RadioMail User Scoops News Services: Reports Los Angeles Earthquake

A Washington Times article published shortly after the quake reported that Jim Opfer, a telecommunications consultant in Torrance, California, may have been the first to notify the outside world about the devastating L.A. quake.

Jim is an active user of the RadioMail wireless messaging service. Seconds after the quake began, Jim sent a message about it to a number of RadioMail subscribers around the nation.

There are a number of public on-line networks in the U.S. and around the world, including CompuServe, Internet, America OnLine, and Prodigy. RadioMail and other wireless services can broadcast to other wireless subscribers, or can link up to these on-line services and broadcast vital information, when it happens. In fact, according to the Times article, many of these on-line networks reported increases in traffic shortly after the quake, as people tried to get word on friends and relatives in Southern California.

The author of the Times article is a 100LX and RadioMail user, and received nearly a score of quake-related messages in the hours after the quake. The E-mail messages were transmitted to his Motorola InfoTAC modem by Ardis, a radio data network based near Chicago.

The Times article did not indicate whether Jim was an HP Palmtop user on not, but he must have used some battery-powered portable or palmtop computer. His story and those of David Shier, Michael Miora, and Dagoberto Garcia, document the value Palmtops, E-mail and wireless communication proved to be for persons and businesses jolted by the recent quake.