Comments on: Internet Nostalgia, If You Can Believe It

By: stuart

stuart — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:44:47 +0000

9th grade, in 1977. My school had something called a Texas Instruments 990/10, which was donated by the company. It was a large desk sized machine with a 12” white plastic floppy drive that could be inserted and a black and green screen. The machine would boot up with cassette tapes, and one would store written programs in cassette tapes. It also had a 9 pin dot matrix thermal printer. I remember studying basic Fortran, and to one had to write the program, run a “fortran compiler” and if no errors were found, then run a “link editor” to execute the program.

Later that year the school bought an Apple II which had a cassette player and a 12” color TV for a monitor. It was big deal when the next year the school bought two 5 ½” floppy drives. The machine had 64K of RAM and we wrote programs in Basic. This cost about $2,000.

In 1987 I bought an IBM PS/2, which was an 8086 machine, with a color screen, and 20M hard disk and a 9 pin dot matrix printer, it was about $2,500.

Last week I bought a new computer for my office about $700: 500 GB HD, 4G RAM, etc etc.

What other commodity has experienced such development over 32 years? Maybe other consumer electronics like VCRs, TVs, video cameras, but certainly not things like cars.

By: Carla

Carla — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:10:19 +0000

I remember acrophobia!!!

By: Carla

Carla — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:09:23 +0000

hehe. First computer I used was a Tandy Radio Shack computer in a BASIC computer programming class. I remember when 40mb was a HUGE hard drive upgrade! That was a packard bell….

And when I discovered mirc and forums – I was stratospheric!

Like going to a color tv after watching a black & white tv for a couple of years….

By: MamaT

MamaT — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:33:56 +0000

Must have been 1983? My mom worked for Compuserve and we logged on using a small b/w tv as a monitor, radioshack keyboard and hillarious cradle modem.

By: Laserboy

Laserboy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:14:46 +0000

That was the first shit someone thought to send on the internet??? WTF You’ve got to be kidding. And you got 4 stations? We got three and some fuzzy nonesense on the UHF dial. Dial? OMG I just turned into my father. The first computer we got at work took an hour of flipping switches just so it would read a punch tape which then let you use a teletype keyboard for data entry. The second computer we got at work had a whopping 16K of memory – no hard drive at all. And I had a Timex Computer. it had 4K of memory and you hooked it to a cassette player to download a program. It never did tick. Much less keep on ticking. It just made you want to kick John Cameron Swasey. I traded it for a 1960 Coke machine and got the better end of that deal. Keeps my beer REAL cold.