<p>I remember when we went shopping for our first computer and to research the purchase we bought this humongous magazine called Computer Shopper. It was like 3 inches thick and had hundreds if not thousands of computer companies. As my husband just said, " it’s not like we could go on-line and read about them"! We decided to get ours from this little company in South Dakota, you know- the boxes use to come in black and white spots like cows.</p>
<p><<when i=“” first=“” worked=“” in=“” an=“” office,=“” we=“” typed=“” letters=“” with=“” carbon=“” paper=“” and=“” different=“” colored=“” copies=“”>></when></p>
<p>two words: mimeograph machine. Try getting that ink out of your clothes and off your skin. Just getting the stencil loaded without wrinkling it was an art form.</p>
<p>[What</a> is a mimeograph machine?](<a href=“http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/literacy/referencematerials/GlossaryOfLiteracyTerms/WhatIsAMimeographMachine.htm]What”>http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/literacy/referencematerials/GlossaryOfLiteracyTerms/WhatIsAMimeographMachine.htm)</p>
<p>there is a link to a picture. Yes kids, if any of you are reading this, we had to turn it MANUALLY to make a copy</p>
<p>Remember how you had to center a headline on a typewriter. Go the middle position of the paper (which you had to calculate by hand based on your margin settings) and count the number of characters in the phrase you wanted to center. Divide by 2 and backspace that number from the center.</p>
<p>Oh Man do I appreciate Word 
Kids today really don’t know how easy they have it!</p>
<p>So what’s the next great invention going to be? In twenty years, what will we look back on and shake our heads about??</p>
<p>I don’t remember the year, but we bought our first home computer ($2000 at least) from an obscure company my H heard about somewhere: Dell.</p>
<p>Also this thread reminds me of my dad’s major technical purchase. He bought one of the first handheld calculators for his office. It cost over $100 and had only add, subtract, multiple and divide functions. He brought it home one day and we kids were allowed to look at it, but not touch.</p>
<p>I was in a stats-heavy program and if we had a data set, we had to type it in manually as such:
x y z a b
c d e f g</p>
<p>So the program could calculate eigenvalues, correlation coefficients, regressions, etc.
And if you made one mistake - you were totally screwed. You couldn’t go back and edit. So if you got to the bottom of 100 rows and discovered one character out of place in row #3 … too bad. Settle in, you’re retyping.</p>
<p>Ironically, S asked for and received a typewriter for the holidays (my sister’s old Smith-Corona). He thinks it’s “neat.” Gah.</p>
<p>And, of course, data sets were things that you copied by hand out of an old census book and pieced together.</p>
<p>I paid a grad student to enter all the data for my senior thesis (which involved a statistical model of a given marketplace). It took weeks and months to do, and was necessarily a data set that was pieced together from different areas and many assumptions were involved in bridging. I am convinced that between the capabilities of Excel and the internet / data sets available on line, I could probably re-create and improve it in a few hours’ worth of work. Just grab the data, lay it how I want to in a spreadsheet, press a button and poof … all the stats I need.</p>
<p>I also remember taking a course in business school about giving presentations, and we had this newfangly thing called a Powerpoint slide show. And we thought that was crazy. Why would you rely on a computer, which might break down, when you could have transparent overheads of your presentation in your briefcase, and know that they’d work?</p>
<p>Imagine the man-hours wasted on collating overheads … and did you prefer plain paper in between, or paper that had the report on it …</p>
<p>Anyone also remember a computer game whereby you’d type in something … like
GO TO ROOM
and the computer would type back<br>
IN THE ROOM, THERE IS A BROOM, A CLOCK, A WATCH (etc)
and you’d type back
TAKE BROOM
and from there it would do something, it would “move” you to the next room,
you were on some kind of treasure hunt? </p>
<p>I’m not recalling the specifics, but we thought that was so cool, that the computer had some concept of a house / castle and could “move” us around in it.
Absolutely no graphics. Just words. A very early precursor of video games.</p>
<p>I remember the early Texas Instruments handheld calculator my dad bought. No percentage, no memory, just basic math</p>
<p>I love watching footage of early Nasa engineers using their slide rules and compasses and protractors! I can’t believe we got to the moon and back with such primitive technology</p>
<p>[Free</a>, Fun DOS Games ? Action, RPG, Puzzle: Captain Comic, EGA Trek, Miner VGA, Duke Nukem, Commander Keen](<a href=“Suite 101 - How-tos, Inspiration and Other Ideas to Try”>Suite 101 - How-tos, Inspiration and Other Ideas to Try)</p>
<p>Hugo house of horrors. [Hugo’s</a> House of Horrors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo’s_House_of_Horrors]Hugo’s”>Hugo's House of Horrors - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: that was Adventure (which later became a commercial game). I actually had a job testing hardware/software where part of my job was to play Adventure for an hour every day–it tested communications while the engineers were optimizing the system. You could get a maximum of 350 points and I never managed better than 349. Sigh.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Anyone remember the Bowmar Brain? My father gave one to my mother for Christmas sometime in the early 70s. I think it cost $500.</p>
<p>[Bowmar</a> Calculators](<a href=“http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/bowmar_calculators.html]Bowmar”>Bowmar Calculators)</p>
<p>I remember Hugo’s House of Horrors. I also remember Dragon Hunt. We would play it but never really knew how or what we were doing. Commander Keen and Duke Nukem were miles ahead and we had a lot fun with those games.</p>
<p>I received my first calculator, a Texas Instrument, for my high school graduation present. And now days kids get cars…</p>
<p>I remember buying our first home computer when our kids were 3. It cost $3,000 and to think that we’d ultimately be a family with 4 laptops was unbelievable! Not to mention we couldn’t have even envisioned the iPhone or similar phones, and now my kids and I have them (H has a different smartphone through his work).</p>
<p>In high school, a couple of us used to play Pico Fermi Bagels on a printing terminal. Smaller than a DECwriter… Hmmm… I don’t know what the terminal was or where the remote machine was… I had forgotten about it. We found it quite entertaining. I’ll have to tell my video game loving son about it. Although, actually, he likes Mastermind…</p>
<p>I got my first computer when in 95. I remember back then that you had to buy each part sepreatly or on the rare occasion find a full pakaged set.</p>
<p>DMD77 - I wikipedia’ed that … That’s exactly it! Thanks!</p>
<p>“Anyone also remember a computer game whereby you’d type in something … like
GO TO ROOM”</p>
<p>I’m remembering “The Fog” or something like that. I think it was from a Stephen king book.</p>
<p>Or was my first game “Zork”?</p>
<pre><code>“West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here…”
</code></pre>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_I[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_I</a></p>
<p>Back in highschool…around 1979-1980…best friend and I met these two very geeky boys who stood out to us because they had an extremely expensive sportscar in our very working class neighborhood. We hung out for a few months, the four of us (my friend dated one of them but she wasn’t allowed to date so it was always the four of us). </p>
<p>The sportscar? They had been writing computer games in their spare time, and sold them to some company. </p>
<p>I always wondered what happened to them and then one day just a few years ago, I was reading the news and learned one of them became extremely successful and extremely wealthy. I can’t share the details but it would sure make this story a lot more interesting (you would know the company and maybe one of them too). </p>
<p>It was definitely one of those stories from that era. These kids (who btw I am sure from the bios I’ve now read, never did bother to go to college) were at the right time, right place, with the right smarts.</p>
<p>sueinphilly–the easier way to center was to go to the middle of the page, and just hit backspace once for each two letters/spaces of your title, as you spelled it to yourself. That’s what I did, anyway.</p>
<p>My FIL still has his old TRS80, (Trash 80) and my boys liked to play with it when we visited. </p>
<p>In the early 80s DH could bring a portable (or luggable) home from the office and attach our phone to the back of it to dial in to the work computer. It meant the phone line was out of service but, hey, we didn’t have teenagers back then.</p>