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I remember how excited I was when I upgraded to a 1200 baud modem! My Epson Apex could not run windows but it sure could connect to the bb's lol
I remember teaching myself DOS so I could set up and run my own batch files
I loved it when I got the 1200 baud modem and my writer friends and I could chat. It was very simple but easier than emails. We are soooo spoiled now
I used Dos to do file managing, especially deleting them. I hate that all my standby files when I write stuff are still there clogging up the list. Windows has made deleting them so much more complicated.
I do remember the 8 character limit in file names though.
you were ahead of the game.. i didnt have a hard drive till like 1996, i was going for a new computer build and the local computer parts place had a 40mb hard drive on sale for like $150 and i built a super computer, i skipped over the whole 286/386/486 stage, i went from xt->pentium* well actually this super computer had a cyrix processor, it was suppose to be equivalent to the pentium but it registered as a 486, still had 640k mem but the mobo had pb cache, had cga graphics, 33.6bps modem, soundblaster compatible sound..anyways its amazing that the cellphone i have now is like 1000x more powerful than the computers i used from the mid 90's-2000's...smh
When we set up the bbs, my ex took his stack of stand alone hard drives for his Raido Shack collection and wired them into one large (for the time) hard drive, and this was set up as the primary one for the bbs. It took a lot of space and always had a fan on it but it certainly did the job. I remember when we got our new improved 386 machines, we used a local computer place and ordered it custom. I still wonder if that might not be a bad idea with laptops.
I got one of those watches that had a calculator and kept a phone directory and stored other information later and loved the space creature of the future image most people got. But that WATCH had more stuff on it than my first trubo xt, and that was the best you could get in 86. I used it for quite a while for word processing. Unline other desktops later, which coughed at 80 degrees, it would still run at 90.
Baud is the speed of your connection. 300 baud was three hundered connections per minute. A slooowww scroll. 600 was really fast in comparison. The next big jump was 1200 baud. It seemed like lightening. You had to buy a new modem for each jump and hook up your second line to it to go online.
Sysop. System operator. You start a bbs, you operate it. With us it was him and me. This included checking uploads for viruses and reading over posts for inappropriate stuff to delete, and lets not forget verifying they were all adults. We had to see a copy of your id and sent you an authorization. If you ran a bbs from your home, and someone put inappropriate material on it and a child saw it YOU were considered responsible.
I'll bet getting off dial up has been quite an eye opener. I only wish the cost of a fast cable line wasn't even MORE than the cost of a second dedicated phone line.
In those early days, one screen character required 10 bits be sent.( 1 Start, 8 Data, 1 Stop). So 300 Baud/bps = 30 Characters ( or later, Bytes) per second.
Funny thing is, I was a nerd for getting it back then. There were just around 30,000 users when I joined. It was the cheapest way to get a true internet email address at the time. When the user count got up into the millions, I had switched to the free account model with no dial up access just because I wanted to keep the address. I got another email address only because of the perception of what it meant to have an AOL address at that time, but I didn't drop the AOL account. I still occasionally get emails from people I have not seen or heard from in several years. It drives me nuts when people change their email addresses more often than their tires.
That was one of the cool things about how people reacted. Most assumed you were a nerd and must be smart to figure out how to run one. Most also saw no real reason to have one. What would you really need with a home computer? They sent people to the moon or were something businesses used.
But my particular friends were all techies, to one degree or another. We were all part of science fiction fandom, and most of the people who went to filks and conventions had one or wanted one. We included some of the supernerds who advanced that old turbo xt to something with far more capabilitys by tinkering and experimenting. I worked as a programmer in the mid 80's and only one other of our staff had their own. Most of the old timers didn't see why you'd need one at home.
But it was interesting how everyone assumed you a) must be smart and b) must be good at math if you dealt with computers. Intelligence probably does play a part, but I'm awful at math.
My son who keeps telling me I *have* to get facebook was sitting on my lap playing kids games on my computer at four. For him they've always been around and used as part of daily life.
But even for me, many of the people I've known and many of the choices about life wouldn't have been if there was no home computer and no internet since I would never have met them. Those of us who are not really 'normal' but see things a bit differently were probably the first to try it since it let us find others like us we hadn't at home.
I remember spending $800 for a 1200 baud modem that went into the trash as useless and worth nothing years ago. Where I worked, about 1982 I was among the first to use the IBM PC when it first came out, as well as an Apple "Fat Mac"
about 2 years later. None had hard drives yet, I remember buying one at work that was 10MB for several hundred (external). At the time I already had a computer at home, it was a Micropro with only 64k memory, a televideo green screen monochrome monitor with built-in keyboard, two 720k 8" floppy disk drives and an acoustic modem (had to place the telephone into it).
My first hard drive was 20MB, I bought it from PC Connection someplace in New England. It cost $399, and I was never going to be able to fill that up! Before that I loaded DOS from a 5" Floppy. Good times.
Oh, yeah, I was making $3.35 an hour back then. I REALLY wanted that drive!
Dial up! Yeah, I had Earthlink. Watch TV while surfing the net, and having a magazine close by to read while waiting for pages to load. EBay was in its infancy, Yahoo had just flexed its wings, people used Netscape as a browser and no one had heard of Google. The search engine of choice was Metacrawler. Computer games were played on the TV and were Atari and Intellevision, or however you spell it. Yep, them was the days.
I started with CompuServe. Word for word, it contained some of the best content on many of the boards. And unlike many places, it was easy to have a good conversation with other members.
Now, talking about early "web" - I was using a beta of Mosaic way, way back. Must have been at least 1992, maybe even earlier. I'm trying to recall what I had available a bit before that at a start up where we had several Sun workstations (this would have been prior to Solaris, one of the earlier OSes). I got on email in the mid 80s in terms of "intranet" usage (IBM PROFS no less!) and about '87 in terms of "internet" usage.
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