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A Web whiz
By JOHN BALZ, Times Staff Writer PEBBLE CREEK -- Otto Witzell "burned" a CD recently. "I'll go to the library, check out a classical CD and burn it," he explains. Oh, so you're a pirate? Witzell laughs. "Who isn't?" At 85, the former mechanical engineering professor is the oldest computer networking guru in Pebble Creek Village. He has put his knowledge to work helping first-time Net surfers and the computer illiterate in the neighborhood. A half-dozen or so neighbors call him regularly with questions about which computer equipment to buy, why an e-mail program won't work or how to put the homeowners association budget in an electronic format. Witzell first worked on a computer at Purdue University after World War II. It took up a space as big as his living room and offered the computer power of a calculator. The first personal computer he owned was an Apple. He got it in 1983, and he doesn't remember what kind it was, but odds are it was an Apple II. Apple didn't offer anything else. Today he uses a 6500 Macintosh desktop, a PowerBook and an IBM compatible laptop, which he keeps just so he can "figure out how to work Windows." Witzell keeps them in his study, next to a rotary telephone. "It works fine," he says about the telephone. Witzell says he's on the computer a couple of hours a day. He keeps a music library of classical tracks in the "upper hundreds." Beethoven is his favorite composer. He has written a program for which he enters stock market quotes of the dozen companies he owns stock in and tracks changes in his daily net worth. Every morning, he checks his blood pressure and enters that figure into a spreadsheet. Sometimes he'll graph the data points and show them to his doctor. "He wanted to know what my Ph.D. was in," says Witzell, who lives with his wife, Jane. But for all his acuity, Witzell doesn't trust the Internet. He doesn't like to say he is nervous about the Internet, just cautious. Smart people are out there ready to steal his personal information, he says. "There are too many ways by which, if I was an untrustworthy fellow, I could get someone's credit card number." Then Witzell makes this last point clear: Getting people's credit card numbers is one thing he does not know how to do. - Do you have a neighbor who belongs in the newspaper? Please let us know. We're looking for people who have done remarkable things, but might not otherwise be featured in our news pages. Please send your idea -- including where the person lives -- to sokol@sptimes.com.
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From the Times |
