And Veronica. Thanks for the nostalgia.

is what I thought. There were only a few; they were costly.... and dry and ugly. Little did I know....

I had little knowledge of this new contraption and had to enlist my 10 yo boy's help from afar.

I connected via AOL and have never looked back, well, not the AOL part anyway.

I was using computers at work so I had a sense of their utility--I wasn't as "geeky" as many of my co-workers, and many of my friends, though.

"Computer time" was terribly expensive for me in the nineties--I lived in Europe and they charged through the nose!

AOL became the first service to go unlimited. There is no way I could have afforded the huge bills most people were running up online in the bad old days of pay per hour service.

I had been using DOS and Win 3.1 at work, so the transition to Win 95 wasn't hard, at all. It's a good thing because I didn't have any kids with brains to pick.

My first AOL was off a floppy disk and wouldn't do any faster than 1200 baud. The first signon to download a newer version that would work with my "super fast" 14.4 modem took HOURS, and I think at that point, the program still fit onto a floppy disk.

This was a real blast from the past. I remember watching that show on PBS every week for a year before I got that first, clunky Win 95 box.

pre plug and play. I remember spending about a month trying to get a sound card, a cd rom and a hand scanner working at the same time. I finally ended up making a chart that listed Com ports, IRQs and several other factors before I could get it all to work.

My first computer started out life as a xray film scanning machine that I modified for home use.

I was going into Config. Sys. to get some tchotchke or other to work.

I did, too.

I can beat you, I started out in cold rooms when computers had hand wired harnesses and were basically counting machines. The best thing about that job was the AC.

travel, the small consulting group I worked for bought us Toshiba laptops in 1995. They were very expensive and heavy but I used it for 3 years. Bought a laptop for myself in '98. I have never owned a desk top computer because I didn't want to buy another piece of furniture.

that I used in my Genealogy business...and the two bricks that worked as it's rechargeable batteries. It was heaven to carry around compared to a friend's computer I used in 1987 that was classified as a "portable computer".

1983 was the first time I ever used a home computer--my mother's. Now, THAT was furniture! It ran using DOS and back then we used gedcom files to build our family tree on it.

I had to use a terminal emulator on a Macintosh SE/30 with a blistering 14.4k modem to connect to an IBM machine running AIX where I could access the internet through a text-only web browser called Lynx. If I entered all the commands correctly, which usually took at least half a dozen tries I would be greeted by the Webcrawler start page. It sucked, but it was completely free.

In 1996 I got ISDN and Netscape on a 180mhz Pentium PRO blew my mind.

I connected to a service called ECHO here in NYC. I got connected using an Amiga 1200 with a 14.4 modem. ECHO still exists. I browsed the web - what there was of it with a program called IBrowse for the Amiga. Before that I had to use a unix program on ECHO called Lynx. It was text based. Ah the frontier days....

if memory serves me right. I was a youngin' but I still remember listening to that weird dial sounds as it connected to libraries and universities and a few companies that had pages. It was very archaic looking compared to even this video.


Here's wiki's cool info about what I used, it was Q-Link, which was a Commodore 64 only software program, which later became AOL!


Networking software

During the 1980s, the Commodore 64 was used to run many bulletin board systems using software packages such as Bizarre 64, Blue Board, C-Net, Color 64, CMBBS, DMBBS and The Deadlock BBS Construction Set, often with sysop-made modifications. These boards sometimes were used to distribute cracked software.

There were also major commercial online services, such as Compunet (UK), CompuServe (US – later bought by America Online), The Source (US) and Minitel (France) among many others. These services usually required custom software which was often bundled with a modem and included free online time as they were billed by the minute.

Quantum Link (or Q-Link) was a US and Canadian online service for Commodore 64 and 128 personal computers that operated from November 5, 1985 to November 1, 1994. It was operated by Quantum Computer Services of Vienna, Virginia, which in October 1991 changed its name to America Online, and continues to operate its AOL service for the IBM PC compatible and Apple Macintosh today. Q-Link was a modified version of the PlayNET system, which Control Video Corporation (CVC, later renamed Quantum Computer Services) licensed.

About the size of small ice chest, with a floppy drive in front. But I wasn't connected to the BBS. The guys in what later would be called IT were, on their Tandy TS-80s and they were reading and writing in MS-DOS. That was like trying to learn Swahili to me.

I didn't work on a PC until I bought my first one in April of '99, a Gateway. Still have the tower, sitting a few feet away from me.

Internet Relay Chat. Was the fb of the 90s. (still used too!)

Cheers
Sandy

them in school in the mid-80's. Being the first students who had computers in school was a neat thing, indeed.

Good job keeping your old tower!

good stuff!

yes, my mom spent $2000 on a mac performa in the mid 90's, IIRC. I was like wow that's expensive!

I spent $300 on a used performa 180, which was probably 50% faster than hers. I thought it moved pretty quickly, but yeah, compared to today, it's like walking by a snail! I've sat and waited for a page to load fully about 3-5 minutes before. LOL

...Yea I'm old(er). I remember the old BBSs, 5.25" floppy drives (and 8.25" ones), the Netscape browser and...I'll stop now. Started on a Radio Shack TRS-80.

It had no external memory (1983 or 1984). I bought a cassette drive so I could save programs. I also bought a disk of programs. I remember the startup screen said 3580 bytes free.

It didn't do much (I wrote a little jumping jacks program - my first 'for' loop), I learned a lot about what programming was gonna look like. My next computer was a Tandy 8088 in 1989. I learned how to develop databases in a program called Nutshell. Then in 1992 my wife bought me a 386. I used this database experience to develop a fleet maintenance program in Borland Paradox.

My wife first connected to the Internet (text based in 1995 - I believe). We got two lines one for data and one for voice. A little later we connected with Netscape. Then in 2000 or so we got high speed Internet and since then it has been a necessity.

I had an accompanying cassette drive and a Star Micronix dot matrix printer .

It really helped me a lot in the long run. I never got a printer for it.

so I was online in 1994 to communicate with family in the US. Each night we played some sort of online game. Later years we would play Diablo together and/or basic games on...ICQ.

Cheers
Sandy

was the university's mainframe:





Then the department's minicomputer:



and we could store our programs on floppy disc. Luxury!

At Kansas State. They had moved past the cards, but we had an account (where we were charged for our time). It sucked when your account was drained and you had an assignment due the next day.

Started with WATFIV Fortran on keypunch, then Pascal with online electronic storage, then assembly with a Kim-1 and papertape.





My 16 GB flash drive has the storage capacity of 25,000 miles of paper tape!

It's amazing how far we've come in such a short period of time.

but now you can find them for $10 or so. Imagine, a single 16GB Flash drive equals 16,000 of these back in the day:

I give you the $8 billion iPod

magnetic media was not for undergraduates

just one. one tube.

I was a part-time computer operator during college (among other jobs at the same time). My boss let me bring home a terminal and modem so I could log in on the weekends. I could log in and get an idea of what my weekend was going to be like when I went in to do the tape backups and print all the customer billing statements.

The modem was 300 baud and you had to use a phone to dial the computer at work then flip a switch on the modem to get it to connect once you heard the tones from the remote end. That's right, no "AT" commands on that modem. It was primitive. But since it was all text and no graphics it wasn't that awful.

My house-mates at the fraternity house thought I was really cool for a nerd.

So who remembers the "AT" commands that were standard on modems back then?

We had a dial up modem that connected to the fueling station. It was about 1992, we had a 1200 baud modem (I don't remember what AT was but it seemed like there was an AT light - it connected on its own). It was pretty high tech at the time, they may still be using it. We could download the text from the site and then I imported it into paradox to match up with the other vehicle costs. Moved it from one computer to the other with 3 1/2" floppies.

It all seemed pretty leading edge at the time.

and Gopher was the rage

He used examples of "The Women's Rights Conference in Beijing" and "The Whole Earth Catalog".