I've been musing about tablets, the Fire and computers

[eSheri]

WebTV was my beginning in 1996.

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by TimW

The 486 I got didn't have a modem in it. Why, who in the world would need an internal modem?

I had a 300 baud modem for my Atari computer. There was no internet, so all I could do was logon to a local BBS. It was magic!

[DustyDisks]

Originally Posted by wizwor

I had a 300 baud modem for my Atari computer. There was no internet, so all I could do was logon to a local BBS. It was magic!

The days of dial up bbs and zillion dollar phone bills!

But the wonder and pure geeknes of it all at the time. Being geeks before it was cool!

[Skydog]

My first computer ran CP/M, had one 5 1/4 floppy, a 12" monochrome monitor and a whopping 256k of memory!! And later I added a 300 baud modem to access my local BBS.

But I was the coolest person/girl on my block.

[sirmaru]

Does anyone remember the "internet giant" called Compuserve? That was the "internet" prior to the graphic internet we now use.

[wizwor]

That was pre-internet, simaru. Compuserve, Prodigy, GEnie and others provides access to proprietary services through proprietary interfaces -- primarily via dialup. I never used Compuserve, but I used to reset GEnie modems in Lynn, Massachusetts at the beginning and end of my workday and drew a check from Prodigy as a Special Contributor when they transitioned from proprietary service to internet service provider.

More magic. We were all so lucky to have been there before everything got figured out...

[ApK]

Originally Posted by wizwor

.

More magic. We were all so lucky to have been there before everything got figured out...

I met my wife through CompuServe. (We met via the scuba forum to go diving together).
I still remember my CompuServe User ID. And I remember when they first opened their Internet mail gateway and we had to had to use dots instead of commas....ah, good times.

And GEnie...ah...met some fun women through GEnie....that was before meeting my wife.....

[copyrite]

We still have an Apple IIe hiding in the basement hubby refuses to get rid of. No hard drive in that animal! First PC, a 286 had a whopping 20 mb hard drive (no modem of course).

[wizwor]

Does it work? I had a box of Atari treasure in my parent's attic. When I moved into my own home, they evicted it. After a decade in my attic I was shocked that EVERYTHING worked -- even the 30 year old disks. Amazingly, people still use and develop for these things. I have forsaken the venerable 1050 disk drive in favor or an SD card reader.

So, this is not 100% nostalgia.

[DustyDisks]

Originally Posted by copyrite

We still have an Apple IIe hiding in the basement hubby refuses to get rid of. No hard drive in that animal! First PC, a 286 had a whopping 20 mb hard drive (no modem of course).

Man this thread is a blast from the past. First box I built had a 8088 then 8086 later a 286 with Harris math coprocessor screaming along at 20mhz. With a used full height 10mb hard drive, that came from at&t my first, and still have it!

The early boards with the dozens of jumpers on them that had to be configured, before they could be used

And the fun of trying to read the boards manuals that were Chinese or Japanese translated into English that was a wonderful puzzle to solve.

Those days were FUN!

Now what we are using and used to would have been Magic to us back when.

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by DustyDisks

Man this thread is a blast from the past. First box I built had a 8088 then 8086 a 286 with Harris math coprocessor screaming along at 20mhz. With a used full height 10mb hard drive, that came from at&t my first, and still have it!

My first Intel iron was a 286. It did not have a coprocessor, so I had to run an emulator to run autocad. It was slow, but not as slow as driving an hour to look at a picture when there was a problem. It was advertised as coming with a 40m disk. That turned out to be a typo, but they put one in for me. It had to be partitioned, though, because DOS didn't recognize partitions over 32m. Every file I owned fit comfortably on that 8m D: drive. Part of the appeal was the vga video which allowed the PC to play games that competed with my aging Atari. NFL Challenge, Kings Quest, and Commander Keen come to mind. I had to add a sound card too. I used that computer from 1989 to 1993 when I bought the 486 -- which had a coprocessor.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by ApK

I met my wife through CompuServe. (We met via the scuba forum to go diving together).
I still remember my CompuServe User ID. And I remember when they first opened their Internet mail gateway and we had to had to use dots instead of commas....ah, good times.

And GEnie...ah...met some fun women through GEnie....that was before meeting my wife.....

Mine was AOL. I met my hubby online too! We met on ICQ. Remember that chat client? I lived in in St Louis and he was stationed at Whiteman AFB on the other side of the state. After 8 days of chatting, he drove up for the weekend. My mother freaked!
We spent the weekend together and have never been apart since, that was over 13 years ago.

[Timoleon]

Originally Posted by DustyDisks

Still have my two ZX-81's

Both built from the kits that were offered...For a grin, I hooked them up about a year ago, and they still worked as good as ever. Got them before Timex got involved. That was my introduction to using "Basic".




Slight bend!

Time Sinclairs! I had two of them as well --- hitched them up to a 10" black & white TV set, and thought I had created an artificial brain!

[sirmaru]

How about those Stringy Floppies for the TRS-80? It saved 40K of data up from the mere 16K on a regular sound cassette. There were no floppy discs back in 1979.

[WillysJeepMan]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

How about those Stringy Floppies for the TRS-80? It saved 40K of data up from the mere 16K on a regular sound cassette. There were no floppy discs back in 1979.

I remember those days. I had a Model I with a whopping 4KB of RAM. Nothing was more frustrating that trying to save/load software on cassette tapes with an improper volume level. When I upgraded the RAM to 16KB and the ROM chip to Level II Basic, I thought I was a top dog.

Dang I'm old.