed DIR. To run a program you typed its name. There was no "double-click." There was no mouse at all on many systems. You either knew the commands or you were lost.

UNIX was the powerful, professional operating system used by universities and large corporations. It was expensive, required specialized hardware, and was far beyond the reach of ordinary users and small businesses. The rest of us used whatever we could afford -- which usually meant DOS.

-- THE INTERNET IN 1994 --

In 1994, the Internet was not the place you went to watch videos or buy things. It was a text-based world of email, Usenet newsgroups, FTP file transfers, Telnet, and a brand new thing called the World Wide Web.

Most people accessed the internet through dial-up connections to universities or through services like CompuServe, Prodigy, or the brand new America Online (AOL). The familiar sound of a modem connecting -- that screeching, squealing handshake -- was the sound of the future arriving one kilobyte at a time.

The World Wide Web itself was only a few years old in 1994. Tim Berners-Lee had invented it in 1989 at CERN. By 1994 it was just beginning to spread beyond academic circles. Netscape Navigator launched in late 1994 and changed everything -- suddenly ordinary people could browse the web with a real graphical browser!

Internet tools of 1994:

• Email - Electronic mail. Revolutionary. Send a message anywhere in the world instantly!
• Usenet - Newsgroups. Online discussion boards for every topic imaginable.
• FTP - File Transfer Protocol. Download files from servers around the world.
• Telnet - Log into remote computers over the internet.
• Gopher - A menu-based way to navigate internet resources. Predated the Web.
• Archie - Search tool for FTP archives. The Google of 1994.
• Veronica - Search tool for Gopher servers.
• WAIS - Wide Area Information Server. Full-text search databases.
• IRC - Internet Relay Chat. Real-time text chat with people worldwide.
• The World Wide Web - Brand new in 1994. The future nobody knew was coming.
• Finger - Look up information about other internet users.
• Talk - Real-time text conversation between two users.
• Pine / Elm - Text-based email programs. No mouse required.

-- THE HOLY GRAIL: THE INTERNET COMPLETE REFERENCE --

In 1994, if you wanted to understand the Internet, there was ONE book you needed. "The Internet Complete Reference" by Harley Hahn and Rick Stout was the definitive guide to everything the internet had to offer.

At MCR Company, we called it The Holy Grail. Every person who came to us asking about the internet, we pointed them to this book. At 817 pages, it covered everything:

• Electronic Mail (Email) -- what it was and how to use it
• Usenet Newsgroups -- the social media of 1994
• FTP -- downloading files from the internet
• Telnet -- connecting to remote computers
• Gopher -- navigating internet resources
• Archie & Veronica -- searching the early internet
• IRC -- real-time internet chat
• The World Wide Web -- a new chapter in internet history
• WAIS -- Wide Area Information Servers
• The Finger service -- looking up internet users
• Talk -- real time conversation
• Mailing lists -- email discussion groups
• And much, much more...

Harley Hahn earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Waterloo and a graduate degree from UC San Diego. He had also studied medicine at the University of Toronto. This combination of analytical rigor and accessible writing style made the book both authoritative and readable -- a rare combination in technical publishing.

The book was later revised and published as a second edition in 1996, and Hahn went on to write Harley Hahn's Internet & Web Yellow Pages which became the first internet book to sell more than a million copies.

"Before Google, before Wikipedia, before any of it -- this book was how you learned the internet. If you found it in someone's house in 1994, you knew they were serious about this new technology." -- MCR Company

Read it free online: The Internet Archive has preserved this historic book for posterity. You can read the original 1994 edition at:
https://archive.org/details/internetcomplete00hahn

** THEN vs NOW: HOW FAR WE HAVE COME **

** CONTACT MCR COMPANY **

MCR Company is no longer in operation, having closed in 2004 after 15 years of service. However, this domain and website stand as a testament to those early days of personal computing and the World Wide Web.

For inquiries about this historic website or its contents:
Email: mike.y@mail.com

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