<p>Xerox 820/CP-M86/ 8 floppies
IBM PCs at work/DOS 1.0
IBM compatible at home/ DOS 1.25
Xerox Star/GUI interface/Mouse: Wheres the command line?
EDLIN
Vivid nightmares: in a jungle being chased by dinosaurs
TI acoustical coupler (300 Baud)
Hayes 1200 Baud modem (carved from a solid aluminum block)
Upgraded home PC with an extra 360K floppy drive (51/2 disk SS/DD)
First hard drive: 5 Meg/$200. King of the Hill!
WordStar/Spellcheck/Mailmerge 1.0
Lotus 123
More dinosaurs!
Subscribed to Computer Shopper when it was the size of the Manhattan telephone directory
Sat in planning meetings to deploy 286 machines as servers
Internal e-mail account sometime in the 1980s cant remember the exact year.
TCP/IP Telnet
IBM compatible clones with flip top covers to ease construction and to add or remove peripherals: caused massive RF interference (no shielding) which made your internal organs glow and really messed up TV reception if your computer was set up in the living room.
First laptop: Compaq portable/30 lbs/amber screen/six foot 120V cord.</p>
<p>I remember when H’s best HS friend described his older brother’s job “and after they are all done with work, for fun they have this program where the computer shows hallways and you are an eye-ball and you go along the hallways and can find other people…” We all thought it was really strange and boring. Should have bought Microsoft in 1979. (Well, OK, it wasn’t publicly traded then…)</p>
<p>Count me among those who cried when my box of cards got tipped over…</p>
<p>Moving up the time-line - our favorite family joke involves one of those “oh no, the report is due tomorrow and I forgot” scenes dear to the heart of high school parents everywhere. Three pages on the British Royal Family? Get 1 and 1/5 from the antique World Books on the shelf and then “go online” and get something else… at that point in time it was only news. His report went from Edward II to Princess Di’sfuneral. No, he didn’t get a good grade, but it was better than it would have been without the internet…</p>
<p>I also remember early “mobile” phones. While I was doing chemo and such, DH decided I needed a way to reach him and the friends who were taking care of our kids. The “phone” was housed in something larger, similar shape and 5 times heavier than a shoebox. He thought I would just tote it to all appointments… Ummm, didn’t happen. Plus when we “plugged” it back into the car, you had to take out the (regular phone handset sized) important part and slap it against something hard to make sure it connected. Yeah, that was the bleeding edge of technology.</p>
<p>Ah yes, the punch cards. Standing in line waiting to load your cards and praying that they would run and praying and praying. I was trying to explain that to the kids. And Fortran IV and Cobalt III which almost killed me. Seeing my first PC. Learning BASIC… And yes, joining AOL in I think 92 or 93 which I thought was so cool considering how “black and glowy” it used to feel before AOL. Wow.</p>
<p>And did anybody keep the programs that made “pictures” come spewing out of the computer center? I remember one (probably only ran once and became a campus icon) that reproduced Miss July in X’s, O’s and void cells.</p>
<p>and the superior attitude of the kids who took your pitiful, hopeful shoebox of punchcards and slammed them into the machine and pretty much told you to go home because your program wasn’t going to run until about Wednesday…</p>
<p>I had a grad school job in l977 digitizing aerial maps into teeny-tiny triangles so natural resource data could be stored concerning each triangle and compared with different models of land use development. All stored on punchcards.</p>
<p>I also remember sometime around l983, my H and I were visiting his brrrrilliant rabbi friend in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. He wanted us to see what he could do with his computer screen. Next thing we knew we were typing text lines back and forth to some guys in Bethlehem, on the West Bank of Israel. </p>
<p>We were sharing jocularly about the weather differences. I stopped typing to ask our friend, “who ARE these guys we’re talking to?” He said, “Who CARES? We’re TALKING !” </p>
<p>I could almost feel my pupils widen, stomach flip to realize we could talk across significant boundaries. Really I felt the earth move.</p>
<p>UUCP email addresses, where you had to know the name of every computer along the way from the source to the destination, and if one of them happened to be down then your email message didn’t go through and you tried an alternate route.</p>
<p>Not the internet, but back when I was a programmer in Basic language (1980’s) acoustical couplers to place the phone (the type with round ear/mouthpieces - nearly obsolete) to connect to clients remotely. 300 baud modems. You literally watched the dots print on the screen.</p>
<p>I remember when my son saw a dial phone for the first time. He asked where the ‘redial’ button was.</p>
<p>I remember when AOL was the e-mail that everyone used. It took us a long time to switch! When I was pregnant with my last child 17 years ago I had to go on bedrest in the hospital for the last 5 weeks of my pregnancy. It was a combination of boring and nerve-wracking. </p>
<p>My husband brought in a laptop and I was able to get on-line at the hospital and talk to people on bulletin boards (aol bulletin boards) but everything was much slower then. You would post something and five minutes later it would show up. In the meantime five other people would be posting and you had to figure out who was talking to who.</p>
<p>I watched, “You’ve Got Mail” over the winter break and broke out in a smile when I heard the dial up sounds when Meg Ryan would get on-line with Tom Hanks.</p>
<p>dragonmom, I had one of those car phones that were big and heavy. They were a step up from the CB fad that they replaced!</p>
<p>My first job in 1980 was working on a Radio Shack TS-80 computer and we upgraded at some point to a TS-90 (if those numbers are correct). My boss was really into the computer thing and would talk about it all the time. Is that the same as a Radio Shack Tandy?</p>
<p>Got my AOL account in 1993 and remember IM late 90’s? AOL would always crash when I was in the middle of a conversation and I would have to shut everything down and start it up again. </p>
<p>I stumbled on Ebay when few items were listed except lots of Longenburger (sp?) baskets and Disneyana. It wasn’t itemized originally and I would have to go through each page and it would crash by the 10th page (of thirteen pages). I haven’t bought anything from Ebay since 1998.</p>
<p>We had a mobile phone in Norway in 1984 and my friends here, didn’t believe me. It was cheaper to make calls on the mobile than a land line in Norway which is why many people had mobiles. Plus you could take it with you to your summer home.</p>
<p>Wow, reading this thread, I feel like I felt at my highschool reunion. Little snippets of things bringing back all these memories I didn’t know I had! The sudden deep familiarity with things from so long ago…and yet trying to reconcile them with the present.</p>
<p>Not internet…but was a user of “multimate”. Yuk. </p>
<p>In 1994, I was doing consulting work for a local cable company. The GM sat me down in front of a desktop hooked up to this thing called a “cable modem” and said it was a look into the future. Wow…it was FAST! I told all my friends. </p>
<p>Still have friends with AOL accounts. What’s WRONG with them?</p>
<p>I believe I have you all beat. I did my first programming using the Dartmouth time-share BASIC system in 1971 (back when there were 8 stations in New Hampshire!). I ghost-wrote an article on ARPANET in 1984. I had my first cell phone in 1989. My first internet account was 1992 on AOL–using the DMD77 login! (DH was using the internet from 1986.) I place my first Amazon order the year they started (1995). Oh, and I have a six-character gmail account.</p>