The sky is gray, and fog rests between the trees at the edge
of a field on the Samson farm near Marshall, Missouri. It is 7 o'clock in
the morning of February 8, 1996. Beams of light spill out of the
farmhouse windows. Across the yard, eight huge cylindrical silos rise
up from the ground. Two guard dogs are chained in front of the vehicle
barns. The air is mild, and the soil is moist and muddy from the ice that
is just beginning to thaw.
The Samsons have been farming in this place for decades. They do not raise
any animals, but grow grains like corn and wheat on their land.
E. Benedick Samson, 61, and his wife Maryann, 56 (in the picture),
have six children, five of them girls.
Four have married, and all of them have left the farm. The
family spread out across the Unites States and followed their lives in
separate directions. And then came RAIN.
John Watson came up with the idea to offer Internet access and electronic
telecommunications for the Mid-Missouri area in the summer of 1993.
After negotiations with a nearby network
provider failed, Watson joined David Jones, Vice
President of Mid-Missouri Telephone, and together they made RAIN,
the Rural Area Information Network. RAIN started with
a donated mainframe computer from Carfax, a Columbia, MO company.
RAIN is open to anyone who has a computer and a modem. Its main intention
is to provide electronic communication and Internet access in a rural
area. Watson speaks of the project philosophically. "I strongly feel that
rural access to the internet is of as much importance as interstate
highways were in the past," he says.
"In fact the internet could well be the conduit that returns to rural areas,
the very jobs and people that left via interstate highways in decades past."
Today, RAIN has more than 2500 users who access the system through a
network of nine local telephone companies.
Schools and librarys get free access, and text-based access is free to all.
But starting in April 1996, Mid
Missouri Telephone
will charge $20 per Month for full internet access with the SLIP
protocol, which will allow those customers to use graphical TCP programs
such as Netscape. The other eight companies are expected to follow
Missouri Telephone's lead, charging for service according to their expenses.
According to Watson, without RAIN, none of the nine phone companies
could afford to offer internet access to this sparsely populated area.
If Watson is right, then the Internet will change the landscape of the mostly rural mid-Missouri. A visit to the Samson farm may give a glimpse of just how that might already be happening.
Maryann Samson did not care a lot about computer networks and used her personal
computer to manage the farm business. Then, back in 1993,
she heard about electronic mail
forums from other farmers of the area, and got some information about RAIN
at the Marshall library. Maryann has a degree in Business Administration
but nontheless knew that help with farm taxes and current information about
changes in law could be very useful. So she got a modem and learned about
e-mail accessing RAIN with the free dialup service.
After several of their children gained access to the internet, keeping in
touch with the family now involves electronic telecommunications.
Lisa Samson, living at Virginia, uses e-mail and is building a Web homepage
about childhood disorders. Maryann Redelfs, one of her married sisters,
studied Agriculture and her current job
at the University of Missouri extention is to promote agricultural ressources
from computer networks and to teach how to use them.
Sarah Samson is a student at the University of Missouri and frequently uses
the university's Internet connection to send messages home to her parents.
Her brother Benedick works for McDonnell-Douglas in another state and uses
e-mail to contact the family. Even several of the farmers' grandchildren
have e-mail acces through their schools and exchange messages with other
family members.
