So who else remembers online experiences from the early 90's

[WV6Z]

http://www.biggeekdaddy.com/humorpages/ ... t1994.html (http://www.biggeekdaddy.com/humorpages/Geeks/24pilot1994.html)

[n4aud]

Internet by the hour...my first dial-up account had different "tiers" and you got more online time the more you paid. Unlimited internet was pretty pricey.

[M0GLO]

I remember that, hour tiers.
And 9600 baud.
And watching the screen fill one character at a time.
On my green mono cga monitor.

I miss those days. ;)

[N3ATS]

Goodbye!

LOL, I sure do remember that when I was an internet n00b with AOHell!!!

[N2RJ]

We didn't get landline telephones until 1989. Prior to that to have a telephone you had to be a rich somebody living in the middle of town.

Connecting to American online services was out of the question. We had a local one called Opus Networx. They're almost defunct now, having given up being a dialup ISP a few years ago.

I had a 2400 baud modem at the time and it was pretty slow, but got me online. I actually got it free from a friend. Lightning had struck his phone line, shorting out one of the bypass caps, so I replaced the bypass cap and got a free modem.

I experimented with a few other things - such as dialing fax machines and also private BBSes belonging to several companies.

One great BBS I remembered was Arctic Lair, which was run by a local computer store. One of the guys I made friends with was actually a ham - 9Y4RT.

The first internet experience came when Opus connected to the internet, this was back in 1994. I had telnet access as well as limited SLIP access through the BBS through a menu.

I ran up a phone bill which was almost $700 and dad cut the phone. End of the line for me, well until I was 19, started working part time, paid off the debt and got my own phone line and internet account.

By the way, internet was TT$69.00 for 20 hours/month, TT$800/month for unlimited. The prices dropped down with competing ISPs, but it's only now they have true broadband through cable there...

Late 90s, I started working at Fujitsu and they had a 128kbps fractional T1. Woohoo! My first real taste of "faster than dialup." That was pure heaven, as its broadband speeds enabled me to make free VoIP calls using net2phone to my girlfriend who moved to New York the year before.

In 2000 I had enough of that and moved. We ended up getting married somehow, (when you're young and stupid these things happen) and in our apartment we got broadband cable. In retrospect we shouldn't have because it pretty much destroyed our lives as we became slaves to the internet...

My first dialup was at 2400. I guess it was not that slow because:

A. I didn't know any better and
B. I wasn't downloading or uploading large sums of data.

To this day, there is no high speed internet to the last house I lived in before moving here. You gotta go dialup in that place in Kansas. My house and the house across the road was about a mile from the next house and no one wants to pay for the high speed lines out there.

The simple life my asp.

[M0GLO]

Ahh, so we're not talking first Internet then.

My first dial up was 300 baud and my favorite destinations were HalTeks BBS for techie stuff and Kaos Faktory BBS for crazed counter culture.

Once again, watching the letters appear one at a time (only slower) on my green monitor, while my 8086 got hotter and hotter. :D

I remember the 14.4 modem I got, WOOHOOO! That was BLAZING fast!
I could almost pretend I couldn't make out the characters drawing on my screen one by one.
I used that one to service my own BBS, WildCat was pretty cool software.

[kf0rt]

I ran TBBS, remember that? My brother-in-law wrote it, no sh!t (he's a ham, too -- now fairly "well to do" as a result).

[M0GLO]

Damn! Your bro in law is Phil?

That software is still going strong.

[N2RJ]

I used that one to service my own BBS, WildCat was pretty cool software.

Wildcat was what Arctic Lair used, and they had a couple of freeware CD-ROMs that served up some really great files for download.

[kf0rt]

Damn! Your bro in law is Phil?

That software is still going strong.

The stories I could tell... :lol: Phil and I built (probably) the first viable computerized repeater controller ever. He was the analog engineer (worked for Martin Marietta at the time) and I did a lot of the digital work. This was in 1978-79. Predates TBBS by a few years. Phil now lives SE of Denver and hasn't changed a bit. His adopted sons are my by-marriage nephews (insert long story here). He's a good man, and I owe him a lot. Swear, I could write a book -- those were some seriously fun times in many ways.

Surprised anyone is still using TBBS, though. Anyone still using the TERM14 program that lets you connect to TBBS via LAN? I wrote that. :shock:

A bit more on edit: My BBS was The Grotto Lounge. This was the BBS that started TBBS, but I didn't take it on until the original owner decided to shut it down. TBBS was pretty mature by then. The guy who ran it was tired of it and the sponsor was having financial problems. I traded some ham gear for the modem and a "lease" on the computer. That was in 1990. After a lot of years, I shut it down on December 31, 1999. It was the echomail hub for Denver at the time, 104:1. Man, the hours I spent on that...

[n4aud]

All I can say is "Wow!" I used a few BBS around here before the internet was available at a reasonable rate. I actually kind of miss the bulletin boards.

[N1LAF]

Whatever happened to Archie and gopher?

[M0GLO]

Whatever happened to Archie and gopher?

They ran away with Veronica! :lol:

Man, I haven't seen those outside of a University or library system in like... well... ever!

You know, html and the browsers pretty killed all of that. Too bad too, they were pretty light weight and useful.

[al2n]

Ah, 2400 baud and the BBS systems. Them were the days.

I remember the screaming 8088 machine my college roomie had. CGA monitor, 10MB hard drive, and it only weighed 35 pounds!

The day I upgraded to a 486 with 9600 baud and VGA, I thought I was one bad dude.

[ad4mg]

Yep ... started with the 1200 baud modem, external, with a serial cable so thick the modem never sat flat on the desk. It's been a long time ago, but I started on the BBS I think was called the "Blue Ridge Express". Had a forum, lots of downloads, etc.

Tried the internet for the first time via a public dial-in connection available through public funding from VCU in downtown Richmond. Funny, I was thrilled to be on the internet, but didn't have a clue what to look for or what to do ...

Spent a fortune on modem upgrades ... 1200, to 2400, then to the blistering 9600 baud modem.

Joined AOL when it became available, and it took years to get weaned from that. Talk about intellectual stagnation!

[kf0rt]

Nobody here had a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem?

The guys on my BBS would have get-togethers once or twice a year. I had one of them here at the house (1994?) where I set up two Windows 95 (beta) computers with dial-ins to the web. Had about 15-20 people here and it was the first time any of them had ever seen the Internet or Windows 95.

One thing I have never had is an AOL account. :roll:

Nobody here had a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem?

The guys on my BBS would have get-togethers once or twice a year. I had one of them here at the house (1994?) where I set up two Windows 95 (beta) computers with dial-ins to the web. Had about 15-20 people here and it was the first time any of them had ever seen the Internet or Windows 95.

One thing I have never had is an AOL account. :roll:

We had acoustic modems in the 70's. I thought this thread was about the early 90's. My bad.

[kf0rt]

Oops. No, my bad. I think it was the 90's before I finally threw that away. :lol: :lol:

[kb2vxa]

Starting at the beginning my first exposure to computers was in the mid 70s, an IBM System 3 mainframe with a 300bd acoustic modem. We had to dial the other operator, chat a while, then start the download which happened to be the Transamerica quarterly report. That oversize 386 took the entire shift to complete the task and THEN we had to decolate the printout, ugh.

Skipping ahead to 1995 my 386 wasn't on line but it died soon enough and I built a 486 DX60 out of junk box parts, discovered there WAS an internet of sorts and someone was kind enough to donate an AT&T 14.4 serial port modem. We all know what AOL stands for so my aim was the BBSes, there were several ham oriented ones in the local area so no toll charges thank goodness. The last to shut down was owned by my friend Larry N2HGY, that lasted until around 1998. I had no need for Telnet with a packet radio BBS nearby which is why the 386 in the first place.

Fast forward to the present with another home brew only a gazillion times faster and more powerful but one step backward. I moved a couple of months ago and due to financial difficulties antennas have been delayed indefinitely so it's Telnet (ugh) to a packet BBS in Australia. After years of railing against Land Line Lids and Amateur Internet guess what. Yup, Hank W0RLI is laughing his butt off.

Shut up you clanking bucket of bolts! OOOooohhh the pain.

Still I'm grateful for the generosity of Ray VK2TV for keeping me on the "air" so all is not lost.

[KG4CGC]

1992, Prodigy and Compuserve.
100 $$ a month to play chess and fantasy leagues!

[N2RJ]

Nobody here had a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem?


No, because we didn't have telephones until 1989.

I read about them in Compute! Magazine, however.



The guys on my BBS would have get-togethers once or twice a year. I had one of them here at the house (1994?) where I set up two Windows 95 (beta) computers with dial-ins to the web. Had about 15-20 people here and it was the first time any of them had ever seen the Internet or Windows 95.

One thing I have never had is an AOL account. :roll:

I got 8 months free when I bought a Dell PC a few years ago. Gave it to my mom to use.

[n4aud]

Anybody who hasn't used a printer-terminal and an acoustic coupler to play Advent is a computer newbie...yeah, that WAS in the 70's. All of us who know how to make a program card for a keypunch machine...we're a dying breed. If you've never written an entire COBOL program on cards and then had the card reader shred the next to last card...you ain't lived.

[kf0rt]

Here's the "guts" of The Grotto Lounge BBS in 1995:

http://home.comcast.net/~tatanka02/grotto1995.jpg

Two of the three computers ran the two phone lines of the BBS and the third was a Novell 2.x file server. This was before I got heavily into FIDO and had the Planet Connect dish on the deck out back -- what a pain in the ass that was. Towards the end, we had five phone lines running into the house: two were BBS public access lines, one for FIDO feeds, one for the house (family) and one for my own modem.

I miss the "community" of local BBS systems. Made a lot of friends, but have only really kept one over the years.

Remember Jack Rickard of Boardwatch fame? The Grotto had one of the only copies of PIMP before it went public. We had Internet email running, but very few knew how to use it. The system would batch Internet email in the dead of the night, so turn-around was about two days, still faster than sending a letter. This was before you could buy your way into Internet email, and I could probably go to jail for some of that stuff.

It's really amazing how far the technology has come in about a decade.

[kf0rt]

Best "this really sucked" story of running a BBS:

In the FIDO days, you could send and receive mail via the network (usually a local call, but it took longer), or you could "crash" mail directly to the recipient's BBS by dialing it directly (usually long distance). I had things set up for crash mail because we had very little traffic.

One time, there was a bad entry in the nodelist -- some BBS in Phoenix that was picking up the line but not connecting. My system called that BBS every five minutes for three days before I noticed and shut it down. Got a HUGE bill from Qwest for over $300. Called Qwest up and they assumed it was a billing problem at their end and dropped the entire bill. Whew.

[WV6Z]

Holy crap, that was a lucky break! :shock:

[kb2vxa]

"Got a HUGE bill from Qwest for over $300."
Due to an "input error" I got a $1,200 monster from Verizon.

"Called Qwest up and they assumed it was a billing problem at their end and dropped the entire bill."
The remnants of Ma Bell (you smell, sonny monkey bun, tray beans on sun)* aren't so generous.

* Michelle, John Lennon's French pronunciation is atrocious.

[W4KLB]

:shock: anyone remember kirmit?? oh my :lol: :lol:
73

[N2NH]

Did anybody use Blue Wave, Boxer (Text Editor), SLMR (Silly Little Mail Reader - Mustang Software and their Communications programs) or TinyEd? Or do inadvertent beta testing on McAfee which was free then? I also used to use Turbo MobyZmodem and Super Zmodem for downloads. The latter let you look at downloads as they came down and play Tetris as you downloaded. Started with a 1200 baud modem and went up to a Boca Research 39K (which could sometimes be goosed up to 54.4K). Also had an early Plextor CD writer. Nothing special. 2X when it felt like it.

The good old days. At least until I got my telephone bill. For a short time, the local telephone company was charging more for data calls and long distance from the outer boroughs of the city to Manhattan. We were in different area codes by then and they took advantage of that. Imagine Long Distance charges from one side of the city to another.
:evil:

[N2RJ]

Does anyone remember networking computers with BNC connectors, RG58 cable and having to use terminators on the end?

[M0GLO]

Does anyone remember networking computers with BNC connectors, RG58 cable and having to use terminators on the end?

Oh yeah, thin net and T connectors were the way in 92!

Remember ArcNet and vampire taps?

[kf0rt]

Does anyone remember networking computers with BNC connectors, RG58 cable and having to use terminators on the end?

Oh yeah, thin net and T connectors were the way in 92!

Remember ArcNet and vampire taps?

We ran ArcNet at work for years. Active hubs and passive hubs, all coax and BNC's. Had miles of the stuff in the ceilings. A few years ago, I had a use for some of that coax and thought I'd be doing someone a favor by swiping some out of the ceiling. It was all gone!

[W7XF]

How about C-Net BBS's in the mid to late 80's???

I actually ran one myself.

K7KWH

[WV6Z]

Kevin is that a new puppy? :shock:

[W7XF]

No... just my beagle when he was a wee lad....

[WV6Z]

Ahhhh...... glad I am no tthe only one that flashes baby pictures..... of dogs. :D

[kb9rqz]

Nobody here had a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem?

The guys on my BBS would have get-togethers once or twice a year. I had one of them here at the house (1994?) where I set up two Windows 95 (beta) computers with dial-ins to the web. Had about 15-20 people here and it was the first time any of them had ever seen the Internet or Windows 95.

One thing I have never had is an AOL account. :roll: I never did Imy first was a 1200 baud model for my C-64

I have never had AOL at any time though

[kf6rdn]

say XYZZY
You are now back at the Small Brick Building..

I did accoutics for awhile, then got a cool smartmodem 300bd internal for an apple 2e.

I ran a "matchmaker system on an apple with 2 disk drives.

BBS's..
I ran a "matchmaker system on an apple with 2 disk drives.

I ran WWIV - Phantom's Opera. When the play had just come out. Had a couple punks try to crash it, they just posted annoying stuff, and bragged but apparently they had gotten into someone elses.. But someone else knew them.. Turns out they were kids of someone infamous at the time.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.h ... A966958260 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0DF143AF931A35756C0A9669582 60)
http://www.godulike.co.uk/faiths.php?ch ... ubject=who (http://www.godulike.co.uk/faiths.php?chapter=24&subject=who)

Long and short I ended up on People Court.


After that I ran (behind the scenes - the owner was someone else) a multi line DLX system, Stepping Stone hotel.

[M0GLO]

Damn! Are we just a bunch of freaking geeks or what! :lol:

[kf6rdn]

Considering I found and watched an archive of that PC episode.... Yeah, I was big time!

[n2ize]

I can always tell when i am reading the writings of geeks. Whenever, after a few postings, or, after a paragraph it no longer makes a bit of sense and nothing seems connected to anything else ... then I KNOWI am dealing with geeks. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

[N2RJ]

Does anyone remember networking computers with BNC connectors, RG58 cable and having to use terminators on the end?

Oh yeah, thin net and T connectors were the way in 92!

Remember ArcNet and vampire taps?

I remember wiring part of the central bank of Trinidad and Tobago using AUI.

[KF5ER]

Early 80's, Commodore 64, 300 baud modem and Quantum Link.
Pure magic! Remember all the Commodore 64 ham programs? Downloading
them at 300 baud gave you time to mow the yard while you waited. My phone
bill was running $70-$80 a month!
Still on 56K dial-up but remembering the way it was, thats fast.

[KC8TCQ]

I hung out on several area BBS's, the "Morning Show" BBS run by one of the DJ's at the local rock station, he had a huge pr0n collection, and lost it when his HD crashed heheh, he was heart broken for a few weeks, then they had a hamfest in town and he bought some cd's at the hamfest chock full of pr0n.

I used to love playing Tradewars 2000, I was amazed to find there is still a place online you can play it. http://www.uci.net/~ice9/

Another guy I worked with was into BBS and Tradewars, so we decided to start our own BBS running Wildcat, it was basically a private BBS among a group of 15 friends.

We also installed Tradewars on the machine in our office, as we worked different shifts we would compete against each other.

[N2RJ]

say XYZZY


Incidentally that was a cheat for minesweeper in Windows 3.1.

[kc2orw]

Acoustic Couplers 300 baud (yikes) yeah :lol:
Token Ring wow, Readers Digest went hook, line, and sinker for all things IBM Token Ring, OS2, etc. Then they finally broke from all IBM all the time and made a deal with Compaq.
Oh well times change right doesn't matter just so long as there is something to move onto. :mrgreen:

[kc7gnm]

Hmmmm

Had a homebuilt 80286 with 2 megs of ram running SuperBBS. Was linked to fidonet and ran a flight simulator board. Was dedicated to FS4 and I had plenty of planes and such for download. Then I remember compuserve. I was a subscriber to them for a while and all they had was a text based interface. Those were the days. Now all you can do is read about those BBS's because most don't exist anymore. I don't even have a modem in my current computer anymore. Just lan cards. LOL. BTW 2400 was the thing back then too and I had a zoom 2400 baud modem that was smoking back then.

[kk7ue]

Anybody who hasn't used a printer-terminal and an acoustic coupler to play Advent is a computer newbie...yeah, that WAS in the 70's. All of us who know how to make a program card for a keypunch machine...we're a dying breed. If you've never written an entire COBOL program on cards and then had the card reader shred the next to last card...you ain't lived.

Gawd I remember being with my dad at his work (Burroughs Corp) and him having a fit because of that exact scenario! Had to be early 70's maybe mid. I was a little kid that much I remember

[kf0rt]

Only time I ever used punch cards was in college in the mid-70's.

They would purge all the "mass storage" between semesters, so if you wanted to use your program again, you'd have the computer punch it onto cards so you could reload it the next semester. I wrote a simple schematic drawing program using one of the early Tektronix graphic terminals -- don't know how many K of memory it used, but it was a box and a half of cards. :mrgreen:

[kc2orw]

Only time I ever used punch cards was in college in the mid-70's.

They would purge all the "mass storage" between semesters, so if you wanted to use your program again, you'd have the computer punch it onto cards so you could reload it the next semester. I wrote a simple schematic drawing program using one of the early Tektronix graphic terminals -- don't know how many K of memory it used, but it was a box and a half of cards. :mrgreen:
Yeah I took a coarse on programming RPG (which version not sure anymore) I even learned to read Hollerith code off the cards. It was a System 360, what a clunker, they were going to upgrade to a 370 in a few months, eeeyew!
This is IBM land 1 in 4 kids I went to school with had a parent who worked at IBM Research Kitchawan in Yorktown, NY. So we had a heightened awareness of computing in the locality. :lol:

[n2ize]

As a math major in college I often wound up in close proximity to computers even though much of the course work was theoretical and quite abstract. Although my early computer experiences are not nearly as vast as many here I do remember writing numerous FORTRAN programs on punched cards for running various types of programs I wrote in those days. We had to submit the cards for processing and the output would be spat out on green bar paper the next day... that is hopefully if your program ran at all.

But most of my work was done on the PDP-11, Dec 20 and later VAXen via teleprinter terminals (remember the LA36 Decwriter ?) and later on using video display terminals,

As far as early home computers and all that goes I mostly remember dialing into bulletin boards. Nothing fancy and no, never ran my own BB.

[N2RJ]

The only old computers I used were home computers - Commodore 64, 128, VIC-20, Plus/4, Apple //c.

Oh, and I did do some RPG programming on an IBM system 36 to migrate the database for an insurance application.

[n6hcm]

Oh, and I did do some RPG programming on an IBM system 36 to migrate the database for an insurance application.

you are the only other person i'm aware of who has done RPG programming (i did some at IBM during a summer internship) ...

[N2RJ]

Really? When I first got into the industry, I thought everyone was using that, certainly a lot of the banks were.

I even applied to IBM for a job, but they didn't hire me.

I also got laughed off by the local DEC dealer (http://www.digi-data.com) but I had my laugh when I finally got a job and lead the decommissioning of all of their Digital Unix systems and replaced it with Sun.

Take that bi*ches!

Revenge is best when served boldly.

I was real upset that MuRata didn't hire me in '99. But the company who did hire me ended up buying out the section I was trying to get hired on at and we dismantled their operation. Now, I compete with MuRata again somewhat with their ceramic resonators.

I feel that it was for the best now. I didn't see it then. Clear as day today. Things happen for a reason. They really do.

Really? When I first got into the industry, I thought everyone was using that, certainly a lot of the banks were.

I even applied to IBM for a job, but they didn't hire me.

I also got laughed off by the local DEC dealer (http://www.digi-data.com) but I had my laugh when I finally got a job and lead the decommissioning of all of their Digital Unix systems and replaced it with Sun.

Take that bi*ches!
Something else to think about. I used to live near IBM in Austin. I lived closer to them than I did my workplace. I knew many people who worked there. They were very somber and wished they could find somewhere else to work. Job satisfaction was near zero. I actually worked with the nephew of Robert Noyce at Austron. Yeah. He worked where I worked rather than at IBM.

[n2ize]

The only old computers I used were home computers - Commodore 64, 128, VIC-20, Plus/4, Apple //c.


Ah, you missed out on some fun stuff. But I guess I also did since I missed out on some of the early "home computers". I did play around with Atari's and Commodore's and even an occaisional Apple. However, I rarely considered them for any serious work, although I am sure some of them were capable of a lot more than I realized at the time.

I did write a morse code practice program which ran on my Atari 800. It could generate random morse code, read and translate text to code, send at varying speeds, pitches and even had "virtual QRM" to simulate on-air conditions. I'd have to say that little practice program is what got my code up to speed and got me my license.

[n4aud]

Oh, and I did do some RPG programming on an IBM system 36 to migrate the database for an insurance application.

you are the only other person i'm aware of who has done RPG programming (i did some at IBM during a summer internship) ...

I took a class in RPG back around 1980, give or take a couple of years. It was an evening class and the instructor didn't really know RPG, he was learning it with us as we went along! I learned what I learned from the book. Anyway, it was an evening class and I was going to an on-campus dance afterwards, and we were allowed to "brown bag" at our college's dances then...so I decided to get a head start. I bought a large Coke in a plastic cup and poured some out (probably half) and poured in some rum, then put the top on and went to class. A really HOT girl sat in the seat next to me, one of these lecture halls like a theater. We were friends at the time, and during class she whispered "I haven't eaten all day, give me a drink of your coke" and before I could stop her, she grabbed my cup and sucked down a huge drink through the straw. There was a delayed reaction, she turned and gave me a HORRIBLE look, then her stomach growled LOUD. Fortunately, there was a class break and we went out into the hall, and she was PO'd big time...and I couldn't stop laughing, which just made her even more mad. I told her it was her fault for not asking first.

The reason I posted this is that it's my only real memory of RPG! That, and we did our programming on those blasted cards, and the instructor didn't know what he was doing.

College was fun back then... :dance: :mrgreen: :D

[n6hcm]

Really? When I first got into the industry, I thought everyone was using that, certainly a lot of the banks were.

I even applied to IBM for a job, but they didn't hire me.

I also got laughed off by the local DEC dealer (http://www.digi-data.com) but I had my laugh when I finally got a job and lead the decommissioning of all of their Digital Unix systems and replaced it with Sun.

well, i didn't know people who were doing that sort of computing. by the time i had gotten that job i had been programming on ibm iron for years academically (pl/i, could write my own jcl from scratch, ...) but saw my future in open systems ... a year or two later found me working at MIT in the open source world and i never looked back.

when i joined the institute DEC was still big news and Sun was still the upstart ... i think that if digital had decided what digital unix (and ultrix before it) was going to be and stuck to their guns they might have lasted longer ... it was bsd-ish for a while, then sysv-ish, then bsd-ish again ... and finally osf/1-ish. feh.

[N2RJ]

The beginning of the end for DEC was when Compaq bought them out, then HP.

I see HPUX all over the place, but OSF/1 is pretty much gone.

Digital Unix was big in Trinidad - several industrial plants used them for oracle and informix databases.

We had an informix db for an insurance app (written in 4GL) running on Digital Unix 3.2c which we later ported to Solaris 2.6.

Y2K was the killer, as our digital unix wasn't Y2K compliant, and digi-data wanted to charge us $4000 to upgrade. Getting a new box from Sun (an E250) turned out to be cheaper. I had to figure out how to get the whole network to recognize the darn thing - terminal servers, PCs and printers had to all be set up under Solaris.

We paid Fujitsu to come in and figure out some of this stuff, but they threw their hands up in the air. We asked for some of the consulting fees back, which we got.

Then when I was hired by Fujitsu, one by one I saw customers swapping out their DEC hardware for Sun. (Fjitsu did Sun sales and service in the English speaking Caribbean).

The phone company (Cable and Wireless/TSTT) was heavily invested in DEC though. They used VAX for pretty much everything.

One of the things I enjoyed was going to customer sites and working on OLD hardware. I am talking about reel to reel tape old. Old ICL mainframes and ICL Unix machines which were running ICL Unix which was a SysV variant. One place I remember was the seismic research unit. Basically I had to help them transfer old archived seismic data from reel to reel tape onto a brand spanking new Sun E450 server.

Oh, and I also got to take home one of the Sun Java station doorstops - never got around to doing anything with it though.

[KC9NRN]

http://www.biggeekdaddy.com/humorpages/Geeks/24pilot1994.html

I get a headache remembering the BBS's I used to access and at work we had access to the Internet before it became WWW. Nothing but green text, we thought we were the chit back then. My first CD/RW cost me $1,000.00 and took so long to burn a disc you could almost watch a movie, but then downloading files took as long so we didn't care!

Then came along America Online and Prodigy among others, in 1996 it was the norm to get a busy signal rather than a live connection. Oh the memories!

[KC9NRN]

Ahh, so we're not talking first Internet then.

My first dial up was 300 baud and my favorite destinations were HalTeks BBS for techie stuff and Kaos Faktory BBS for crazed counter culture.

Once again, watching the letters appear one at a time (only slower) on my green monitor, while my 8086 got hotter and hotter. :D

I remember the 14.4 modem I got, WOOHOOO! That was BLAZING fast!
I could almost pretend I couldn't make out the characters drawing on my screen one by one.
I used that one to service my own BBS, WildCat was pretty cool software.

I remember buying my first 300 baud modem, remember the movie "War Games"? I had the same modem, stick the phone handle on the cradle and dial out! How about the leap from 28.8 to 56k!! Woohoo! Quake at what we thought was high speed!

[KC9NRN]

Ah, 2400 baud and the BBS systems. Them were the days.

I remember the screaming 8088 machine my college roomie had. CGA monitor, 10MB hard drive, and it only weighed 35 pounds!

The day I upgraded to a 486 with 9600 baud and VGA, I thought I was one bad dude.

I built a 386DX/25 with the "Co-CPU" and filled the memory card with 16megs, it was as much as it could hold and I bought the first 1meg Boca Research accelerator that came out. I was the envy of my friends until a buddy of mine built an AMD based 386DX/40, not only did we have to race our cars but our computers as well.

I really do miss those days, big time.

[KC9NRN]

Does anyone remember networking computers with BNC connectors, RG58 cable and having to use terminators on the end?

I have to stop reading this thread, not only do I remeber networking token ring but having to replace it or chase down which computer was screwing the network up!

I HATED Token Ring but it paid the bills, so did Novell... man I could go on and on... need to get out of this thread or I might get banned for over-response! :shifty

[KC9NRN]

I can always tell when i am reading the writings of geeks. Whenever, after a few postings, or, after a paragraph it no longer makes a bit of sense and nothing seems connected to anything else ... then I KNOWI am dealing with geeks. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

The owner of the company I work for says he doesn't want to ask me questions anymore, soon after I start to respond he says it turns into a "Peanuts Episode" and all he hears is "waaah blah blah waaaah blah blah".... funny thing my XYL says the same thing... :shock:

[KC9NRN]

Acoustic Couplers 300 baud (yikes) yeah :lol:
Token Ring wow, Readers Digest went hook, line, and sinker for all things IBM Token Ring, OS2, etc. Then they finally broke from all IBM all the time and made a deal with Compaq.
Oh well times change right doesn't matter just so long as there is something to move onto. :mrgreen:

Networking OS2 and WARP, that was fun times!