ERNIE.txt

Hi Tris,

Regarding your invitation to imagine a character, as a teen in the late 1970s I
was a gas station attendant at a garage that had been a Chrysler dealership many
years earlier - the garage itself had been in business since the 1930s and Ernie,
the owner, my boss, had started there in the 30s as a teen, working his way up
to eventually buying the place.

They had broken tech from even earlier times!  There was a pair of broken
teletypes/teleprinters they had in the past used to locate parts with from
the nearby independent garages on this pre-Internet network.

This was in New Hampshire.  I'm imagining some fictional rural network of
garages never stopping using the teleprinter modem network but just augmented
it over the years with PCs and RPIs and eventually an AI that just knows the
world of quantities of part numbers and printed text via the paper-printing
terminal.

My real boss's name was Ernie.  I'm calling This imagined system AI:

Efficient Resource and Network Inventory Exchange (ERNIE)

"Lost Terminal" doesn't need ERNIE - it is perfect as is, but I had fun just now
remembering that old dealership and the decades of old pre-Internet tech and auto swag -
there was even a me-sized Pegasus from a 1950s or 1960s Mobile Oil sign in the
basement :)

Ed