technological nostalgia

A few years ago, a friend of mine and I went to Intel's museum. He was very nostalgic about an 8086 chip because he used to have one.

 

How far back, chronologically, does your recap/computer history go?

In the late 80's, where I worked, they tried to force-feed a lot of us DOS when our county government got computers. Templates to fit over the F keys. No mouse. No internet. No SOLITAIRE! A glorified word processor. Misery.

The mouse changed everything. I played primitive games on friends' machines in the early 90's. Still hadn't seen one with SPEAKERS. Started hearing about "e-mail". Didn't pay too much attention. Why not call on the phone? What? E-mail's FREE? Anywhere in the WORLD? Hmmm. Still not sure.

Under pressure from kids, took the plunge in 1995. Big decision: 75 mHz, 100 or 133? Bought a Packard-Bell 100 for $2,100 ON SALE! Got a dial-up connection!
Bought "Myst"! Clicked with my MOUSE! Bought SPEAKERS! Quickly found international radio stations (bad streaming; played half the time) and listened to HIP AUSTRALIANS in the middle of the night!

The rest is history, as they say. A minor nirvana for me was two years ago when I got a PC-cam and mike and hooked up on Yahoo Messenger with several others in an early Prius endeavor. Someone's going to let us do all this for FREE?

Now I think the sky's the limit. This machine is changing the world. I love groups like this. You can quickly get to "know" untold numbers of people quite free from the filters of normal social stratification, and free from the normal pressures of face-to-face meeting---until you're ready to do otherwise.

Ultimately, totalitarianism doesn't stand a chance. The ultimate tool of liberty is now accessible to many---perhaps most. Astounding. And in my lifetime.

 

I'm "only" 50, but I guess I'm the oldest so far --

My first experience with a computer was at work, where we had to log on to the mainframe using a TELETYPE. To suppress the password, you had to tear off part of your printout and stick it behind the print head! No kidding. Otherwise, your password would get printed for all to read. Most input at that time was done using keypunch cards! The year was 1978.

Around that same time we got a "computer" that was a stand-alone unit like you would think of a computer nowadays, but it had a 32-character display that would show you only a portion of a single 80-character line. It had 16k of memory (that had been expanded with a cartridge the size of an 8-track to a whopping 32k of memory), and a tape cassette drive. Yep, that was the "hard disk" of the day! This was an impressive step up, believe it or not.

[Broken External Image]:http://img289.imageshack.us/img289/4703/hp9830sys7ve.jpg

I came in very early in the morning just to learn how to use that computer. We used it to control test equipment. It was hooked up to a thermal printer, and a plotter. I remember getting it to plot mathematical functions, and was so thrilled with that type of output from a computer that I showed my parents. To them is was just a bunch of squiggles on paper, and they were not impressed. I later taught it to play checkers (that was hard), play missile command on the plotter (it would even draw a little explosion if you typed in the right angle at the right time), and a game of tick tac toe, which was impossible to win. You could even decide who went first, but you still couldn't win.

After that we got CP/M systems with single-density 8" floppy disks... Ah the power!

This was all before operating systems like DOS.

Ah, those were the days!

 

Wow, when you were 23? It must be even more rewarding for you to have "seen it all" the last 27 years, huh? When did you really get a glimmer of the greater possibilities that are now reality? Did the internet change your whole perception of the possibilities?

I was 54 when I got the Packard Bell in 1995. To that point in my life the epitome of technological advancement as I experienced it came in the form of the space program, cable TV, my new microwave oven, my cordless phone (cell phones were still a novelty) and my in-the-ear hearing aid!

 

I thought I was late at 23. I had spent 5 years in the Air Force, and felt I was behind the curve. I was a newbie in an Engineering company, and the people around me were no dummies. However, they weren't quite as interested as I was, and I quickly became the 'expert'.

I remember (I think it was around the mid-70's?) telling my Mom home computers were right around the corner, but she didn't see it, nor their value. Of course back then we were still talking about things like the Altair 8000, which had a row of switches and leds to use to load registers with machine code. I had no idea how fast we would get to where we are today.

After many years as the departmental expert, I ended up running the PC/Mac side of IT, but when they got up to speed, I went back to Engineering.

I was a CB'er -- "10-4, good buddy!" I remember when they went from 23 channels to 40. Wow. Well, your cell phone is just a more sophisticated 2-way radio system, now with pictures, movies, music, Bluetooth, and more wonderful advancements.

The Internet. I was in IT when my company connected itself to the Internet. A whole new world opened up, mostly text back then. Web browsers were just coming into being, and there was a whole controversy just around transmitting graphics. It was actually hard to explain to someone that they could click one link and be in Germany, and click another and be in Japan. The hardest thing about connecting to the Internet was creating an "Intranet" inside your company that was TCP/IP based and had centralized mail and networked computers. We had many mail standards to tie together back then (VAX, mainframe, Unix, PC, Mac, etc), and getting a crude PC XT on the network was no fun.

Even then, I still had no real idea how far things would go. Back then the 'commercialization' of the Internet was totally unthinkable, and in itself a MAJOR controversy.

Speaking of the space program, I saw the moon landing live (had to stay up late) at age 14. You must have been 28!

So you were 54 in 1995? Guess you're the 'old man' at the moment!

 

There's an 87-year-old around here somewhere...

Interesting. Your perspective is deeper than mine. How rewarding to have all this happen in your "prime"!

Yeah, I wasn't there when Al Gore was, and it was a government/university project, but "commercialization" was still an issue, though dying down, when I logged on in '95. Almost like the old AM-FM struggle. Hey---FM Internet??

 

I’m not the 87 year old but I am old enough to remember the operating system wars between Apple, Commodore, radio Shack and Atari before IBM came out with the PC.

I had used various terminals with built in modems so that you could dial up a mainframe and place the handset on the cradle on the terminal. Teletype put out a “portable†that had its own suitcase and weighed in at about 40 pounds. There were no monitors everything was printed out on thermal paper.

My first personal computer was an Atari that you hooked to a TV for a monitor and had a choice of a tape or disk drive. We got PC’s at work so I bought a clone or two before getting my first Mac. At that time AOL was for Apple/Mac only and was my first window to the net.

 

My first computer experience was learning to 'program' with punch cards in college. What a nightmare! A program never worked at first so you had to manually go through stacks of cards, view them and look for 'mistakes'. I disliked the process so much that I avoided 'computers' for the next few years till the Apple came out. It had a screen about 6 or 9 inches square and was much slower than doing the work manually. After an Apple and Apple 2 I bought a 286PC (Cost Thousands as I remember), then worked my way up the hardware chain to my present desktop and laptop either one of which has more computing power than the first manned flight to the moon! Still, while I may have unwittingly been in the front row seat for the ride of computing power, I find it not as amazing as my grandparents who were born before the automobile age, but died well into the space exploration age. My grandmother learned to cook on a wood burning stove, but died after learning to cook on a microwave. They were a 'bridge' generation, my parents not so much and my generation may well prove to be another 'bridge' generation.

 

Ah Nostalga

The first computer I worked with was a Control Data 160A. Neat old dog, no CRT, the display was a couple windows with octal projection readouts (numbers 0-7 only), you had manual toggle switches for bootstrap loading and paper tape for main program load. Had like 8K of core memory, unit was actually integrated into a full size office desk and had the power of about a cheap pocket caculator, oh yea, this thing ran off 208V three phase power!!!

My first PC (of sorts) was a Southwest Technical Products 6800. This was a kit built unit, only it was not plugging in boards, it was soldering components into the boards, then plugging them in. It was based on a Motorola 6800 processor, storage was on cassette tapes through a portable audio recorder, display was an RS232 based dumb terminal, no graphics.

Could spend more than a few evenings listening to some records (no CD's yet) and punching in line ofter line of BASIC code.

 

ahhahahah neat thread!

My first brush with computers was back in '81/2? when I was about 9. I got my firt computer, a Radio Shack MC-10 (MC for mircocomputer), with a whole 4K of memory, expandable to 20... I remember hooking it up to my 14" black and white TV and learning Basic by mimicing pre-written programs, my first Basic program:

5 rem
10 Print you suck
20 goto 10

:lol:

I remeber the day I broke new ground by buying a cable that allowed me to hook up one of those slimline cassette recorders to it, and viola, instant "disk" drive!

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So who here still refers to computers as...


...machines?

h34r:

 

i also did the Air Force thing and then got out and went to college.started at Riverside community college and took a few computer classes. there we had to sign up for time in the lab. we had a "dedicated" remote connection to a main frame computer (our college wasnt big enough to have its own computer) at UC-Riverside. the computer there was a "monster" since it had 2 WHOLE MEGABYTES of memory.

we had to send the program via a a teletype through an 80 column card reader. i remember i spent at least an hour trying to help this young lady (yes i had ulterior motives!!) get her program together. she just about had it when she dropped her card holder... unfortunately she had not discarded the bad cards yet. there goes over 200 cards onto the floor. there was about 20-30 that had been rewritten. so then we spent another hour sorting them out. by then our slot time had expired. so i blew a weeks worth of computer time (we were only allowed 3 hours a week and i signed up all my hours at the same time) never got to run my program one time. so i turned it in not knowing if it would work...never got it back so had to assume it was ok. (only programs that would not run were returned and they were not graded...)

on the cellphone thingy... a few years later i was working for this guy installing vinyl flooring. he got his cellphone and was so proud of it, nearly every day, he would show off by driving to this certain spot up in the hills overlooking the valley (the 35 pound behemouth didnt really work very well in any other location) just so he could call his wife to let her know he was working and would be home at the same time he came home nearly every day for 30 years. (he was very good at finding any excuse he could to not work past 6 pm and since he co-owned the company...he got away with it).

 

I'll bet it was then you learned the old trick of drawing a diagonal line across the top the card deck with a Magic Marker

 

actually she was in the process of doing that. at the time we had just got done comparing a good card verses the bad card. her problems were not knowing the importance of syntax and spacing.

 

I've been working/hacking with computers since the early 80s, and I'm kinda shocked nobody has mentioned the absolutely astounding Amiga here.

A lot of people thought of it as a game machine, but it was really a multimedia machine before anybody had heard of multimedia. It was a machine that came with 512K of ram, could display 4096 colors at once on the screen, and do stereo sound for under 500 dollars. All of this in 1985.

If Commodore could have marketed the thing properly, I have no doubt that it would have replaced the Mac as the 'alternative' platform today.