Guest cutchemist Posted July 29 Report Share Posted July 29 Not sure. All I can say is it's a different era than when I was in school and we were using 5.25" floppy disks and people were asking "What do I need a computer for?" .......and oregon trail......lolLOL... exactly... thanks for the memory of those big ass floppy discs.. and the black screen with green lettering.. lol lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest endymion Posted July 29 Report Share Posted July 29 Admitting this makes me feel really old, but I remember the day when my elementary school got our very first ever personal computers. It was a pair of Apple II's, the original kind from before the IIe or IIgs or anything. It was a HUGE deal for our school. They sat in the library, the whole school shared them. The only software that I really remember was Logo and Hunt the Wumpus.Our principal took some flak as I recall for spending the money on them. But hey it worked, I became a computer scientist. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest saintjohn Posted July 29 Report Share Posted July 29 my high school computer science teacher (an mit grad) was an early adopter, too. we got a dozen of those early apples during my senior year. up until then, our programming had been done on ticker tape. at the time, those big floppies seemed like something out of 2001: a space odyssey. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest endymion Posted July 29 Report Share Posted July 29 TICKER TAPE, holy crap Saint John! You just made me feel better about my age. The only thing that I have ever used a punch card for was as a novelty bookmark for my computer science textbooks in college.I can barely comprehend a high school with a punch card minicomputer, those were really expensive? Did you have to send your programs off-site to run them and then you got results back afterward? You had the computer on-site? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pod Posted July 29 Report Share Posted July 29 My elementary school was equipped with Commodore 64 and 128 systems. Outboard 1541 5 1/4" disk drives, cassette tape drives. Running BASIC as an OS LOAD "LOGO",8,1 Apple IIs didn't come till middle school. By then I was a total DOS whore anyhow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest endymion Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 See people this is what happens if you don't use tax dollars to buy Apple computers for kids. They become PC users, you just lose them at some point. It's so sad. The school system is totally right to fight this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pod Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 Well that and my father was (and still is) a network engineer, and there was always a PC or two rattling around the house. Scarily enough, because of that, I've had a .com somewhere in my description since 1991...people said "inter-what?" and such, and even the old hoary services like Prodigy (Stodigy), CompuServe (Compu$erve), and this crappy one out of Virginia called America On Line, were still not that popular. And there was GEnie, as well. Then 1993 rolled around and there was the introduction of the WWW to the world as a whole. I puttered around with Lynx for awhile, but I ended up scrounging up a copy of NCSA Mosaic written by some guy named Marc Andressen over in Illinois. Threw it on this IBM PS/2 with a blazing fast 486/33. Too bad that was all it could run...that and having to dialup at a blazing 14.4 Kbps. Hey, let's download Wolfenstein! The web was a geek paradise back then. No real trolls, and everything was free. Even the porn! Well, that was largely on USENET, which to this day is still the best source of free porn. Telnetted into my ISP's box and ran tin for that shit...later on just picked up an early version of Free Agent. No such thing as messageboards, chat was largely realtime via IRC and BBSes that you telnetted into. 1996 rolled around. Black Thursday, and the beginning of the endless September...when AOL connected their private network to the Internet as a whole. Some say the beginning of the end, I just thought of it as just letting a whole bunch of trolls loose. I was more concerned about the CDA. Blah blah blah, dot com boom and bust, and here I am in 2004 sweating in Miami on a 3 Mbps line and a box a hundred times faster than that 486. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest saintjohn Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 tin, pine, elm . . . thanks for the memories, pod. actually, i've still got the same email address from my original unix shell account (even though my provider is long gone).tech, i only worked with the ticker tape monster for a single semester. it didn't have a monitor, just rows of lights (like something from an old science fiction movie). the display was pure binary - on off off on on off on off. the apples, by comparison, were very, very cool. my senior project was a buggy video game which was sort of like asteroids, only not as much fun. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pod Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 A laser system I've worked with has asteroids ported to it. I'll see if I can show it at the Spin-Off. ;D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest macboy Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 Blah blah blah, dot com boom and bust, and here I am in 2004 sweating in Miami on a 3 Mbps line and a box a hundred times faster than that 486. Anyone remember the days of the 300 baud modem? Holy shit, I thought it was amazing sending email for the first time over 20 years ago. Everyone was telling me how stupid it was. "Email will never catch on!!!!!!!" To me, just the idea of transmitting data over a phone line was incredible. But 300 baud?? LMAO - 0.3kbps speed. BTW pod, what speeds are you getting? I just upgraded and I'm getting about 2.7 - 2.8 right now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pod Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 About the same, on average. Depends on where I go of course. Internet traffic is equivalent to old-school line noise. I remember switching up from a 2400 modem to a 14.4 and being pissed that I would only hit 9600 sometimes due to the shitty wiring. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest endymion Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 The fastest connection that I have lately is the wireless at Starbuck's. There's just something wrong with having a faster connection sitting outside at a cafe table than I have from my home, but they really went overkill on the lines to some of those places. I'm sure that some of them are just DSL lines but the one near my place sure isn't. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pod Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 I don't see them provisioning anything more than a T1 to Starbucks. Even at a discounted rate, a full T1 isn't cheap.It is faster since you are most likely the one doing any serious web work there, while everyone else is just on IM or hopefully visiting CJ since they see the stickers on your laptop ;DWhat I think the case is, is that the Hellsouth DSLAM that you connect to at home is horridly oversubscribed, and they haven't bothered to upgrade it yet. If I'm not mistaken, the landline from Starbuckses is handled by Covad or someone of that nature. That, and Bellsouth sucks to begin with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest endymion Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 I relish in knowing as little about the details as possible.There does seem to be a pizza box DSLAM right here in my building though. Network room is next to the snail mail room where I can see inside. Yeah okay I'm a nerd too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pod Posted July 30 Report Share Posted July 30 Next the pizza-box is undoubtedly a very tired hamster in a wheel, knowing Bellsouth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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