I was just reminiscing today about my first computer. It was a XMas present, circa 1998. One day, 70 years from now, I’ll tell my genetically-engineered ubermensch granchildren about the Good Ol’ Days when computers weren’t automatically jacked into a port on the side of your head. They’ll probably roll their eyes the way you do at that wheezy old man who wears suspenders and always rants about “those whippersnappers”.
Anyway, I remember sitting down at this magic glowing box and having no idea how it worked. Specifically, I couldn’t work the Caps Lock or the space-bar, so all my posts looked like this:
Yeah, that was an awkward time. Kind of like being trapped in adolescence both online and off. A little unsure, a little clueless, a little annoying. I also remember the days when porn was automatically the first hit on Google. Didn’t matter what you typed in, “dinosaurs”, “flowers”, whatever, pr0n was the first hit. Now the first result is typically something related to role-playing, with porn being #5 or #6 on the list.
And emoticons! Emoticons were like learning a new language. You had smiley of course: But also his deformed cousin bug eyes: O_o and, of course, anime freak: ^-^ And remember those ASCII artwork? Man, some people had way too much time on their hands.
Yep, yep yep I remember the Well. Basically I remember the web before porn. It was 1988. I remember talking about nothing much but it felt so…so…cyberpunk! I was 13 or 14 at the time.
This one’s not mine - I got it (IIRC) in an email sig from a CompuServe member.
As for first-compter memories - getting online with IBM’s comm.bas - yep, written in BASIC, and guaranteed to crash the PC if you hit the backspace key. Didn’t usually hurt the connection as the modem was external - wait for the PC to re-boot, start the program again and be right where you left off.
Oh, and the computer itself? A white-box PC clone with a 10 MHz 8088 processor, the 8087 match chip (so I could use AutoCAD) 1 meg of RAM and a 20 meg hard drive. Sitting on top was an EGA monitor. For its time, that machine was smokin’!
Upgrading from a 300 baud external modem that required me to pick up the phone and dial the number to an internal self-dialing 1200 baud modem was an awe-inspiring moment. Remember accessing CompuServe at 300 baud to read forums and find something to download, logging off and coming back on at 1200 to download it? I forget the price, but 1200 baud connects were charged at double the 300 baud rate back then.
Anyone else remember the magic moment when CIS enabled actual alphanumeric email IDs? IIRC, it was close to Christmas in whatever year, and nearly everyone celebrated being able to say that they could be reached at *humanfriendlyname@compuserve.com * rather than 76272,3276. Oops… make that 76272.3276@compuserve.com - you did have to remember where you were and use the comma for login, and the dot for email.
I’ll tell you something I don’t miss: teenaged trolls harassing me on AOL. In my opinion, 1997 & 1998 were the low points of the internet. I can still picture the pimply-faced little bastards, hunt-pecking away on the Gateway PCs their moms bought them, claiming to be super-secret-mega-hackers working on UberComputers they built themselves. Turds.
I had a modem installed in my Hyundai 286 back in 1990. Weather, (not so) local news, and silly games. And there was no local number in my home town, so my phone bill for the first month I had internet access was almost $300. Ugh.
Going back a little further, I still remember
load “program”
Please insert cartridge in tape deck 1 and press Play
…then wait 30 minutes for the text-based RPG to load. Heh.
The first computer I ever programmed used punch cards. The first one I ever actually owned was a commodore 64 with a cassette drive. There was no “internet” in the modern sense back then. The closest thing was BBS servers, if you were fortunate enough to even own a blazingly high speed 300 baud modem (two trained hamsters with flags just might be a bit faster). I was pleased as all piss when I could finally afford a disk drive. For those of you who don’t remember, the commodore cassette drive stored every program twice, and when it loaded it compared the two to make sure they matched. This made it twice as slow and half as reliable. :rolleyes: The disk access routines were so horrible that there were dozens of “quick load” ROMS available which would speed things up by a factor of 10.
This was in the “good ol days” of computers, when manuals came with things like schematic diagrams and ROM listings.
Granted, I started out fairly young with computers, but still, you all are making me feel old.
I’ll give 1000 extra bonus points for anyone here who knows how to set the drive number on a commodore disk drive.
1998? 1998!!! By that time my first computer was 17 years old and in permanent “doorstop emulator mode”. It was an Apple II+, with a blazing 1.1 MHz 6502 processor and 64 K of RAM. The external 10 Mbyte hard drive (a Sider), had 3 operating systems (Apple DOS, ProDOS, and C/PM) and we never filled it up. I used a Hayes 300 baud modem to access text services to chat on “bulletin boards”. Kind of like the SDMB, only slower and monochrome. It was great!!! It NEVER crashed, booted up in 30 seconds, and was 4-5 times faster than the 8088 10MHz machines. Also, Appleworks integrated word processor, spreadsheet, database program was one of the slickest, fastest, easiest to use “office” programs I’ve ever used. 20+ years later, Microsoft has yet to market anything comparable. THOSE were the good old days,you young whippersnappers!
BTW, my ubermensch children DO roll eyes at me when I mention it, even though it was their first computer, too.
1998? I got my first computer in '89 and I’m not quite 24 years old yet. I was hooked from the moment I saw it, too. I very clearly recall BBSes and the all text-based days, and still thought of Google as a relatively “new” website until very recently (last 2 years or so) when it became a household name.
The first computer I had that I was interested in enough to memorize the specs (circa 1992 or so) was a 12mhz, 4mb RAM, 16-color, ~400mb Hard Drive BEAST. We referred to it at the time as “The Super Computer.”
But also his deformed cousin bug eyes: O_o and, of course, anime freak: ^-^ And remember those ASCII artwork? Man, some people had way too much time on their hands.