It used to be that we could look back just 5 or 10 years and be amazed at how far we’d come. I remember in the late 80’s or early 90’s talking about the fact that when we graduated high school, we didn’t have PC’s, the Internet, music on CD, or cable TV. And, while they were around, we didn’t have a VCR or a remote control for the TV. Calculators still cost hundreds of dollars. No cell phones. No laptops. No digital cameras. No laser printers. No e-mail.
It’s still amazing to me, but unfortunately it is starting to sound less like “wow! lookit all the neat stuff we got we didn’t have yesterday!” and more like “you damned kids don’t know how good you got it…why, back in my day…”
So, when I saw this link from Slashdot about electronic bulletin boards, called BBS: The Documentary, my first thought was: “Hey! Wow! It was just yesterday that we were running our baseball league on TriBBS and using ‘high-speed,’ 2400-baud modems!”
My second thought was: “No, you idiot. That was over 15 years ago, and you haven’t needed to used a modem in almost 4 years.”
Still, it’s a cool site for an old geek. I especially love the All-Time BBS Software List with links to every piece of BBS software known to man.
I still remember quite clearly stepping up from a 300 baud to a 1200 baud, and being GLAD about it.
I’ll see you on the porch. I’ll save you a rocking chair and some Geritol.
My first PC had a 126MB hard drive and I remember thinking, “I’ll never EVER fill THAT up”.
My first calculator (Early 1970’s): A $60 Heathkit – I had to assemble it! It had 5 functions: add, subtract, multiply, divide, and constant.
My first computer: Commodore 64
I also remember that awesome jump from 300 to 1200 baud. QuantumLink. And “flippies”!
My first PC: Wyse 8 MHz 286 with a whopping 1 MB RAM (that I inserted chip-by-chip) and a huge 40 MB hard drive.
Would it make you feel any older if I said that I’ve never used a BBS and only seen a 2400 baud modem in a musem?
I remember selling acoustic couplers…you remember, the high-tech interface where you tooko the handset of your phone and put it in the cradle so you could use the computer over the phone line? Yup, 300 baud…
Tape drives… meaning cassette tapes!
8″ Floppy Disks… sigle sided, double density!
Daisy Wheel Printers…
I distinctly remember the first package of 3 1/2″ High-Density disks that we carried. A 10-pack of 1.44 diskettes retailed for $74.99!
I can still create an Autoexec.bat or Config.sys file in my head, I had to recite it so many times over the phone for people who managed to delete their root directories. It’s those rare times when I actually think I still know something about computers.