Anyone here ever use an acoustic coupler?

[pokerfan]

Store a program on paper tape?


Operate a keypunch machine?


Use an eight inch floppy?


Let's just say that I don't miss the old days.

[ChoralScholar]

1. Yes, no, no, yes

I got my first PC in 1984, first used the Internet (such as it was) in 1992.

[Robb]

3. Same here, on all counts

Robbstrodamus' great predictions:

"Why the hell do I need an email address? I'll only be able to send mail to you and like five other guys."

...and

"The web will never catch on. It's too slow to be worth anything. Text-only forever!!" :rofl:

[ChoralScholar]

6. You remember,

back at the beginning of the browser wars (circa 1995), everyone had buttons on their pages that linked to the download page for their preferred browster:

This page looks best on the Netscape 3.0 browser:


This page looks best on Internet Explorer:


Well, me, being a complete smartass, used this button on my own pages:

This page best viewed with a 'Text-only' browser:

[pokerfan]

8. 1993

[hobbit709]

2. Yes, yes, yes and yes.

How about a step relay shift register

[pokerfan]

4. Nope

but I've played with bubble memory at Intel in Folsom, CA.

[hobbit709]

5. How about core memory?

[pokerfan]

7. yeah

at the university.

[newmajority]

9. Ah memories....

How many of you Commodore users had GEOS? It was the attempt to compete with the early Mac.



GEOS came with Quantum Link online service which eventually became AOL



And yes, they sucked then too.

[harmonicon]

11. is that a vic 20?

That was our family's first computer - I was just a little kid, but I clearly remember the night that my dad brought it home. A computer!?!?! ahh!!!!! bat-shit crazy future living!!!!!!!!!! We had that tape-drive thing too. No internets for us though, I'm afraid.

[TrogL]

15. That's a Commodore 64

The VIC-20's big brother.

[harmonicon]

18. I thought the vic-20 was first

no?

[pokerfan]

25. It was first

Kim-1 -> PET -> Vic-20 -> C64

The Kim-1 is the one I stored programs on paper tape with.

[harmonicon]

26. so the C64 wouldn't be the Vic 20's older brother....

just a younger brother that was larger and fatter.

[pokerfan]

27. Vic-20: 1980, C64: 1982

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International#Computers.2C_8-bit

[RoyGBiv]

24. Just had a total flashback ...

Sitting up all night playing Scott Adams games, snacking on pickles for some reason, and being really impressed that load times where under a minute.

[MonkeyFunk]

10. Yes, no, no, yes

but my first program was on punch cards.

[swag]

12. Did all of that. I miss some aspects of the old days.

Like an ice-cold bottle of chocolate pop from the pop machine at the Shell station in Black Earth, Wisconsin in 1967.

[Kutjara]

13. All of the above.

I remember when the IBM PC in our office got its first "hard drive", a 12" Winchester disk that sat in its own case (the same size as a PC). It had a whopping 1 megabyte of storage capacity and I remember thinking "who could ever need more than 1MB?" How naive I was.

[TrogL]

14. All four

I worked for the University of Western Ontario in their computing department for a summer.

They had acoustic couples for connecting the DecTerms to the mainframe.

They also had card punches for programming the IBM1130.

We had the very, very first floppy drive for some wierd micro and it was an 8 1/2". I think the mainframe also took them.

I applied for a job where they used paper tape, they had me punch some but I screwed up because the instructions were verbal instead of written and I didn't get the job.

[Fox Mulder]

16. No, no, no, yes.

[Shine]

17. No, but it sounds deliciously obscene.

:evilgrin:

:hi:

[MilesColtrane]

19. The only one of those I've used it the 8" floppy.

That was the only way to store sounds and sequences when I was composing on a Synclavier in the 80's.

[Hawkeye-X]

20. Believe it or not, my dad used to own a business doing a lot of data processing.

And when I was a kid, I always loved to play with the puncher.

Also, I have even seen 8 inch floppies and tapes.

Dad sold the business (and got stiffed as well) almost 20 years ago.

We are now an consulting company with a new side business that is growing.

[Fredda Weinberg]

21. 300 baud, why? Oh, and I soldered a ZX-80

Got the diodes backwards and the keyboard wouldn't work ... figured it out from the diagram and went back to school years later to understand why.

Sorry kids, but it's a black box now ... coding your own assembler from machine code - now that's programming!

[ScreamingMeemie]

22. Yes, no, no, Yes...

All of my homework in computer lab (high school) was on 8 inch floppies which, for stupid reasons, I kept and so did MrG. We were dweeby that way.

[bluesbassman]

23. Sure did!

And I used to fix these. Back in the day, BofA had a Mechanical Department because everthing we worked on WAS mechanical!

[DarkTirade]

28. I play acoustic guitar, is that anything like it?

:P

Seriously though, when I first started using computers they were down to the 5 1/4 inch disks.

First one I owned had one of the fancy-schmancy new versions of the 3 1/2 inch disk that could store data on BOTH sides of the disk, raising the total to something like 720k. We didn't get a computer that could read the 1.44 meg disks until several years later though.

But our old Tandy 1000... it had a 40 megabyte harddrive. That was HUUUUGE at the time. So big that the latest version of DOS couldn't handle it. It had to be partitioned into two seperate 20 meg drives.

[papapi]

29. Are these primitive sex toys?