What are your profound computer/ information age moments?

[Declan]

@Shamozzle

What have been your “Wow!” computing/information age moments?

Of course , now you have to do a thread on your most horrific moments in the cyber age.

So of course you downloaded bonzi buddy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonzi_Buddy

Your SO found some interesting holiday snaps of you on the net, stuff like that.

Declan

[Voyager]

@Purgatory_Creek

No, I recall it as a maze game, with huge mazes, and I was supposed to move a dot (?) through the maze. Seems to me it was orange on a black screen, but that was a lot of years and a lot of chemicals ago, so no doubt I’m wrong. 'Twas pretty amazing, regardless.

Maybe CDC came up with that one. But orange on black (or black on orange) sounds like a plasma panel, all right.

[Voyager]

@Zsofia

I teared up a little at the Cavalcade of Information Advances in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU video about all the stuff Bell Labs has come up with over the decades. Somebody linked it in the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” thread. I don’t know, I found it touching and awe inspiring even though it’s them tooting their own horns. I’m such a dork.

From 2000 - just before Lucent basically killed Bell Labs in the meltdown. sigh. Funny they skipped noting Arno was president.

[Voyager]

@matt_mcl

My first thumb drive – having thirty times the storage capacity of my first (enormous) computer ON MY KEY CHAIN.

Heh. When I worked at Intel, it was no big deal to get another gig of disk allocated, which I thought was impressive. Now I’m running a workshop which puts the proceedings on a thumbdrive and gives them out. We’re getting some (one or two gig, I’m not sure) for about $4 each.

As for video games, I have one that is the size of the joystick for the Atari 2600, which has about 20 games and the Atari system in it.

[nivlac]

Seminal moment for me was in 1983 when I walked into the IBM Computer Store (they existed in those days), plunked down over $3000, and bought an IBM PC1 with 64KB, one floppy drive, and a monochrome monitor. Over the next year or two, I promptly spent another $5000 or so in upgrades including a 20MB hard drive!!! Wow. I had a ball with that computer and relish those early days working with it.

About 10 years before that first PC, I first encountered computer programming in a physics course and was absolutely enthralled with a machine doing all the calculations so fast. And the computer has been my friend ever since.

[phil417]

To begin with, please understand that I’m 55; I graduated from HS in 1971. Back in the day, an IBM Selectric was high technology.

I went to a business college, where I graduated with a degree in Computer Programming. The computer languages I learned were RPG (Report Program Generator), PL1 (Programming Language 1), and COBOL (Common Bisuiness Language).

On the job, I’ve learned Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Access. I attended college to learn Microsoft Office Applications.

One profound information age moment I remember has to do with my first husband. He (the father of my two daughters, he did give me good kids, I’ll say that for him) was berating/beating me because I’d made mistakes on the keyboard of the VIC 20 (the keys were wider than those of a standard keyboard). For a change, I stood up to him & told him that I could type on the keyboards at work, just not on the VIC keyboard, and that my typing was paying for his expensive habits. I didn’t think so at the time, but in introspect, the pain was worth it.

Love, Phil