In 1968, Dad covered sports for the New Haven Register in Connecticut. He reported on the New York Jets home games.

He beat the keys of a typewriter and when he finished, he took his story from the typewriter, walked to the Western Union office and “sent” it back to New Haven.

The typewriter never failed to boot up.

The Western Union office never handed him a piece of paper reading, “Your trusted wireless connection is unable to connect at this time.”

As tough as it must have been to type a story without the convenience of a delete key, things were reliable. Always reliable.

Here we are more than 40 years later and I would do about anything for a Western Union.

Sitting at Trustmark Park in Pearl watching the St. Aloysius baseball championship game against West Union, I’m supposed to be providing up-to-the-second updates. I have covered games here before — on all levels — and the wireless connection has never failed before. Updates are being sent from telephone to a co-worker, who then writes up the updates.

Since leaving the Sports Department for our Web site — www.vicksburgpost.com — it has been my charge to get local information out to the world in a timely manner.

The success of that comes down to one simple fact — we are only as good as the Internet connection we have.

Technology, especially in the media business, has made things very simple. Want to know the capital of Peru? Google capital of Peru and in less than a second, you will know.

For many journalists, this is all we have ever known — computers and Internet connections. We never relied on linotype or hot lead. The Vicksburg Evening Post won a Pulitzer Prize for producing a newspaper on the same day a tornado hit the city in 1953. Try that today and, well, I bet the server would be down and the Internet connection lost.

For those here at the Post who have worked through the changing times, it really must grate on their last nerves; they can put out a paper with a typewriter and a stack of white paper if need be.

Things had to have been more difficult years ago, but sitting at this computer with the error message taunting me, I sure do wish I had a Western Union office near me.