That Salmon Chanted Evening puts "dial up warning" into every LOLCats post.

Oh so true.

the .001% of users here that are still on 56K dial-up internet connections complain bitterly if it isn't done.

It was absolutely indestructible. I got a lot of work done on it and it never crashed. I've stuck with Apple products ever since.

You had to insert a disc with the system to start the computer, remove that disc and insert the Program (such as your word type app), remove that and insert your blank disc to save your original material to. I wrote my thesis on that computer. I still have it, but not sure I saved the keyboard, mouse, or any of the discs. It had a drawing program, and I introduced my grandchildren to simple little games on it. I think it finally died before I replaced it.

It seemed like such an amazing gadget at the time that all those disks didn't seem to be a bother at all. finally threw out those disks not too long ago, since I don't have any way to read them any more.

and the 14.4 modem for my first home computer back in 1995.

Not fondly.

is still using AOL and uses it for official business.

Long before the world wide web (1982-1985)! I'd enter a link, go make lunch or take a shower and sometimes the page would have loaded.

That was bad enough, but the telephone line had a place down the road where the cable came up out of a mud puddle and was wrapped in garbage bags and duct tape attached to a branch to keep the splice slightly dry. If it rained hard, or if someone swung their truck wide at that curve and the branch fell over, I not only lost our connection, but I lost our telephone until the next time I could take the time to drive into town to use a pay phone to call in the outage.

By the time I'd upgraded to a 14.4 modem, the phone line had been replaced on that section of road and the connection was MUCH better. But then I joined Compuserve and was trying to load photos so it really wasn't a lot faster.

And that state-of-the-art 300 baud modem cost about $500 in 1980 dollars. Imagine what that would be now.

OTOH, imagine what the monthly fees for broadband access are now...

-- Mal

Wonder how they would handle the internet?

with a 300 baud modem. We ran a Color64 BBS and even had a second phone line put in just so we could have TWO whole users online at the same time. It was glorious! I think I paid 500 dollars for a 10meg external hard drive.

I remember having Q-Link before it became AOL and then we got Prodigy and made fun of people still on AOL.

Last month I got a request to help one of the medical doctors with our company with an issue he was having and he was going to be on leave working from home for a while so wanted to communicate with me through his home email address. I laughed for about 10 solid minutes when his secretary told me it was (name_redacted)@AOL.com. When I finally got done and could catch my breath she said "Yeah. I know."

His first was a Wang and we found the programming guides for that one. But the Wang was strictly for his business as a consulting mining engineer.

The Commodore was his first personal computer and we have the tape deck and floppy drives for it. I have no idea if the thing works and I'm not sure I want to plug it in to try it. I think Mom had the monitor for it, too - but we didn't have room in the Prius to bring it home and it will have to come on our next trip. He saved all kinds of documentation that I need to go through. For years he saved the floppies, but Mom finally made him get rid of them, sometime after he had upgraded to computers with no floppy drives at all.

The TI-99 was supposed to be Mom's first computer, but she resisted using one for years. Eventually she used a 286 to edit a historical quarterly publication. The TI-99 has been taken out of the box once or twice but I'm pretty sure it has never been used.

My first internet service was The Source which was purchased by Compuserve. That's when I discovered online forums! Compuserve used to be the place to find online tech support and to join interest groups. Back in those 14.4 (or slower) days we used a program called TapCIS (The Access Program for the Compuserve Information Service - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TapCIS) - it would go online, pick up message headers and responses. Then we could write responses and mark the messages we wanted to read, go back online to up and download, read and write messages, then back online to upload. Since we paid by the minute for access to Compuserve, TapCIS made it affordable, using minutes online to get hours worth of offline reading and response time.

After AOL purchased Compuserve they changed the forum software so that TapCIS could no longer function. By then of course most people had faster access and there were unlimited data plans available. Frankly, I still miss the efficiency of that system and not having to wade through pages and pages of posts to keep up with threads I'm interested in reading.

I did find my way here from a Compuserve Forum - a user on the Democratic Forum there used to post links to threads here. Once AOL screwed around with memberships and access once too many times, I gave up on those forums and just stayed here.

Damn thing multitasked and it did not even have a hard drive. It was the first computer I accessed the internet with. Of course, to be fair, it was mostly running the old Lnyx text based web browser on dialup but it worked.

It had color too.

I loved that machine. It was the first home computer whose output you could record, in glorious NTSC standard video!

You didn't even need Video Toaster or an expensive time base corrector to synch it up with the rest of your equipment.

that the graphics (underwater scenes) for the movie Hunt For Red October were done on a Amiga. My son got one after he outgrew the C64 but he moved out shortly after that and took it with him so I never got to play with it much. I got a Packard Bell with a 486DX instead.

I had Eudora on it and was able to use it to check email. The funny thing is, the SE/30 boots faster than my wife's windows machine.

It's now sitting on a shelf, but I bet it'd still work.

Maybe retrofit them to function in the modern systems, like old typewriters are being retrofit to type onto Pads.

Here's the Apple Home page on an LCII when Steve Jobs died:





Capacitors going off like firecrackers is a common problem when starting old computers. I have a mess of old computers in my garage, I have a bad habit of collecting every computer I ever did serious work on, and I've even kept the second non-relay computer I ever built (many of the parts in it were cannibalized from it's predecessor.)

I even have an eight inch floppy drive. Nobody has asked me to convert an eight inch floppy in decades... and that is one machine I'm truly afraid to plug in and start. It has a monster transformer and huge filter capacitors in it. If that thing blows it might destroy itself and could catch the house on fire.

I'm thinking of doing something even more obsessive than this guy. I've been toying with the idea of sticking a Raspberry Pi in my Apple IIGS and seeing if I could make that work as a graphic web browser. The Pi, of course, would do all the "heavy lifting" but I'd be using the GS hardware for keyboard and mouse input, and the GS operating system and hardware to move the completed rendering to the original GS RGB monitor.

Horrors, don't get me started... I also have an Amiga 1000 in the garage.

But I've got to confess. The availability of some great emulators in Debian has limited my mad hardware experiments. If I want to play with my old Atari 800, all I have to do is click a link on my Debian desktop.

I'd have expected the ghost of Steve Jobs to show up on the screen and say, "I told you so!"

95% of what we do is crap.

95% of the time we can't tell what's "useful" from what's "crap."

We live for the one-quarter-of-one-percent of the true arts we recognize.

The rest of the time we are just eating and crapping, or else we are starving.