Ha ha, I remember that! My Atari 800XL computer with whopping 64k memory, and Family Computing magazine...
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OLDER crowd (20+)? WTF?
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Ha ha, I remember that! My Atari 800XL computer with whopping 64k memory, and Family Computing magazine...
The best was compute!... Oil Tycoon for the C64. PEEK and POKE FTW
If you couldn't program, you had to wait a month for bug fixes to come out in the next issue... I would get aggravated and fix it myself
Yep - we should thank Sinclair, Commodore and Acorn because those early machines spawned a whole generation of hobbyists and programmers.
Ah, the special keys you needed to press to enter the BASIC keywords. Good times.
The thing that amazes me is that we can now carry in our pockets a device that's thousands of times more powerful than those early machines and probably costs less in real terms - the iPhone. Lord knows what we'll have in another 20 years (presuming we don't do something really stupid as a species!).
You were the guy that always set the Tandys to say that. I always wondered who that was.
Yep, and the ones that came before them - MITS (Altair) 1975, SWTP (Southwest Technical Products) 1975, Ohio Scientific 1977?, and a slew of others (including of course Apple in 1976). Of course, the Altair is where Bill Gates got his start with Altair BASIC, and we all know what came out of that.
Age distribution is actually amazingly even on this forum. See this poll thread:
Poll: How old are you?
Poll: How old are you?
26 years old.
I am 26, and have had a mac for 4 months, and love it OS X Leopard. way better than Windows. Don't know y i waited so long to get 1. Now my wife is ready to get rid of her PC and get a MAC. Probably MBP next.
I am 26, and have had a mac for 4 months, and love it OS X Leopard. way better than Windows. Don't know y i waited so long to get 1. Now my wife is ready to get rid of her PC and get a MAC. Probably MBP next.
A good relative change analogy.. I too recall when I replaced my IBM PC/XT with a 486 66mhz IBM sometime in 1993.. I got "Internet" access and there was all of 50 websites or something.. it was running at 28K or maybe even 14.4K.. How far we've come in 15 years.. and much how far will we go in 15 more???
My 7 year old son now wouldn't recognize a world where he couldn't google up something (safe mode of course!
).. and he takes the iphone (Which he plays with all the time) for grated as a "given" in tech.
Actually, we don't really know.
- Very few members indicated their age in the vote. Small sample size.
- 40+ as one category does not show the distribution of 40+ plus age group.
- The age brackets are every 3 years beginning with 13, then end up with every 5 years until stone age.
It would be fun to see a poll where each age is listed separately, and a larger percentage of the MR community voted (indicated their age).
The Good (?) Old Days...
Well, I'm no youngster here, at 46. But my high school was pretty advanced for its day. I learned to program in BASIC on a DEC PDP8/M with a single DECTAPE drive, and an ASR-33 Teletype for I/O. Oh - and a whopping 8k (K!!!) words of Core memory. We eventually upgraded with a VT-52 and LA-36 printer. Later, the PDP-8 was put out to pasture, replaced by a PDP-11 with 4 (4!) terminals, all sharing 16k words of memory...
I also dabbled in Fortran and FOCAL just a little...
My first personal computer was an Apple ][ plus. I eventually moved up to a Mac SE, upgraded that to an SE/30 (they really should have named it the same as the Mac IIx...), and even had, at one point, a color external monitor, AND greyscale on the internal SE/30 monitor .
The SE/30 gave way to a PowerBook 520c, which was replaced by a PowerMac 8500, then a PowerBook G3, a PowerMac G4 (Digital Audio), and now, my MacBook Pro (2.33 Core 2 Duo).
Over the years, I've used those DECTAPES, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies (including cutting the extra notch to use both sides...), 3 1/2" "floppies", Zip disks (100 & 250 MB), Jaz disks, and the occasional SyQuest cartridge.
Now, of course, it's all Gigabyte-range hard drives (at one company, I used to buy 1 gig hard drives for $500...), thumb drives or SD cards with multiple-gig capacities, etc.
Oh - and you know you're old when you can recall saying to your boss: "We should buy more RAM for our Macs now. The price for a 16MB DIMM is under $400" !
Have a happy 4th!
Well, I'm no youngster here, at 46. But my high school was pretty advanced for its day. I learned to program in BASIC on a DEC PDP8/M with a single DECTAPE drive, and an ASR-33 Teletype for I/O. Oh - and a whopping 8k (K!!!) words of Core memory. We eventually upgraded with a VT-52 and LA-36 printer. Later, the PDP-8 was put out to pasture, replaced by a PDP-11 with 4 (4!) terminals, all sharing 16k words of memory...
I also dabbled in Fortran and FOCAL just a little...
My first personal computer was an Apple ][ plus. I eventually moved up to a Mac SE, upgraded that to an SE/30 (they really should have named it the same as the Mac IIx...
), and even had, at one point, a color external monitor, AND greyscale on the internal SE/30 monitor .The SE/30 gave way to a PowerBook 520c, which was replaced by a PowerMac 8500, then a PowerBook G3, a PowerMac G4 (Digital Audio), and now, my MacBook Pro (2.33 Core 2 Duo).
Over the years, I've used those DECTAPES, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies (including cutting the extra notch to use both sides...), 3 1/2" "floppies", Zip disks (100 & 250 MB), Jaz disks, and the occasional SyQuest cartridge.
Now, of course, it's all Gigabyte-range hard drives (at one company, I used to buy 1 gig hard drives for $500...), thumb drives or SD cards with multiple-gig capacities, etc.
Oh - and you know you're old when you can recall saying to your boss: "We should buy more RAM for our Macs now. The price for a 16MB DIMM is under $400" !
Have a happy 4th!
Old online services...
Or GEnie? or Delphi? or the ORIGINAL CompuServe?
I still have my original AOL handle. There are six letters and NO NUMBERS.
Until I finally dropped it a couple years ago, my Compuserve ID was so old, people didn't recognize it. It was 5 numbers a comma, then two numbers, when most everyone by that time had a 6 & 4 combination...
The original Compuserve was the best. Especially with Compuserve Navigator on the Mac. You could use little monochrome (and later color) icons to represent yourself, and Navigator went online, read your mail, then you replied offline, then it went back and posted your replies in the forums. Compuserve was a really friendly place to be back then (I'm talking late 80s...). Then AOL took it over, and it was all downhill...
Have a Happy 4th!
Or GEnie? or Delphi? or the ORIGINAL CompuServe?
I still have my original AOL handle. There are six letters and NO NUMBERS.
Until I finally dropped it a couple years ago, my Compuserve ID was so old, people didn't recognize it. It was 5 numbers a comma, then two numbers, when most everyone by that time had a 6 & 4 combination...
The original Compuserve was the best. Especially with Compuserve Navigator on the Mac. You could use little monochrome (and later color) icons to represent yourself, and Navigator went online, read your mail, then you replied offline, then it went back and posted your replies in the forums. Compuserve was a really friendly place to be back then (I'm talking late 80s...). Then AOL took it over, and it was all downhill...
Have a Happy 4th!
Wow. I am impressed that they started calling it that as early as '71. Until then they had Data Processing Studies in the Business Schools. If I had graduated earlier I would have had an Engineering Degree with Emphasis in CS.
I thought of more fun history. Before the web some of the big computer companies had private email networks and networking. I remember once being mad that a big file was taking 15 minutes to copy and then I was stunned when it hit me I was copying it from Japan. That was a big deal then. Not long before someone would have had to send a big tape.
It was an amazing day when we could suddenly send emails to friends who worked at different computer companies. Then all of a sudden AOL (and others) came out for the public and the whole world changed very fast.
I still have my original AOL handle. There are six letters and NO NUMBERS.
My partner who worked at Computerland back when they had a whole department just to send FAXES to stores for updates (pre email) actually has his NAME as his aol name. He will never give that one up.
Doom. Point to point dialup.
"OK.. i'm going to call... as soon as i hang up."
Also, remember DeskView?
Same here. First two initials, and last name...
Come to think of it, just like my iTools, er, .MAC, er, Mobile Me account(s)...
Not sure where he's located, but I handled those duties for the Cincinnati area!
Actually I got a BSEE degree with a computer block major from the College of Engineering at UT. The BSCS plan was under the College of Natural Science, although I never understood what was so 'natural' about a man-mad 'science'.
35 here,
learned computers on an Apple 2e
then went the 286/386 route and was a DOS man until Windows came along.
owned and operated every version of Windows from first to Vista (yes, even Windows ME ish ... ) I played MechWarrior over DialUp and SCHOOLED everyone around
my iPhone is the only piece of Apple I own.
learned computers on an Apple 2e
then went the 286/386 route and was a DOS man until Windows came along.
owned and operated every version of Windows from first to Vista (yes, even Windows ME
ish ... ) I played MechWarrior over DialUp and SCHOOLED everyone around my iPhone is the only piece of Apple I own.
Mostly Tampa Bay and Grand Rapids, Mi. Got myself booted from a couple stores for using language a little less PG than "sucks" a couple times, too.
That's great! It just goes to show that you don't need all that memory and bloat. I thought I was really uptown when I finally got the money to upgrade my first home computer (an S100 - remember those?) to a whopping 4K! Wowee!