Computers

The private ownership of computers by the over-sixties was still relatively rare, though quite a few used them at work. Ruth (here with her late husband, Zion) was one of the pioneers among the elderly, writing plays and essays. Arie R. used the computer for composing music. Shammai wrote his dissertation on Husserl which he finished in 2001, getting his PhD, Yoav L. was into programming. There were about 50 households of people over sixty, only about ten of them had computers.

Among the younger kibbutzniks, 60% had computers and practically all of them had an internet connection.

By May 2002 the number of private internet users was almost 100, one of them had a broadband cable connection which did not work properly, and about a dozen were hooked to our 10-mb LAN. The framerelay had been expanded to 256 kb and we are about to install 10 mb-VDSL connections to the homes of the members.

In February 2003 more than 50 members had been connected to the local area network via the VDSL connection and the bandwidth of our internet connection was expanded to 1Mb. We had also changed our ISP (Bezeq international).

We upgraded our Internet connection d to a bandwith of 2 Mb upload and ½ Mb download in August 2004, bought a new firewall and a bandwidth monitor. About 110 private users were connected to the LAN, more than two thirds of all households.

Another bandwidth upgrade to 4 Mb by 1 Mb in November 2005 wasn't as successful as the previous one, and we were having a few teething problems.

Our 4 by 4 Mb bandwidth served us quite well for about two years. But with the summer holidays looming we needed to expand. We ordered at the beginning of summer of 2008, but with the telephone company dragging its feet for two months ("Sorry, we've mislaid the order"), it was September when we got our upgrade to 8Mb up and 8Mb down. A small step for mankind.

In October 2010 we expanded our bandwidth to 16 by 16 Mb, which hopefully will not be gobbled up by greedy apps in the coming months.