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You’ve already been sharing your stories with each other through Post It Forward, and you’ve built an amazing, supportive community around those stories. Now here’s your chance to put your empathy to work and master the skills it takes to be a crisis counselor. 

Dozens of Tumblr users are currently in training and Crisis Text Line is eager for more awesome volunteers to be a part of their 2015 Tumblr Corps, lending support to texters who are dealing with a wide range of issues. If you’ve got a computer and a kind heart, apply here. You must live in the United States and be over 18.

President Obama is traveling in Alaska to shine a spotlight on what Alaskans in particular have come to know: Climate change is one of the biggest threats we face; it is being driven by human activity, and it is disrupting Americans’ lives right now.

Hayes Smartmodem

Hayes Microcomputer Products was a U.S.-based manufacturer of modems. They are particularly well known for their Smartmodem, designed by Dale Heatherington, which introduced the ability to control the modem through a simple command language, as opposed to manual operation through front-panel switches. This smart modem approach dramatically simplified operation, making modems a practical device for a much wider audience. Today almost all modems still use a variant of the Hayes command set introduced in the Smartmodem.

Hayes was a major brand in the modem market from the introduction of the original 300 bit/s Smartmodem in 1981, and was particularly well known for high quality. They remained a major vendor throughout the 1980s, periodically introducing models with higher throughput. In the early 1990s a number of greatly cost-reduced high-performance modems were released, notably the SupraFAXModem 14400, which eroded price points across the entire market. Hayes was never able to respond effectively, and the widespread introduction of ADSL and cable modems in the mid-1990s repeatedly drove the company in Chapter 11 protection before being liquidated in 1999.

At the time of its introduction, the modem market was fairly small, and competitors generally ignored the Smartmodem. But it was not long before hobbyists were able to combine the Smartmodem with new software to create the first real bulletin board systems (BBSes), which created significant market demand. The market grew rapidly in the mid-1980s, and as the Smartmodem was the only truly “universal” modem on the market, Hayes grew to take over much of the market. Heatherington retired from what was then a large company in 1984.

Patrick Pichette, Google CFO retirement blog post

Respect.