10base-2 Ethernet?
(I don’t know if this should be in the Game Room or not).
The first home ethernet network I had was a 10-base-2 thin coax that my housemates set up. We didn’t pipe the internet over it (we each had dialup in those days) but my Windows95-using housemates set up a workgroup and I joined it with my Mac to their surprise. Each machine had to have a terminator if there wasn’t a continuing cable to the next piece of equipment, and I guess it’s a good thing none of us were laptop users at the time, since removing a device was complicated, the network functioned like old-fashioned christmas lights, where any point of interruption would make the whole network stop working.
It took me several beats to understand what this has to do with Game Room. I’m so totally not a gamer!! No we didn’t use it for multi user whatchamacallem games. Just printer and file sharing.
I can vaguely remember the coax running around out computer lab at my high school. And even that I only remember because I asked someone why there was a cap on one of the ends. 10Base-T is the first networking standard I really remember.
I was thinking that people would join in with their one computer reminisces…
Like:
Who remembers 8” floppies?
My wife had a good one last night:
Who remembers night and weekend hours for your cellphone minutes?
Used them on a Wang word processor in the early 80s.
But let’s step back farther - punch cards! FORTRAN IV in 1973. Good times!!
Or getting yelled at by a friend because you texted them and they didn’t have texting on their plan so each text costs like 75¢.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Who remembers long-distance carriers for your landline?
Heck, who remembers landlines?
Oooh, yeah I do. When I worked on IBM System 34s and 36s I used its fatter, uglier relative: twinax. Now THAT stuff really sucked…
I remember that back in the early days AT&T had a competing standard. My group at Bell Labs wired together a bunch of 3B-2 computers to do parallel computing experiments.
Of course I remember punch cards, and JCL. And the green card you put in front of your card deck. In John Donovan’s System Programming book he said that the green card that could get your job priority was a $5 bill.
A while back I caught an old rerun of The Simpsons, where Mark Hamill guest starred. The gag was he was giving a talk at a sci-fi convention, but instead of talking about Star Wars he went into a spiel about how you can save money by switching to Sprint or something like that. It took me a while to realize he was not talking about cell carriers, but rather long distance plans for landlines.
But while we’re on the subject, who remembers dialing 10-10-[something] before dialing the phone number, to route your call to particular long distance carrier, or however it was that worked?
And those services like 1-800-COLLECT and 1-800-CALL-ATT?
and *69?
I remember coax network cable with 50 om terminals at either end. I remember 8" floppies and punched cards (in my first year CS for Engineers class only).
Mostly what I remember was thinking that 10Base-T would be a great rapper name.
I had forgotten until you mentioned it, but now you reminded me of how my college roommate would always wait until late at night to make long distance calls on his cell phone*, because of the cheaper nighttime rate. I found it incredibly annoying because I was never a late night person, even in college, so he was always on the phone when I was trying to sleep. But apparently the people he called considered it a perfectly reasonable time to call.
*There was a land line in the dorm, but IIRC it could only make local calls, unless you had a phone card. Or maybe there was some system where you entered a PIN before making a long distance call so it knew who to bill it to. In any case I think it may have cheaper to call long distance on a cell on nights/weekends than to use the landline.
Long before floppies, we used to do typesetting with rolls of paper tape. All the codes and characters punched onto the tape. Those chads could get quite messy.
I’ve got at least a couple of zip disks sitting around in a drawer somewhere. No clue what’s on them. I may never find out.
Been there, did that! Fun! For one silly project, I did a maze-runner program, where a bug negotiated a 13x13 maze using the “left hand rule.” Used 3-d matrices to store the history of 2-d mazes.
Also, yeah, twisted-pair cable, both four-strand and 8-strand. Since our system only used four strands, 8-strand cable was good because you could wire two outlets for only one run of cable. I spent a LOT of time up in the ceilings!
When I was in high school in the early 70s, I worked in my dad’s office during the summer, and one of my tasks was printing addresses on multi-carbon forms using a monster of a noisy machine that read the punched tape. The tapes were pink, and I bet if I went back to that office today, I’d find a pink chad or two if I looked hard enough!
Heck, I first learned to typeset on a machine that used 12” floppies! I used SCSI cables by the dozen. Also, I have old Zip Disks, SyQuest tapes and I don’t know what all dead tech.
Who remembers climbing into a tree to make a call.
Oh …wait…I did that a few days ago.
I have no idea what y’all are talking about.
Beck- still living in the dark ages.