Eudora? Archie? Push the cobwebs away...

Porn was still on the usenets back then, wasn't it? No major websites. The weather briefing sites were on compuserve. I remember buying a computer and asking for a 16mb ram upgrade and the store looked at me and said that I only had a 40mb hard drive . . .

I remember about 1985 or so playing Bruce Artwick's Flight Simulator on an orange Compaq 16 color monitor - the new 256 color VGA were just 'astonishingly realistic.'

I seem to remember a guy trying to sell the Mcdonalds.com website address to the burger place and they refused - claiming there was 'nothing' to the internet. Since his name was mcDonald he could keep it even though eventually the company came calling I'm sure. I always wondered how he made out.
 
I remember a flight simulator on an Apple IIe. It even used "hires" graphics (rare at the time).

Remember when Yahoo was relevant? They were the first guys to try to catalog the internet.

But there was ONE major website. cern.ch. Those are the guys who invented the Web. Some of us old farts remember that the net is decades older than the web, and there still is more to it, even now.

And you left out gopher. There was a short time when that's how you found just about any information. And in the really old days, there were dial-up BBS's like WELL.
 
AOL, Prodigy(Sears),

My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. It had 5k of RAM (3.5k after basic loaded from the ROM).

300 baud modem.

I remember paying $1000 for a 20 meg Hard Drive (my first one) and being just amazed at how much stuff I could store.

And calling BBS's all over the country and thinking this was just incredible.

Then I had a friend in college from Austria. I was able to send him an e-mail over the internet (his dad worked for IBM in Austria so I used his dad's e-mail account). The idea that I could get a letter to someone half a world away in a short period of time was mind boggling.

-Dan
 
300 baud green screen connected thru a vt100 terminal emulator
Pine for email, tin for newsreader, then the big wow was Mosaic for a browser.

I recall the company paid $1000 for a 2MB RAM expansion board for a Compaq 286 Deskpro - was a full height, double-sided board covered in RAM chips.
 
When we got a phone acoustic coupler and stopped having to tote boxes of punched cards up to the building where Big Blinky and it's cadre of High Priests resided, it was Nirvana.

Cheers
 
Pfft, I built an Altair out of high school. The BBS I hosted had four 300 BAUD modems in a rack and I could link the sessions together with a home-brewed semaphore program. It was kinda like Token Ring, but everyone wanted to be in 'send' mode all the time so I never could get them to stay in passive mode unless they were shipping a file or a message. We could have FIVE humans 'online' at any one time. Hey - I created the internet! Where's my billions?
 
Not only was I on CompuServe (remember the SIGs?) as 74636,1360, I also had an account on Prodigy for a while. CS had much better resources, including EaasySabre.
 
OK, what was everyone's favourite e-mail in the good old days...

PINE for me!
 
BSD mail.

:)

pine was late to the game. The original line-oriented mailers were game-changers. And none of this fancy-schmancy "MIME" stuff.
 
Pfffffft. :rolleyes:

8088 512K no hard disk, dual 720mb floppies connecting to the local BBS via 1200 baud modem.

Beat that! :D
 
GauzeGuy said:
Pfffffft. :rolleyes:

8088 512K no hard disk, dual 720mb floppies connecting to the local BBS via 1200 baud modem.

Beat that! :D
Click to expand...

Dual Floppies, and a 1200bd modem. You must have been rich! I only had a 300bd modem and a single 5.25 inch floppy.

:D
 
GauzeGuy said:
Pfffffft. :rolleyes:

8088 512K no hard disk, dual 720mb floppies connecting to the local BBS via 1200 baud modem.

Beat that! :D
Click to expand...
Apple IIe, 128 kb expansion card, 80 col green monitor, dual "Disk ][" floppies that buzzed at you all the time, acoustic 300 baud modem you stuck your phone handset into.

And that was a $4000 machine in 1983.

And the high school had one room with 20 Apple II+'s and a Corvus disk. We all used it to pass around pirated software....
 
I saved up for an entire summer to by the Commodore 1541 Floppy drive. Single sided, 120k(?) drive.

Before that I used a cassette tape for storage.

The 1541 had some serious design issues. It overheated very easily, so I of course modified the design to add additional cooling.

It also was very loud and slow. So loud that someone wrote a program that caused the heads to seek in just the right way to make it play Daisy (think kids song). Pointless, but really funny.
 
MAKG1 said:
Apple IIe, 128 kb expansion card, 80 col green monitor, dual "Disk ][" floppies that buzzed at you all the time, acoustic 300 baud modem you stuck your phone handset into.

And that was a $4000 machine in 1983.

And the high school had one room with 20 Apple II+'s and a Corvus disk. We all used it to pass around pirated software....
Click to expand...

Yes. Apple ][e is where it is at! 5 1/4" floppies, playing Oregon Trail all day.

Edited to add: then come home and play with the C=64. :D

PRESS PLAY ON TAPE.
 
Sinclair with the membrane keyboard, a 16k memory expansion brick hanging off the back, an audio cassette recorder for storage and a composite RF video adapter connected to a B&W television. You hand typed program listings from computer magazines and, if they worked, stored them on a cassette for future enjoyment. No modem.

This was better than my first computer work which was on a teletype machine connected to a time-sharing computer via an acoustic-coupled modem. Local storage was on punched paper tape. The program running on the time-share was an early spreadsheet for creating business models and preceeded VisiCalc by, um . . . years.

As one of my early flight instructors would say at the end of many of his adventurous stories: "You know, there wasn't much good about the good old days."
 
Litton L-304 general purpose computer ...

http://ebookbrowse.com/the-litton-l-304-dual-computer-system-sep66-pdf-d419523554
about the size of 4 tall filing cabinets, 8 8k memory modules (later upgraded to 16k) real "core" memory.

1960s technology still in use today. It's the brains of the operation in the E-2 Hawkeye for tracking and signal processing (and whatever new tricks they may have come up with in the last 25 years since I last ran one).
 
gprellwitz said:
Had one of those in the corner near the TRS-80, but I never worked on it.
Click to expand...

When I did a consulting assignment for the State of Illinois, we had a meeting at the traffic monitoring/control center for Chicagoland. They were using PDP 11's (and maybe couple of 8's) as part of the traffic system, along with a few higher-order machines. This was mid 90's. I think I remarked about my "dumb" cellphone having more intelligence than those machines. IIRC, part of that meeting involved a visit to the Moto smart-car/smart-road facility in Schaumberg.
 
Atari 800
48k RAM
5.25" disk drive
hooked up to an old tv

Fun to play games on, After I typed the program in.:)
 
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My first home access was through an IBM 7171 and a 300 baud acoustic coupler. It was company supplied. I had to go out an buy an old style phone to fit. I used local bulliten boards to get to the internet.
1982ish.
Then I got to bring home a 1200 baud.
Then the old 8086 pc.
 
I still use lynx pretty frequently. I use pine for email on an old account of mine, as well. I was (and still am, I guess) a unix geek. I remember downloading Slackware 2.1, 73 floppy disk images, I think it took a couple days.
 
I still use pine and lynx too. I don't see any replacements on the horizon for a long time.
 
gprellwitz said:
We've had this contest before! http://www.pilotsofamerica.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48162

Heck, we had to specify our email addresses relative to some well-known server, like ucbvax or ihnp4! My sig line back then was:
!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!pre1 pre1@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP 76474,2121 (CIS) pre1 (BIX)!ihnp4!chinet!pre1
Click to expand...

That was a rather cumbersome UUCP path. My first email address was {decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!gt7116a. Note the lack of an @ sign. Once they invented the @ it turned into gt7116a@prism.gatech.edu.
 
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IBM PCjr, Remember the Charlie Chaplin commercials ;)
8088 processor
128k RAM
Double sideded 5.25 inch drive
16 color RGB monitor
WIRELESS!! keyboard

I remember being real excited when I upgraded to 640k RAM and could copy a floppy disk without flip flopping it multiple times!

Oh, I can't forget the 9 pin dot matrix printer....
 
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My car's license plate ends in 8088. Only geeks get it.

BTW It's not a custom plate, just a random event at DMV.
 
When I was a kid, back before electricity was invented, we had to watch TV by candle light.
 
slacktide said:
That was a rather cumbersome UUCP path. My first email address was {decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!gt7116a. Note the lack of an @ sign. Once they invented the @ it turned into gt7116a@prism.gatech.edu.
Click to expand...
There were multiple e-mails on one line, only one of which had an '@':
!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!pre1
pre1@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP
76474,2121 (on CompuServe)
pre1 (on BIX)
!ihnp4!chinet!pre1

IIRC, people generally used ucbvax to get to ihnp4, though it may have been decvax.
 
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