X

The EIB Call Screener Program

by Rush Limbaugh - Apr 18,2008

I got an Open Line Friday question in the e-mail. ‘You are always complaining about the call screener computer and how old it is. Why don’t you buy a new one?’ This is an excellent question. I don’t think about it because actually it’s not the computer, it’s the software. The software is the same software we used when we started this program in 1988. It’s the only link technologically we have to the very first day this program started. It’s amazing, folks, but in radio, one of the toughest things that people have had to write is a genuinely good call screener program to show you who’s on the phone, where they’re from, what they want to talk about, how long have they been on hold. Apple doesn’t write software that much. They have developers. It’s an old, before Windows, what was it?

MS-DOS? DOS, it’s even worse, it’s even older than that. You remember the movie War Games? You remember the computer [W.O.P.R.] they were using in War Games? It looks like that. A little screen with these little green blinking cursors going across, except our screen is blue. But, anyway, there’s also some other super-secret information we have about callers up here. I’ve not seen a decent call screener program in my entire career as a talk show host. I think this one we borrowed from somebody when we started. We didn’t have any money. I think we stole this from somebody at WABC. Whose was this? We did buy the rights to this? You mean there’s actually something we paid for when we started? Amazing. We were out there making deals to get stuff when we first started, we didn’t have any money. I know it was cutting edge once, but so was the Apple IIc. You know, so was Charlie Chaplin IBM commercials. They were cutting edge once, too. Anyway, it suffices. I like to tease about it more than anything else. It’s nice having an antique in here to remind us of our roots.