The storm roared in at 1:02 in the morning. Rain, hail, wind, lightning. 
Enough to wake a person from a deep sleep. In the end, we received nearly an inch of rain, but no real damage. That is significant because we live in the middle of a forest and such storms often leave with trees on the ground, and quite possibly no electricity in our house.
But what is significant about this particular storm and its arrival at 1:02 in the morning is that Mark Scirto, meteorologist from KLTV, had predicted that the storm would reach our area about 1:00 a.m.. And, he had made that forecast 31 hours before the storm actually hit. Impressive. I ignored the two minute discrepancy.
As I thought about this the next day, I remembered a student I had many decades ago when I was teaching a computer science course at the University of Oklahoma. He was an Army officer sent back to school for additional training. Each student in my class had to undertake a major project. His interest in weather forecasting led to his project: produce maps of isobars. This would be a map with lines connecting points having the same atmospheric pressure.
That far back in computer history, instructing the computer to draw a map was difficult. There were no packages to facilitate such a task. The student had to write the code to position and guide the plotter.
The army officer worked hard and produced a commendable project. 
But he could only get data that was many days old, much of it a week old. To gather data from more than one weather station was not straight forward.
Today, we have an app on our smart phone and can get such a map accurate within the last five minutes. Of course, we can get many other types of weather information, showing the conditions over the last hour or five minutes ago. And we are not limited to our local area. If we want to know about the weather where one of our children is living, be it Pennsylvania, or Kansas, or California, we can get it. Quickly. As fast as we can type.
Of course, we are very interested in the weather this time of the year when thunderstorms and tornados are born, raised, and wandering around. But as an author, it reminded me of the rapid change in the publishing industry. Amazon, Print on Demand, and digital book readers have changed the atmosphere for authors and readers.
Amazon was created on July 5, 1994. It’s difficult to know exactly when POD first became commercially available, but not very far back.
Living in the woods of east Texas, I find it important to keep track of the weather. Ignoring it could be disastrous. Disregarding the rapid changes in the publishing industry could be dangerous to an author.
James R. Callan
If you would like to receive my occasional e-mail, click here to sign up, and I’ll send you either a free book or a short story, your choice.
I promise not to sell or give your e-mail address away. And I won’t spam you either, just fun and free stuff. 
Hey Jim, thanks for the motivation to keep on keeping on. Times has truly changed, some for the better and of course some for the worse. I enjoy reading these bits of nostalgia. What we know from the past can enhance the future
Glad you topped by, Augie. Some bits of nostalgia can often brighten my day. Then sometimes, it saddens my day. Where have the “good old days” gone? But, today is pretty amazing. We can’t stop progress, nor would we want to. Thanks for the comment.
Ah, technology-love it, hate it, but we cannot, as you indicated, ignore it. I can remember when I lugged an entire manuscript to the post office and sent it off to an agent. Very costly. Now they can just hit a key and reject it!
And taking several hard back books on a vacation. Now, just a 5 oz. Kindle. Thanks, Lesley, for stopping by.
There’s still much guess work in weather forecasting, but it’s certainly more accurate than it must have been in the past.
Working in the newspaper industry, I witnessed the introduction of some of those things that have changed publishing–the upgrading of computer systems for instance. Makes you wonder what lies yet in the future.
Yes. Every time we think we have seen it all, something new and amazing comes along. I love technology. But, writing a good paragraph is pretty amazing also. Thanks for the comment.
Hi James, interesting comments on the birth of weather forecasting in computers.
We’ve come a long way in our lifetime as writers just in what we can accomplish sitting at our computer. I worked on one of the first “computers” that used paper reels punched with code. We had all our form letters that went out to customers on those reels. The machine was behind me and my IBM selectric, so while I worked it ran and stopped when I had to turn around and type in customers name, etc. before it would continue on. That was in 1971. It was an IBM machine.
I remember writing a long report. Then, it needed an extra paragraph on page 2, so everything from page 2 on had to be retyped. Another change? Another retyping. And of course, each of those had to be reread carefully since it was all new typing. The computer and word processors have certainly made our life easier – but no less busy. Thanks for your insight, Velda.