The Rolodex

It was a rainy day and so I decided to work on something I have been putting off for a long time -- cleaning up my contact list. We all have contact lists. Some of us keep them in a Palm Pilot or other personal digital assistant. Others keep them in a small spiral notepad. Some still use the Rolodex. When Alfred Neustadter (born in Brooklyn, NY in 1910 and died in 1996) invented the Rolodex and began marketing it in 1958, he may not have realized that in the twenty-first century, when people in the world of business and government referred to a "well connected" person with a lot of contacts, they would say he or she "has a good Rolodex".

To build my "Rolodex", I started to accumulate contact records more than twenty years ago using a system at IBM called PROFS (The IBM Professional Office System that allowed users to "send and receive information via a computer terminal") which employees used mostly for internal communications. In the early 1990's I got to know Bill Machrone at PC Magazine. Shortly after that I got hooked on learning everything I could about the Internet and I discovered a set of standards called X.400 which provided a way to send emails between various incompatible email systems using the Internet as the transport between them. Back then most companies had no connection between the Internet and their internal systems even though today we just take it for granted that all email conforms to the Internet standard called SMTP which assures compatibility. I still remember the joy (and complexity) of sending Bill an email and him replying to it. Bill and many consultants and members of the press were using MCIMail, a proprietary messaging system that used addresses that were like phone numbers; e.g. 445-4496. I began to accumulate contact information for those with whom I corresponded on various systems including Compuserve, Spectrum, and Prodigy. In 1994 I began to use Lotus Notes and I consolidated all of the contact information into the Notes address book. I continue to use Notes with IBM but, for various reasons since I retired in 2001, I primarily use Outlook.

So much for the history -- the cumulative result of many years of messaging was a contact list numbering 3,838 names with corresponding email addresses, fax and phone numbers, snailmail addresses and other information. I have always considered the contact list to be an important asset and have regularly kept multiple backup copies of it on my ThinkPad, my server, on DVD, USB Keys and a synchronized copy of the Sony Ericsson P900. I can not imagine losing it. On the other hand, a lot of the information had become obsolete. People move, retire, and unfortunately pass on. I decided to take the time to go through each and every entry, pruning out those that I knew were duplicative or invalid for whatever reason. It took quite a few hours and the end result was a reduction in the number of contact records from 3,838 to 2,475 or 35.5%. A savings in space but more importantly an upgrade in the quality of the asset. (read more)

Internet Technology September 29, 2004 04:51 PM