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.
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)
Re:Woof, Woof! (Score:2)
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....
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.
C64 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:C64 (Score:2)
Apple II+ (Score:2)
Re:Apple II+ (Score:2)
Re:Apple II+ (Score:2)
Jeez, thanks a lot! Next time try warning us with a SPOILER tag or something before ruining it for the rest of us...
Man, I almost managed to type that out with a straight face...
Oregon Trail was my fave for the Apple II (Score:2)
I don't recall playing any games on the Apple II, or Trash80, er TRS 80 for that matter. What I did playing with them was using BASIC to write games and graphics.
FalconC64 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.
Re:C64 BBS'es with CCGMS (Score:2)
I joined Quantum Link and eas able to communicate nation-wide...in color...at 300 baud! Very cool!
Re:C64 BBS'es with CCGMS (Score:3, Funny)
/nostalgia
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.
Re:PDP-10 (Score:2)
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.
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.
Re:Discovering the BBS (Score:2)
That's part of what I think disillusions me about computing lately. The sense of learning and exploration are lacking.
Pr0n! (Score:5, Funny)
3 letters (Score:3, Interesting)
Turing (Score:2)
Re:Turing (Score:2)
Turing wasn't a terrible language, at least the Pascal like one with the same name wasn't! Clean syntax, higher level, great debugger (on Sun, don't know about elsewhere), decent range of types, fairly OK at OO, and really quick to get going. Beat Java and C++ hands down when I learned them subsequently to learning Turing. Now I mainly use Python (the odd bit of VBA as my glue as working in finance I'm constrained to Windows - there are no decent
learning assembler on an Atari ST... (Score:2)
I was expecting to be incredibly fast and silky smooth on the screen, it was around then I learnt the habit of optimising the bejesus out of my code
I knew I had to start going out and meeting girls when the answer to a problem i'd had for weeks came to me
ah, memories... (Score:2)
Re:ah, memories... (Score:2)
Re:ah, memories... (Score:2)
Re:ah, memories... (Score:2)
I miss those days. Most of my IRC channels are pretty dead now.
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?
Re:ah, memories... (Score:2)
Re:ah, memories... (Score:2)
Your journal entry says you are from canada...
Sun2 ? ..feh (Score:4, Funny)
Babbage was kind of a pain, though.
Daughter?!? (Score:2)
DEC Minicomputers (Score:2)
Playing lunar lander on a GT-40 (PDP 11/05 with graphics adapter) in graphics mode in 1973.
Building my own ADM-3 terminal from a kit.
Booting CP/M successfully using my own custom BIOS. Buying my first pair of floppy drives (360k, $200 each). Buying my first hard drive (5meg, $250).
Building my own PC from a bar
The day I got my 2400 baud modem... (Score:4, Interesting)
14,400bps (Score:2)
Memories (Score:5, Funny)
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!
I remember... (Score:2)
Tandy 286 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tandy 286 (Score:2)
and speaking of which, i remember `Artstudio' on the zx spectrum, which really kicked the pants off any current mspaint in coolness. it even had a `mouse' cursor, which you could move around with the keys. you could make fonts and stuff. i remember i used to draw sprites all the time with that thing. hardcore pixelart. good times.
Re:Tandy 286 (Score:2)
All I remember is my annoyingly rich friend Steve had one, and I was jealous. Then my Dad bought an Amstrad PC1512, which blew the Speccy away. I did a cool picture of Barney Rubble on that thing, I probably still have it somewhere, I'll have to check.
Re:Tandy 286 (Score:2)
Tee hee (Score:2)
#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].
Apple //e (Score:4, Insightful)
-molo
ZX81 (Score:2)
I had a ram pack which didn't work unless I removed a zener diode then it didn't work on my next zx81 unless I put it back.
I then rewrote to cool tools which gave read,data and restore to ZX81 basic and one which played sound out of the TV speaker. I also wrote one which decoded morse code tapped out on the keuboard.
Then I moved on to the TRS-80 with t
Amiga 500 DOS (Score:2)
BBSes were another great one, though the phonebills were a shock.
Damien
Re:Amiga 500 DOS (Score:2)
Bitnet, on VAXen (Score:2)
Robot Battle (Score:2)
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.
My fondest memory... (Score:5, Funny)
Good ol' "POKE 144,88" disables the "run stop" key on PET, CBM, VIC-20, C-64, and C-128 computers...not sure if it works on the various emulators out there.
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
resu
Re:My fondest memory... (Score:2)
10 ONERROR
20 CLS
30 PRINT "MR HART IS A BASTARD " INPUT
40 GOTO 10
BBC micros always had absolute fits at that one.
A Passage to India (Score:2, Interesting)
Definitely BBSing (Score:3, Interesting)
my bio (Score:2)
Frustrating lessons (Score:3, Insightful)
While I realize that this shows me to be far younger than many Slashdotters, as well as much less technically skilled, I think I ended up learning a lot about how to fix many basic computer problems. I may not be a "computer guru" or even a "133t h4x0r", but it did get me up to what would probably be considered a modest level of understanding.
It may have been extremely frustrating, but I look back upon it kindly for allowing me to learn.
Many (Score:3, Insightful)
Saving, borrowing, and going in together with my roommate to put together the $2,000 (that was lots more then than it is now) to buy an IBM PC. The beast came complete with no drives (that's right, NONE - we wrote things via the embedded "cassette-basic" and could save the programs to a cassette tape recorder), 16kB RAM and a monochrome non-graphical display.
The San Francisco computer shows of the early 80s. Those were fun shows. I saw the Osborne I when it was first shown there and went on buying sprees to buy chips (yes, young-ones, individual chips) to plug in and get my RAM up to 64kB, as well as expansion cards (everything was optional back then) to get a clock, printer port, serial port, and finally 640kB of RAM (expansion card and lots and lots of chips to plug in). Everything was outrageously expensive by today's standards so there were lots of cobbled together add-ons. A favorite was a photocell gizmo that clipped onto the print-head of an Epson dot-matrix printer which along with some software made it work as a scanner.
I remember buying DOS 1.0 and a third-party 320k double-sided floppy drive (IBM was only shipping 160 single-sided drives at the time). You had to patch DOS to get it to use both sides of the disk and at $15 for a floppy this was important. The alternative was to buy one of those punches that cut a notch in the opposite side of the disk so you could flip it over and use it as two single-sided floppy disks. When we went to add a second drive we had to figure out how they had wired the drives and found out that all OEM drives were jumpered as "drive b" and the cable between the two was twisted to swap the first and second drive signals. We cut the jumpers and got everything working.
Later, we bought a modem (Cermatek 300/1200: $600) and had to convince the powers that be at UC Berkeley to upgrade the modem bank. The head of the computer-center finally told me that they were now buying 1200 BPS modems because they were the "wave of the future".
I remember having lots of aha's about how computers really work when we learned assembly on DEC computers. The first assignments required us to toggle in the programs at the front-panel of PDP-8 machines. Octal was great for that because the PDP had the switches grouped in threes so you got really fast at using the middle three fingers to toggle in the octal instructions.
Finally, I remember a little cardboard computer we used in one class. I still have it somewhere but can't remember the its name. It had sliders for the registers, a card with small holes for memory registers and little "bugs" to use as a memory and instruction pointers. You filled in the memory cells and registers in pencil and "executed" the "programs" manually by erasing and rewriting memory, sliding the register stack sliders, etc. One day I'll photograph it and put it up on the web.
Re:Many (Score:2)
Those who are curious about the nifty little cardboard illustrative aid to computation [bellsystemmemorial.com] can download the emulator [j-cinc.org].
Favorite memory... (Score:2)
Back in the early 90's I had some of my most memorable moments on the PC. I was only 7 at the time:
BBS'ing using the ultra-fast 9600 modem
Beating people up in the arena in Ambrosia
Being scared for the first time by a computer game (Doom)
Ehh, that's mine.
The Day I Became Elite (Score:2)
oh and falling alseep while on CompuServe and waking up 40 quid poorer
Re:The Day I Became Elite (Score:2)
Running my own BBS (Score:2)
I worked up a copy of Waffle BBS to execute as a door program from the main system, and had a UUCP feed come in nightly complete with email. I believe I was the first
SPARCstations (Score:2)
Of course, now that Sun has burned through all of their credibility and good will, I wouldn't touch their stuff with a stick...
Mike
BBS Door Games (Score:2)
Re:BBS Door Games (Score:2)
Amazing...
Time-lapse recollections (Score:3)
- Convincing my dad to let me have the "Fly the unfriendly skies" Skyfox t-shirt.
- Buying the Neuromancer videogame with birthday money, and through it finding out about the novel by Gibson.
- Wasteland.
- Hacking the Bard's Tale III characters with a hex editor.
- Getting an Amiga 500 and a genlock, and using it to add primitive effects to home movies.
- Connecting to local GremCit boards with a 300 baud modem from my Amiga.
- Getting a hacked account on a local ISP from a friend, and liking it so much that I paid for a legitimate one.
- IRC and Usenet before the advent of the web.
- Watching as the world realized the potential of the global network.
- Meeting young people today who have grown up in a world where they're always connected to their friends and a vast resource of information.
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.
Prime Hack (Score:2)
Low level hard disk formats (Score:2)
I didn't think I could ever use that much space.
Re:Low level hard disk formats (Score:2)
g=c800:5
or something really glose to that. Those were the days! I was doing great getting 65MB out of my 40MB drive too.
what about Slashdot? (Score:2)
Re:what about Slashdot? (Score:2)
Timesharing! (Score:2)
MERITSS. T.I.E.S. MIRJE. But by far the most entertaining one we could dial into (at least without getting into trouble) was the MECC Timesharing System, or MTS.
During my high school years between 1978 and 1981, I was introduced to such concepts as:
* E-mail between people located in geograp
Old BBS's, (Score:2)
Commodore, Packet Radio, and VAXen (Score:2)
It was an EXCELLENT computer...way ahead of its time.
Being active in the Commodore 64 world...
USENET/email (Score:2, Interesting)
Very cool.
Playing Zork with my girlfriend in college (Score:3, Funny)
We would spend countless hours working our way through Zork I, II, and III on a Commodore 64. We'd map out the rooms on paper and try all sorts of wacky commands to try to get through. That was when computer gaming really took thought instead of quick reaction time.
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.
TI-58 Calculator (Score:2)
This device, more than any other, ignited my life-long interest in programming (nearly 30 years ago).
So cool. (Score:2)
- Creating the first software based MP3 player ever.
- Working on Lotus 123 Mac right out of college and being reason 3 for why it shipped.
- Being on the Director team at Macromedia. Too bad it almost killed me.
- Creating technology that was not market successful but kept us employed during the dot bomb.
- Writing my first shareware manual for the Vax/VMS TPU Editor.
- Talking to a a person in Berlin over IRC days before anybody knew the Berl
Punched cards (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure if "fond" is the right word, but I still remember my very first 1st year Computer Science assignment, essentially "Hello, world" in Algol W. Done on punched cards, no less, in September 1978.
If you did really well you could use IBM 3270 [columbia.edu] terminals.
All this was with the campus mainframe, an IBM 370/168 with one whole megabyte of RAM and a 40 MHz clock. Even programmed that puppy's replacement (Amdahl 470/V8) in assembler in one course.
STM 14,12,12(13)
...laura
Pranking my friend's 386/40 (Score:2)
It's amazing how fast someone will scramble to find a boot disk after you add "autoexec.bat" as the last line of that file.
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
Radio Shacks left and right... (Score:2)
* Tandy PC-3 [cox.net] : This was my first computer. I got it when I was 10. I credit it with my long standing infatuation with pocketable and portable computers, programming, and the idea of user-programmable operating environments and applications. It has a whopping 4 KB of memory. And not just RAM, in the sense of working memory- but it was 4KB in which your program and any data would have to fit. It was tiny- smaller than
Sound card (Score:2)
Miner 2049er (Score:3)
3 days ago, a friend and I were reminicing about the good ole days, and eventually started talking about the game Miner 2049er. I loved that game. I did a quick google search, and lo and behold... the author of the game wrote an emulator for it a few years ago, and released it to the world!
http://www.bigfivesoftware.com/Emulator/emulator.
I played it when I got home (only a mac and freebsd machines at work and the emulater was a win-only) and it was exactly like I remembered. And still addictive. Try it out. The memories come back
Re:Miner 2049er (Score:2)
Granted, I'd been able to get that sort of sound out of my C128 if I remember correctly, but still...
Cyber 6600, 835; 6809, 68000, Alpha Micro (Score:2)
Ah, six bit display code. Didja know that display code :D in columns 1 and 2 (or 10x+1 and 10x+2 for x>=0) of a terminal output line would log the user off? (mwahahahaha!). There was another sequence that would case an internal buffer to be spewed to the terminal. Sometimes this contained account and password information. (I discovered this qu
Re:Cyber 6600, 835; 6809, 68000, Alpha Micro (Score:3, Funny)
Space Invaders on 8kb Pet (Score:2)
Oh those were the days.
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?
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.
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!
Re:First color printer (Score:2)
Re:EDO (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:when DOS wasn't something evil... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good old high school. (Score:4, Funny)
Fear not, for there are still many bars in most major cities where you can relive all of this again.
Er, or are we talking about two different things?