Lonely Magnolia

By John Isaac Jones

A shy, lonely computer genius tries to find love in the digital age.This tale is a testimony to the brutal impersonality of modern-day technology. Pygmalion for the 21st century.

 

"Computer genius Dr. Carl Wingate has spent his life programming software and shaping the digital world. A widower in his 50s, Carl tries to find love again but no one sparks his interest. When his daughter suggests online dating, Carl decides to join Southern Singles and meets a special woman with the handle Lonely Magnolia.
This is a clever short story about technology and love. You could take this as a commentary on the detached way we as a modern society make friends and start relationships online. Or you can just enjoy it for the interesting listen that it is. I expected it to end differently, but John Isaac Jones is always unexpected. The narration was immersive and fit the story well. It's a good way to spend an hour, and worth the listen." - Reviewer

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Isaac Jones
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781540193278

John Isaac Jones

John Isaac Jones is a retired journalist currently living at Merritt Island, Florida. For more than thirty years, "John I.," as he prefers to be called, was a reporter for media outlets throughout the world. These included local newspapers in his native Alabama, The National Enquirer, News of the World in London, the Sydney Morning Herald, and NBC television. He is the author of five novels, a short story collection and two novellas.

Book preview

Lonely Magnolia

by

John Isaac Jones

1

Within the world’s computing community, Dr. Carl Wingate was known as a genius. A native of South Georgia, he had grown up on a thousand-acre cotton farm near Valdosta and, in 1975, at age fifteen, he had built his first computer from components he had ordered out of a magazine. Once the teenager had assembled the components—two floppy drives, a crude motherboard, and a primitive keyboard and mouse—he used a television as a makeshift monitor and started to write software. In less than a year, he had written two pieces of crude word-processing software and, by today’s standards, a very primitive database program. Six months later, he sent a letter to the company that manufactured the components and explained he had written a new operating system for the computer, which was not only more efficient, but faster than the current one. Two months later, the company said they wanted to buy his new operating system and sent him a check for twenty-five hundred dollars.

After graduating high school, young Carl enrolled at the Georgia Data Processing Institute in Atlanta to study computing. From the very first day, he took the university by storm. In the college computer labs, he began research to determine optimal combinations for matching central processing unit speeds and addressable memory. During his third year, he wrote a white paper on the subject, Wingate’s Theory I, which was hailed around the world as a major breakthrough in computing technology. The following year, his theories were expanded in another white paper, Wingate’s Theory II, and, shortly afterward, its precepts were adopted by hardware manufacturers throughout the industry.

Upon graduation, he founded Wingate Solutions, a hardware manufacturing firm near Atlanta, which became a major player in the computing industry in only two years. After the third year, however, Dr. Wingate felt he should change direction. While he loved hardware, he felt software was a vaster, more extensive endeavor than its counterpart. Hardware was cold and inanimate, he felt, whereas software, like language literacy, was an infinite world to be explored in all of its various multi-faceted ramifications. Essentially, he saw the study of computer software as an extension of human action. Anything human beings could do with their hands or their minds could be done with software, he felt.

So the following year, he retooled Wingate Solutions to become a software manufacturing firm. In only a few months, hundreds of programs, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and operating systems—the main program that controls all other applications—were pouring out of the company. Over the next ten years, Wingate Solutions became the premier software manufacturer in the world and, in 1992, the company’s brochure bragged "there is no computer on earth that doesn’t have a Wingate program on its hard