Two things, unconnected except they both recalled my past:
The Post is running "Classic Doonesbury". In a recent one Alex, the daughter, is giving her father her Christmas list. She wants a Pentium PC so she can keep up with her classmates, and a 288 modem. I want to say I remember my first modem, but I don't. Could it have been 120/240 baud or 1200/2400 baud? I definitely remember the big advance up the ladder to a 28.8K baud modem. I suspect these days few people remember a "baud" (1 bit per second, where 8 bits equal one byte, which was one character). Back then I was going on-line through Compuserve. So much has changed since then.
Going back even further in time, at some point in the 1940's-50's our poultry flock was hit with Newcastle disease. We had a run of diseases at that time, leading us to change the hatchery supplying our chicks, so I don't remember how bad it was, how many hens it killed, how many eggs weren't laid. I do remember the death toll one of the diseases took, taking the dead hens out and tossing them off a hill into a swamp (I know, not good, but that was another time).
The NYTimes had a Science article on virologists being able to use the Newcastle virus as a means of inserting a vaccine into humans. (Newcastle doesn't do much to people.)
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