We've come a long way baby - world wide web and technology

I remember those old-style dialup fantasy/D&D-ish boards. A couple of the ones I used could be hacked so that you got like a million points every time you logged on, so in the space of a day or two you could be Supreme Warrior of the Entire Universe or something like that.

 

I loved being able to run my Amstrad commands with the old BASIC 1.0, back when you could do that. Being able to run a DOS at age 5 seemed awesome at the time, trying doing that now though, yikes.

 

We can thank Apple for that.

I remember having to type all the paths and such to launch programs.

 

My freshman year of college, the student discount price for a desktop Macintosh computer (with a program called "MacWrite") was $2,995. That did not include the printer. I spent 4 years going to the computer lab at 3AM with my 3 1/2 inch floppy disk containing all of my papers. You always hoped you weren't going to be the poor soul who got The Bomb -- the symbol on the screen that meant that everything since you saved last was irretrievably gone.

 

1st: Commodore 64
2nd: Zenith 286 (12Mhz, 1MB RAM, 20MB HDD, MS-DOS 4.0 & Windows 3.0)
3rd: Laser 386 (33Mhz, 4MB RAM, 300MB HDD, MS-DOS 5.0 & Windows 3.1)
4th: HP Pavilion (533 Mhz, 64MB RAM, 10GB HDD, MS-DOS 6.22 & Windows 98SE)

I still own most of my DOS games. I use DOS Box to play them.
I also own all of the Roger Wilco series.

 

My first machine was a Macintosh 2. 40MB hard drive, System 6.

I remember the moment that set me on the path to computer science. I was writing an essay for school, and MacWrite ran out of space. It refused to add any more pages to my document. So I had to figure out how to convert it to WordPerfect. That was a big deal back then.

 

^

SO many memories.

 

Still have to buffer these days.

 

Especially if it was somebody who was on the terminal before you, who screwed it up.

Or in other words, somebody *set you up* the bomb.

 

Yup. And filmstrips.

I remember being so impressed by the Xerox copier at a summer job -- I was excited to operate it for a couple weeks while the regular person was on vacation!

My husband and I were the first people we knew (other than one friend who worked in IT) to own a PC. A Tandy 2000. 256K.

 

Mmm. Mimeographs: Purple print and intoxicating smell.

 

My first computer was the Commodore 64 then in 1991 I got my first real computer, a 286 with 1mb and a 40mb hd. It only had Dos 6.2 on it and I also had a printer. It was about $2,200.

 

In the early 80s I bought a Radio Shack Color Computer, the one with the program cartridges, a cassette tape drive, and a dot matrix printer. The only extra tv I had to use as a monitor was an old 13" black & white. I got a spreadsheet cartridge, one for finances, a word processor, and a couple of cassettes with text based games.

I spent hours copying Color BASIC programs from the book that came with it, only to find that when I tried to run them there were errors, somewhere in all those lines of code.

It was fun to play with, but didn't really do much.

 

Doesn't matter what language you use or how much experience you have, there are *always* errors the first time you try to run a program.

 

Ah basic pgramming. Yes I do remember it. And yes you invariable made at least one mistake when entering it. Still Basic was easier than other languages to write a programme in.

 

Anybody here ever go to computer camp? That pretty much defined my childhood summers (from about 7th to 10th grade). God, I miss it.

 

Yes, I did a couple of summers at Mintueman Tech learning BASIC, Pascal, and doing LegoLogo. Then a couple more summers at American Computer Experience learning C and Red Alert. Once ACE was at MIT, the next year it was at BU.

 

I remember hooking up a dial-up modem to show colleagues the interweb. May as well have been a shaman for the look of wonderment on their faces.