This Plain businessman started a computer service for the Amish. Does it do too much, or not enough?

From his machine shop among corn and bean fields on Kurtz Road near Ephrata, Lancaster County, Allen Hoover sells 1970s-style word-processing computers, upgraded to internet speeds, at the rate of more than one a day.

For some, Hoover’s machine fits fast-changing business with timeless faith; others fear the computers have fed into a wave of covert internet use that threatens a formal split among his Amish customers.

Since 2004 the machines, originally priced at $800 each, have been adopted by dozens of Plain religious communities to run local systems, with names like Classic, Chore Boy, and Steward, to accommodate and monitor members’ text notes and business records, without video, corporate media networks, or Apple and Google apps.

A senior member of his Old Order Mennonite congregation and coauthor of a book on Plain responses to family abuse, Hoover agreed to talk to The Inquirer about Mennonite and Amish ideas and tools. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Our real goal is to live a separate life and not to be so influenced by popular society around us. If morality is decaying in the world, it becomes even more important for us to become a separate people. Well, that’s hard to do.

Everything is tied together. Especially with the internet, and, smartphones. It gets harder and harder for us to be in business and to make a living without some way of being connected.

For our Plain people, we wanted it to be separate from the world. So it should have no connectivity. Not to the internet, email, or even fax. Just a stand-alone unit. And then of course no amusements of the world, no games, music, nothing like that. Just a business tool.

Well, if it’s in my home, my children will find ways of doing things with it that I have no idea of. And also, if you look at 50 different personal computers in peoples’ homes, you will find 50 different systems. We wanted one like the old word processors, where every unit was exactly alike. No additional programs, no apps that you can put on to listen to music or whatever.

The programs included are a word and a spreadsheet program. And a drawing program, and a computer-aided design program. We developed our own comprehensive business accounting system. With inventory control, invoicing, all that.

We looked at the on-the-shelf programs. They are almost all internet-connected. There are a few that stand alone. But they were so clunky, made for a specific purpose, that they just didn’t fit the bill.

We had a few meetings with interested businesspeople, to see what the need was. Probably made a mistake, we never asked the church for permission.

And it took off. In the beginning, it was the only thing out there for the Plain people. Then other people started. This is about the only one that is still going — because of our stance of not making changes. We do upgrade it. It has much more power now. But we wanted to stay away from Windows or Mac.

We ended up using Linux as the operating system. We used Open Office, we now use LibreOffice, another free program, more powerful, more useful. The computer-aided design program is called FreeCAD. There is also something similar to MapQuest, that helps you with planning and mapping trips.

I’m guessing 400 a year. So if we have been doing this for 20 years, there are a few thousand out there.

It was mixed. In the beginning, it was a huge whoop of joy: Here is something we can use. Once a year there is an expo in Lancaster County, focused on the Plain people and Plain businesses. I got a booth and it was the star of the expo. People were lined up because it was the new thing.

Some Plain communities reacted by banning them because it was coming too close to the computer world. And I understand that perfectly. No hard feelings about that.

What happened more often was that communities started with it, but then became dissatisfied that we didn’t allow them to put more programs on. So they made their own and eventually drifted into the internet world.

It has not made me a popular person. For the ones that feel we should not have gotten into computers at all, I am the bad boy. For the ones that feel we should have allowed more connections, I am the bad boy.

We really don’t want our people working in General Motors, big factories, all day long. We fear that will influence us too much. And so, we want our own little businesses like mine, Allen Repair Service, we rebuild, repair, and resell woodworking machinery.

And it’s getting harder [without internet]. This was a tool to allow us to stay in those businesses.

In Lancaster County, the Amish found loopholes, ways to have their cellphones, smartphones.

The leadership are working through that right now, I’m pretty sure there is going to be a big split.