Computers, The Internet & You

[mark7171]

a TI99/4a when i was real young.

then a apple IIGS at 8th grade? . i got a $20 midgent pocket 2400 baud modem and went online, to a gamming BBS "the evil sock". slow ass, but had games to download over the kermit protocal....and porn.

then hand me downs i386,i486, yada,yada. in the 90's

i built my own stuff from other peoples leftovers.

i have been online ever since the beginning, and all along the way.

right now i like skype, and hope one day i can have accoustic jams over video confrence. my musician freinds have all scattered over time, that would be a godsend.

[RIC N BACKER]

after graduating HS in 1982 a friend of mine sort of disappeared into his Basement and some sort of Computer school.
I thought he was nuts and didnt think the computer thing would really take off..... boy was I wrong on that Huh?

I was out Playing bass racing old cars and getting laid.

by 1986 this new company called microsoft opened and my friend was all excited again. I told him to get a {censored}ing life and get outside of the house because what kind of moron is going to sit at home and Play games on a computer. lol

In 1993 or 1994 when the Partying thing settled down and I had my first Kid we got a computer and Joined AOL. been on ever since

My friend became a pretty successful programmer and did very well financially for a while till the bottom dropped out about 5-6 years ago. he was making 300 thousand a year at one point if not more. then he called me up and had to cancel a get together at my house because he didnt have the 20 bucks for gas!
he is back on his feet now but it was a terrible time for a few years for him as it was for a lot of people like that.

[bonscottvocals]

First computer that I worked on was an IBM mainframe of some kind in 1978. Started coding in Basic, but worked to Cobol, Fortan, and C soon enough. Then on to Apple IIc, Tandy, Commodore, and the like. I work on machines as varied as Solaris SPARC 5 workstations to Sunfire E6900's; Dell, IBM, and HP servers running Windows Server and RH Linux; and plain old desktops.

This was my first 'military' computer, and bays of them controlled missile, gun, and other tactical systems. I do miss the days when I could remove a card and tell whether it was AND gates, OR gates, etc, but I don't miss having 16K of memory that weighs as much as a 5-inch bullet!

[bonscottvocals]

after graduating HS in 1982 a friend of mine sort of disappeared into his Basement and some sort of Computer school. I thought he was nuts and didnt think the computer thing would really take off..... boy was I wrong on that Huh? I was out Playing bass racing old cars and getting laid. by 1986 this new company called microsoft opened and my friend was all excited again. I told him to get a {censored}ing life and get outside of the house because what kind of moron is going to sit at home and Play games on a computer. lol In 1993 or 1994 when the Partying thing settled down and I had my first Kid we got a computer and Joined AOL. been on ever since My friend became a pretty successful programmer and did very well financially for a while till the bottom dropped out about 5-6 years ago. he was making 300 thousand a year at one point if not more. then he called me up and had to cancel a get together at my house because he didnt have the 20 bucks for gas! he is back on his feet now but it was a terrible time for a few years for him as it was for a lot of people like that.

Where in Upstate, NY? Was it anywhere near Ticonderoga?

[Rippin' Robin]

Whoa, serious tubes going on there.

[PtPt]

My first computer was an Apple 2 C someplace in the early/mid 80's.
Next was a Macintosh Performa in 1993.
Had an external 2400 bps modem and frequented local BBS's.
Became a Forum Op on two BBS's.
Got on the internet through a BBS.
It crashed all the time.
We have come a long way.

Pt

[FreestyleIntruder]

First computer - 1990

 

Acorn A3000, no hard drive, 1MB RAM, best operating system ever made (RISC OS). OF course no-one here knows what the {censored} that is, which makes me feel special, even more so than Mac users

 

First online - 2001

 

Duron 800 (everything overclocked to buggery), 256mb RAM, 64mb GF2 graphics, 30 whole GB of harddrive capacity, Windows 2000

[bonscottvocals]

Whoa, serious tubes going on there.

Nope, it was all solid state, no tubes. There was a bay for power supplies, a bay for memory, you had the CPU and I/O as well. I think I remember 16 channels of I/O, and the cables looked like XLR snakes, but you had 16 bit parallel data transfer, so they had a lot of connections. Nothing like CAT-5, believe me! I wish I had a pic of a card to show you, but you could actually look at the transistors and the like, because they weren't burned into silicone at the time.

Those lights are for monitoring and inputing to the various registers that still exist on computers today. The 'B' and 'S' registers where for addressing and the 'A' registers were used for calculations. Floating point was relatively new at that time, but parallel computing, advanced floating point operations, cache memory, etc were still years off.

She generated enough heat that you had to run air conditioning in the data rooms during the winter in North Atlantic though!

[bonscottvocals]

Oh, and first 'Internet' experience was '80 or '81. We were tied directly into the SUNY network, and it was really boring at the time. In the military, we were tied to the DOD network, and we used it to trade info and ideas. It was about '93 or '94 when I dropped onto AOL and that was the real beginning of this stuff for me. Hey, we're still trading info and ideas, but we've got cool graphics now.

[Thumper]

1993 Apple Performa 6200. I went online in 1995.

Current rig HP Pavillion ze4900 runining XP, with a Maxtor 200 gig external drive and an HP OfficeJet 6210 all in one.

Man, I sound like I'm talking about my bass rig. I am such a geek...

[ssimontis]

In 1996 I believe it was, my family purchased a Packard Bell machine. I don't remember any of the details, I was young, I don't even remember if we had Internet or not. In 1998/1999 we purchased an HP Pentium III and got MSN dialup.