Blast from the past

[DaOld Man]

Recognize any equipment in this news cast from 1981?

http://www.wimp.com/theinternet/

[SavannahLion]

Recognize any equipment in this news cast from 1981?

http://www.wimp.com/theinternet/

2 Hours?! That's torture! How the Hell did you guys survive?

[wp34]

That's a neat little slice of history.  $5 an hour for connect charges is insane.

Recognize any equipment in this news cast from 1981?

http://www.wimp.com/theinternet/

2 Hours?! That's torture! How the Hell did you guys survive?

I remember waiting 20 minutes for a game to load from cassette on my Atari 800--only to find out it didn't load properly and I had to rewind and try again.     It's the 80's equivalent of "when I was a kid...".

[Nephasth]

I remember waiting 20 minutes for a game to load from cassette on my Atari 800--only to find out it didn't load properly and I had to rewind and try again.     It's the 80's equivalent of "when I was a kid...".

 

When I was a kid... when the phone rang, we had to answer it to find out who was calling...

[chopperthedog]

TI-99/4A 4 lyfe!


good day.

[Ginsu Victim]

That old man in the video, Dick Halloran, looks nothing like Scatman Crothers.

[wp34]

I remember waiting 20 minutes for a game to load from cassette on my Atari 800--only to find out it didn't load properly and I had to rewind and try again.     It's the 80's equivalent of "when I was a kid...".

 

When I was a kid... when the phone rang, we had to answer it to find out who was calling...

  

Now the caller just flashes on the TV and you can decide whether or not to get up and answer it.

Back then I remember putting "*70" in the dial string to turn off call waiting.  Used to drive my parents nuts when people could not get a hold of us because I was on my modem.

[SavannahLion]

I remember waiting 20 minutes for a game to load from cassette on my Atari 800--only to find out it didn't load properly and I had to rewind and try again.     It's the 80's equivalent of "when I was a kid...".

 

When I was a kid... when the phone rang, we had to answer it to find out who was calling...

  

Now the caller just flashes on the TV and you can decide whether or not to get up and answer it.

Back then I remember putting "*70" in the dial string to turn off call waiting.  Used to drive my parents nuts when people could not get a hold of us because I was on my modem.

That's funny, my parents used to do that to me. But we had something like one of these, (second from the bottom). It was so bad, I considered getting a job just to have a second phone line put in.

[DaOld Man]

Recognize any equipment in this news cast from 1981?

http://www.wimp.com/theinternet/

2 Hours?! That's torture! How the Hell did you guys survive?

Being a kid in my days wasnt easy. We had to walk 20 miles to school, uphill both ways, and when it snowed, we had to push the bus load of smaller kids through the snow drifts.
But seriously, I didnt own a computer until about 1986, and it was a small TS-1000 that my sister gave me. (She got it at one of those time share promotions. She didnt know anything about it so she gave it to me.)
It had a whopping 1 K of ram! (It was a cartridge that plugged into the back of it.)
That was my first experience in programming, because it didnt come with any programs, I had to write my own.
Lucky for me it did have a manual with all the basic commands listed in it.
My first program was a simple version of Tic Tac Toe.
I didnt get online until around 1995, then it was just a bulletin board type deal. My Packard Bell had a screaming 2800 baud modem.
It wasnt until 1997 that I got a 486SX and got on the real internet. (Still dial up though.)
My how far technology has come in the past 25-30 years!

EDIT: Oops, the Packard Bell was a 486SX the one I bought in 1997 was a 586, I think.

[shponglefan]

"Estimated two to three thousand computer owners in the Bay area..."

Ah, what simpler times.   

[shponglefan]

Recognize any equipment in this news cast from 1981?

TRS-80?

[RoyalScam]

Yup, TRS -80 Model 1 at the home, and TRS -80 COCO at the office.

I started with a Vic-20, one year later to upgrade to a C-64. That was around 1982.  I eventually got a 300 baud modem, joined Compuserve, learned too much about Telnet, and Tymnet, and ran a BBS on 4 1541 disk drives.  My buddy Jim, had his BBS on a CoCo, other friends used TRS 80 Model 4's TI99 4a's Kaypros and Apples.  We all eventually went to PC Clones, and FidoNet.  I really miss the diversity, and the Computer Clubs.

Regards,
Scam

[Vigo]

I love the tag:

Richard Hallorman
Owns a Home Computer

[TopJimmyCooks]

OK, i'm 40 and my Dad was an early adopter of pc technology as an architect. 
We had:  TI 994A - with a radio shack cassette player.  I remember a cassette based flight simulator game that came packaged in a ziplock bag and several text adventures.  I remember typing in basic programs from magazine articles and running them.
Dad had:  Kaypro portable computers - the ones with the tiny monitor and pc in the same chassis, and the keyboard was a lid that snapped over the display.  Mouse?  no mouse!
He had:  pen plotters.  they look like today's large format printers but actually wrote on the paper with ink pens.  The paper zoomed back and forth for x and the pen moved for y like a vinyl cutter.
at grade school: apple II's with 5 1/4" floppies, later apple 2C's in high school.  No mac's seen until college. 
We had:  an IBM PC and 8086 on down the line.  I had my own 286 as a freshman in college (rare to see in 1991, more common by 1995).  the first pc i bought right out of college was a 486. 

There was a power mac in the electronic music lab ~1994 and I remember the instructor bringing and plugging in his $500 sampler card, and me asking why it worked without installing drivers.

We had: cassette tape answering machines.  Caller ID started to be widely available while i was in college. 
My roommate had:  a laptop with two pop up floppy drives but NO hard drive. 
We had:  a bag car phone and I knew people who still had them in college. 
I had:  a numeric only pager and later, a sweet alpha pager.
I had:  the nextel cell phone that looked like a walkie talkie with footlong antenna. 

I never had a brick cell phone - although I saw one circa college. 
I never had an acoustic coupled modem.