After speaking half of my life in terms of acronyms like dos, bbs, ram, byte, and cpu, I realized I’ve been in front of, or behind of, a computer for a heck of a long time! I remembered reading the beginning of the PC era. There wasn’t any “cut & paste”, no spell-check, no window type software, just DOS and basic texting. It was the BBS. It was the original forum. And that’s all there was, until the early 90’s. That’s when the World Wide Web reared it’s ugly head and commercialized it, demoralized it, and E-Commerce’d it. Can I blame John Kerry for it?:lol::lol: Anyway, here’s a link to the old stuff if you ever did the BBS: BBS Files
I started BBSing WAY back (prolly 1985ish) on a Texas Instruments TI 99/4a with a tape drive My Dad ended up getting a Tandy 8088-8086 or I used my friend's IBM PC jr. I finally graduated to a 386 running OS/2 and ran my own BBS called The Janitors Closet back in the 90's. What a great time.... A 20 meg HD was HUGE, 1200 baud was smoking, ANSII graphics were the stuff, etc. But atleast you had to be a little smart to use a computer. Now any moron, can and does get on the net and insert their idiocy to the collective. I still stay in touch with several of the people I met on BBSes from back in the day. What a good group of boys and gals.
What's bad I can remember honestly building my first comuter back 83-84. It was based on an Apple II+ and had 48k of memory, ran off a cassette tape drive, and I had a green monochrome monitor for it and a 300 baud modem with manual switching that was hardwired to a rotary phone. Next came the Apple IIc, then a Tandy 8088 with 5.25 floppy, and 10 meg hd. Took programing courses through JCC using a Tandy TRS-80 Model III. Learned Basic, COBOL, FORTRAN, and partiallly learned PASCAL. Craig
Yeah, before BBSes, We had a Timex Sinclair ZX-81 You hooked to the TV for a screen. It had a 16k ram memory pack you plugged into the back. We also had a Heathkit H89 Monochrome that my Dad built. If I remember right, it actually had a floppy drive, with the big 5 1/2" black disks. Heathkit...http://oldcomputers.net/heathkit-h89.html Sinclair ZX-81...http://oldcomputers.net/zx81.html Its funny, I knew Basic programming before I even knew my multiplication tables. Dad wrote a program to teach me and my brothers our multiplication tables on the Sinclair. It would print out the results of how many you got right on the little thermal printer. We hacked the program to go straight to the results and print out that we had gotten all the answers right. Dunno if I ever told him that story, I guess I can fess up now that its been 30 years I recently broke out the ZX-81 to show my kids how far computers have came, and it held their interest for about 5 seconds Kinda like when I showed them my old Atari 2600 and they asked, "what are the shapes supposed to be?" (they were the players in basketball).
I remember playing Oregon Trail off a big ole floppy disk when I was in Middle School... does that count me as a geek? Those where the days!
First computer was a TRS-80 (unaffectionately called the Trash-80) with a (BIG SIGH!) tape drive. It took hours to load the version of Oregon trail we had, and then there were no graphics, just one line commands you typed in and one line results (Oh, no! A Bear has eaten your supplies. You will starve to death in two days.) I used my IBM-PC with DOS until about 95...It was amazing how fast computing could be after that. I still remember my DOS word processing commands. (CTRL OP!)
I can't remember which dialup program I had but I remember typing: atdt xxx-xxxx about a billion times. I would play Pit, TradeWars, BRE and LoRD all night. Cruise all of the docs and download/upload crud all the time. I ran an RBBS while I was in college.
