<p>Here’s a blast from the past…I remember being on the internet back in the late 80’s, but couldn’t remember the name of the service, only that it was owned by Sears. I just found some info:</p>
<p>[Prodigy</a> Communications Corporation – Company History](<a href=“History of Prodigy Communications Corporation – FundingUniverse”>History of Prodigy Communications Corporation – FundingUniverse)</p>
<p>yep --and we had dial up service. It was primative.</p>
<p>I used CompuServe at some point. My parents live in a rural area and still only have dial up - when I visit there, I am reminded of the early days.</p>
<p>I remember thinking years ago “wouldn’t it be neat if they could somehow mesh a cell phone and the connection to the Internet?”</p>
<p>Heck–I’m so old I cam remember when fax technology was brand new!! Anyone else remember “fax paper?”</p>
<p>remember dot matrix printers? and the connected paper, with edges you had to tear off?</p>
<p>In a few short years, our grandkids will be saying the same thing about the technology that we find so modern. </p>
<p>Remember partylines on telephones?</p>
<p>And didn’t Prodigy have several subject forums, but you were limited to the number of posts? Maybe like 25 per month? I just remember something being fairly restrictive.</p>
<p>I hated fax paper. I remember what a big deal it was for my company to decide whether we wanted email or not. We wanted to be able to talk to our clients and thought it was better client service to leave voice mails - that thought lasted about a week. I miss seeing the bike messengers all over town though.</p>
<p>As a young child, I remember the smell of mimeograph machines before photocopier technology.</p>
<p>07DAD - as a young child? That makes me feel really old. I remember it from when I taught school.</p>
<p>Ah Prodigy! I struck up a friendship on Prodigy with an academic. We had both done work on the same obscure book. We swapped papers via snail mail. The last time I heard from him, he said he was going to start going directly on something called the “internet”. wow…what is this “internet” you speak of?</p>
<p>Dot matrix? I remember daisywheel printers! Our first dot matrix printer was an ImageWriter that came with our first MacPlus in 1986.</p>
<p>I got on Prodigy in 1988. I had the state-of-the-art 2400-bps modem and I thought I was cutting edge.</p>
<p>cartera45–sorry, it seems I have a selective memory. I was over 10 in the 1960s [born in 1950] when photocopying started to replace mimeograph.</p>
<p>[Stencil</a> duplicator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph]Stencil”>Mimeograph - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Hanna, oh yes! I remember when “what speed is your modem?” was the very “in” question.</p>
<p>I guess I taught at a school behind the times if they still used mimeographing when I taught. We didn’t have cappuccino machines either though.</p>
<p>I have dial up now .
Not a lot of choice in Seattle for decent access that is still affordable that plays well with Macs.</p>
<p>I didn’t have Prodigy- but I miss eWorld. [It</a> was a real Global Village.](<a href=“This domain has been registered for a customer by nicsell”>http://www.remember-eworld.de/)</p>
<p>H & I were only the 2nd & 3rd phd students to do our dissertations on a computer at a large state institution. It was before PCs, and we had to log on to a mainframe terminal where we were limited to 1 hr. at a time per 8 hr. period (unless you wanted to work after midnight–which we did–a lot!). To word process you had to type codes for everything (I used for. lang. characters/he used Greek symbols for engineering–example: type in “x=1” for pi) and had to insert manually all codes for bold/underline/italics/paragraph indents, etc. Once we used up all our memory allotment, we had to save things on one of those big magnetic tapes (which we still have, I think). Printout came on the green barred 14-in wide paper with all the codes. A good laser copy, appeared on 20 ft. rolls of paper (waxy like fax paper) that was 11 inches wide, so you had to use a paper cutter to get 8 1/2 x 11 pages and then iron them or weight them down so they’d uncurl.</p>
<p>How about 5 1/2 inch (really) floppy disks?</p>
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<p>That’s when I got in. Ouch. It hurts to recall how much that was in 1983. Think about what that buys in a computer now.</p>
<p>I had to take FORTRAN to graduate with a marketing degree. I remember those stacks of punch cards and hoping and praying that the program would run.</p>
<p>Northstarmom…partylines??? You are either much older than most of us or lived in a much more rural area. We’ll go with the latter : )</p>
<p>My earliest computer experiences were dialing in using an acoustic coupler to a PDP at my dad’s office. It was so cool writing assembler - and such a pain when the 50 baud connection dropped. </p>
<p>Printouts? All we had since there was no display… green and white paper with tear off sides…</p>