What Are Your Favorite Computing Memories? 230
aussersterne asks: "Every now and then while reading Slashdot comments, I realize that most people have no idea that -the network was the computer- for decades before Amazon.com and Google ever appeared, taking for granted the rather boring state of commodity computing that dominates the marketplace today. Unix and dial-up shell users remember bang-paths, 110 baud BBSing, 'luggable' computers, UUCP, DC600 OS media, VT100s connected to dumb terminals, and 1152x900 8-bit color web browsing before most PC users had even shelled out for their first copy of Windows 3.x and the free 'serial mouse' it included. Middle-aged geeks, what are your favorite recollections from from the '80s and '90s computing, network, and hardware world, as full of platforms and innovation as it was? Which computer system is still 'your baby' all these years later? Anybody still have a running Sun2? A running FHL UniQuad? Anybody still use KA9Q?"
Woof, Woof! (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought this was a very clever way to propagate messages between BBS's. I guess I graduated from Fidonet to Usenet around 1990...if one considers that graduating, and not simply moving in to The Project.
Good old high school. (Score:1, Interesting)
~~~
PDP-10 (Score:3, Interesting)
We middle-aged geeks go back earlier than the '80s and '90s. My baby was the PDP-10 running TOPS-10, then TENEX, and occasionally ITS. My first gonzo gaming experience was playing Zork on a 300 baud hardcopy terminal in California connected through a local TIP to MIT. Still a hard game to top.
Discovering the BBS (Score:4, Interesting)
This might not seem like much, but it was my first independent project with a PC and I was 13.
btw, that first bbs was "Saimin" in Hawaii, and I to this day I still use the same handle.
3 letters (Score:3, Interesting)
The day I got my 2400 baud modem... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, the memories... (Score:3, Interesting)
Second - The numerous times I had to format and reformat the hard disk (a 40 MB drive! w00t!) and write and rewrite the config.sys and autoexec.bat after I crashed or did something bad to the family's 386.
Third - Getting a 486, and tweaking those config.sys files to run Ultima VII. Installing a SoundBlaster card in there and hearing Wing Commander speak to me.
Fourth - Setting up my own BBS (TAG anybody?) and getting online.
Getting to college in '95, pirating Windows and pwning n00bs in Doom (and later Counter-Strike).
The year 2000 - started using Linux. Yay!
Re:Discovering the BBS (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup, I remember the first time I realized there was other people that where as fanatical about communicating with others as I was. The world of BBS opened up my eyes to shareware and other tools that I had no idea existed as well.
Door games anyone?
The local Eau Claire, WI BBSUG was a bunch of old Hams. I made friends that I will remember for the rest of my life through that community.
The BBS community played a large role in to decide that computer programming and networking was definately where I wanted to be as I got older, and I can say with confidence that the BBS world changed who I am today to a large scale what I am doing and have been able to achieve.
I look back on those BBS years with the fondest memories of learning and exploration.
Tandy 286 (Score:2, Interesting)
i still have that wav file. and i still listen to it now, 16 years later.
and i still have that tandy. it went through a ton, and still works. my brother used to do his finances on taxes on it all the way up through his 2nd year in college(~2000). after that, i pretty much turned it into a dedicated machine for playing civilization, since it would run on the tandy wonderfully.
maybe i'll go dust it off this afternoon
#1: The smell of my ORIC-1 .. (Score:3, Interesting)
#2: Then, a few years later, the same smell (only much, much, much more intense) when I unpacked my first MIPS Magnum [wikipedia.org] pizzabox, placed it on my desk, watched it boot, and prepared to port my code to it
#3: Booting Yggdrasil-Linux on my ol' 386 about 2 years after the Magnum experience
#4: booting new hardware i had a small hand in developing for the first time [virus.info].
Poorly designed computer rooms... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was reminded of this years later, when working for a different company, I walked in one day and the doors to the computer room were wide open! One of the mainframe system guys saw me and literally went white, he said "Oh... we had an air handler failure and forgot to call you. I hope the HP's are OK" I said well they should be, I checked them out, sure enough they had sensed the high temperature and shut themselves down (of course it did expose that my alerting system was not working correctly, in all situations). The mainframe had not faired as well, not sure what they fired, but it was expensive, as I remember.
Re:EDO (Score:2, Interesting)
A Passage to India (Score:2, Interesting)
Definitely BBSing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Woof, Woof! (Score:2, Interesting)
A friend of mine ran a Fidonet node, and I remember being so completely impressed with automated, scheduled dialing between nodes to transfer batched messages. What a great concept!
Farther back (and not related to networking)
PC in Hollywood (Score:3, Interesting)
I myself spent $300 on an NBC portable computer (PC-8201A) with a whopping, get this, 16k built-in memory. Not 16 gig, not 16 meg, but 16k! I actually wrote 2 screenplays with that beauty. I'd write six or seven pages and the memory would be full, then I had to download the pages to a cassette tape as a backup memory.
Flash forward, now in 2005, I'm writing on my blog (http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]) about Hollywood and the state of cinema, without ever having to worry about running out of memory.
C64 BBS'es with CCGMS (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't long before I bought a 1200 bps (which was blazing fast at the time) and started my own BBS.
USENET/email (Score:2, Interesting)
Very cool.
Re:when DOS wasn't something evil... (Score:3, Interesting)
Cutting class and getting credit... (Score:5, Interesting)
One day, he had us type in a BASIC program out of a magazine (BYTE? Softside? can't recall) to display a digital clock on the screen - each kid would do a couple lines, then the next would take his turn as class continued on. When it came to my turn, I just kept on trucking, and the teacher didn't say anything. We broke for recess, and after coming back in, I went straight to the computer and kept chugging away, as the teacher resumed class. Once I finished the program, I tried to RUN it, but there were typo's which then proceeded to fix using the line editor (I had seen Mr. C do this before), until I got the thing working. It was probably one of the best school days I ever had, and it was all thanks to his "letting the line out" and giving me the room to explore.
At the next parent/teacher conference he told my parents about the experience, and that he hadn't seen a kid that age with that level of focus to finish and debug the program for such a long time (boy, has that changed over the years). My grandmother got me a computer for Xmas that year (Atari 400), and things pretty much changed forever from that point forward. It was a pivotal moment for me, and I'll always have to give credit to a great teacher (public school, btw) for providing that opportunity.
Re:My fondest memory... (Score:3, Interesting)
10 flash
20 print " (40 spaces) "
30 goto 20
For those that don't know, flash:basic::blink:netscape. Basically, it made every screen in the lab (a dozen computers arranged in a 'u' so you could see them all at once) alternate between all black and all white at about 1Hz... and all out of sync, of course.
One of many favorite memories. Another was making the computers nonfunctional. To simulate a prompt that actually does nothing:
10 input "]"a$
20 print
30 goto 10
result: would print
]_ (cursor)
take whatever input they wanted
print a blank line
and draw another prompt. until you say 'run' and nothing happens, you won't know it's ignoring you.
664 BLOCKS FREE (Score:2, Interesting)
Say-It S.A.M, and using it to make crank phone calls
Using ML Monitor to make a blue box tone program
and, something I think every c-64 user has been through, taking 6 hours to try to download Jumpman Jr. or similar game, and dealing with those "bad blocks", watching the dashes and colons, only to have Grandma unplug the computer as it's ALMOST done (i.e 2 more hours to go!) so she can run the vacuum cleaner.
GGRRRAAANNNNMMAAAAAAAA!!!!!!
How about ALTOS/ALTGER/QSD? Or multi-padding on an pwned Prime
Jeez, if I let myself, I could fill up a whole megabyte with my nostalgia....Phone Man 4.0 anyone?
OK one more....I ran a CCGMS, and was proud to boast that, with the aid of 8 C-1541 drives, I could boast 1.5 megs of G-Files. Best thing was when I went to sleep, all the LED's made my room look like a little city as seen from a helicopter at night.
Brightest memory (Score:1, Interesting)
After 10 years in MIS, I was on a new job and had been tasked with upgrading a Netware server from 3.x to 3.x+1. I had been told to fly out and get the job done before the end of the week but, I told my boss that I thought I could have it done that afternoon.
I sat in my cube, used rconsole, mapped some drives and upgraded the server, even though it was on another continent, using the install floppies that had been copied to another server in a different town all together. It was all over rather quickly but, afterwards I thought about what I had just done and the technology to make it all possible and I litterally shuddered in awe.
Today, this is all old hat. It's so common that regular clueless users do similar stuff without even knowing what they are doing but, to me, at the time it was awe inspiring. That's what I remember best, the awe of it all. The shudder, I can almost feel it.
In retrospect, I should have flown out and taken a few days off at the companies expense. Oh well, live and learn.
Once upon a time (Score:3, Interesting)
First thing I did was install WordPerfect-5.1 (brand new at the time) and mock up a novel-sized document. I then scrolled to the end. I would have sworn it had frozen had the green disk-in-use light not been blinking steadily. I waited for several minutes for it to get to the end (300 pages) and, impatient, left the stopwatch running on the desk next to the puter, went out to dinner, came back hours later only to find the disk access light still flickering regularly.
Round about midnight, the light's rhythm had changed dramatically, blinking more brightly but less often, and then, WHAM, before my eyes, the last line of the mockup test text appeared!
Lo and behold, it took a little more than six hours to scroll to the end of a 75-thousand word text.
I was hooked on making a faster PC right then.
PS: I am using a fairly modern PC to write this: a Duron 750 with a exactly a thousand times as much RAM (640 Mb) which should be enough for word processing, being ten thousand or so time as fast as the XT2 was, but using the outline feature in Abiword-2.2.x installed on Feather and loaded completely into RAM brings the PC's CPU to its knees, making me wait for updates and scrolling slowly and unevenly, even though there is no swap space being used.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Re:ah, memories... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to hang out in this IRC channel. There was some girl I was trying to get with was and she was interested in it, so I will honestly say I was just in there to kill some time and see if I could get some play. THAT one turned out to be a spoiled little bratchild that needed to be kicked to the curb, but it just so happened my future wife was in the same channel. This was about the same time that netscape first came on the scene... gopher was still the search tool of choice, and Twinsock over windows 3.1 was the standard way of getting online for most peeps. She was plagued by a bad connection and surly tech support from her university, so I would help her out with problems.
We became friends. Nothing more though, as she lived in Nova Scotia and I was in Vancouver... and that's the way it stayed for a couple years. We talked regularly in between her studying for her masters in English.
Now, a small cadre of us became regulars in this channel, but 95% of us were from the west coast. My future wife was about the only one who was out east... so she got on a plane and came out to Vancouver (ostensibly to check out schools to finish her post-graduate studies, but mostly just to come party with some online friends). I had the use of a car and was relatively near by the airport, so I was tasked with a collection of 'virtual hugs' I was supposed to give her from a bunch of the other channel denizens when I met her. I had a list written down with "hugs from: xxxxx yyyyyy zzzzzz"
So, she just came out west and sorta... stayed. We've lived happily ever after, our 10th 'anniversary' is this labour day (although we only got married 2 years ago). A few years back I moved with her and the kids back out to Nova Scotia, as all her family is out here.
The End. Romantic in a highly geeky way, huh?
Doom2 w/ Serial connection (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmmmmm
There are so many... (Score:3, Interesting)
- Dad getting a pocket calculator and a digital watch in the same year - both with LED displays.
- The two-part episode of The Bionic Woman where she had to go through the deadly obstacle course to defeat the evil computer...behold the power of technology!
- Dad was a high school teacher and got to bring home a Commodore PET during the summer for us kids to play with. CLOAD, baby!
-Spending 4 hours typing some huge BASIC program into the PET out of Byte magazine, 1 finger at a time, losing it once due to power glitch, retyping it the next day, another 3 hours correcting typos, and then finding out that the version of BASIC on the PET wasn't the same as the one used for the program. This is especially frustrating to a 12-year-old with ADD...I had never concentrated so much on a single task. And then to find out the time was all wasted...a good preparation for an adult career in IT.
- Getting an Apple
- Learning how to copy games and other protected disks with nibble copying and other nefarious things.
- Beagle Brothers!!! My God, those guys were the best. I learned all my reverse engineering skills from them. A close second was the TMH disks for Apple II's. They were better for graphics stuff, but weren't as clear in how they worked.
- Dialing in to a college mainframe with my friend's Atari 400 and a modem you put the handset into.
- Getting kicked outof my HS computer class because I knew how to program and use computers and the teacher did not. (And they were teaching LOGO! Come On!!)
- In my first attempt at social engineering, gaining access to the store manager's account on 's mainframe, creating my own account, and giving people raises.
- Using my first exploit to gain admin rights to an employer's Novell network and read the boss's email.
There are others, but that's more than enough.
Original DOOM deathmatch (Score:1, Interesting)
Ah, those were the days.
Re:Woof, Woof! (Score:4, Interesting)
I miss those days. Each sysop was responsible for the users posting from his BBS, so there was little trolling back then. The quality of the Fidonet message areas was very, very high: you knew people by their names, moderators did their jobs (or they were voted out).
Unfortunately, I had to stop running the BBS when I moved out of my parents' home. That was when Internet was already taking over, so there wasn't so much activity as in the good days anymore. It went from 60-70 calls/day to around 20-30 and just around 50 active users.
Now, with the Internet it is... well, different.
ARPANet (Score:4, Interesting)
I fondly remember using the ARPANet as a young defense contractor before they let all you riff-raff in and renamed it the "Internet". In those days, it wasn't all about porn, science fiction, and demanding rights to download hip hop for free. It was about particle physics, science fiction, and demanding the right to use MACSYMA for free. Well, okay, there was ASCII porn.
Ah, those were the days....
It's a bit obscure, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically there was only two of us seriously playing on this BBS door game, and I had the upper hand for a while. But then suddenly I got locked out of the game (presumably due to some bug where I thought I was already playing or something, so it wouldn't let me in) and when I came back, the other guy was whomping on all of my sectors and I was getting my butt kicked.
As I had previously expanded across the map, I'd take all my soldiers on to the next sector, and leave only one man in each square (so I could still `own' it.) Since I found that 50% taxation (use the money to buy mercenaries) and 0% draft worked best, this one man never grew into more. So I had half the map with only one man per square. But since my border towns had more, so it was basically hard on the outside and soft on the inside. I thought I was relatively safe.
So, finally I get back in, and I'm reading how I've lost all these squares, square after square after square that the other guy took over. He had like 30,000 men in one army and he was mopping my squares up. But then suddenly there was a battle that I won. He came in with 30,000 men and I had one man. My one man killed his 30,000 men and had stopped his advance cold, since that was the bulk of his forces.
After that, I sent him a ha ha! (in the Nelson style, but Nelson didn't exist yet) message, and then he sent me back a message about how he'd kill that man, and his family, and his family's family ... but by then, I was back to mopping up the map of this guy.
Fun!