Internet nostalgia

[The_Professor]

...old modems were acoustic. You'd dial the number of the other modem, wait for the screech, then slam the phone into the modem quickly...

Ah, never had one of those.
I still have the 56K USRobotics I used for dial up as well as a newer 56K Trendnet.
Also a 33.6 BOCA that I used some.
I ran a call twice dial in server for a while for my own use. But I don't have a real land line now-a-days.

[bpgreen]

...old modems were acoustic. You'd dial the number of the other modem, wait for the screech, then slam the phone into the modem quickly...

Ah, never had one of those.
I still have the 56K USRobotics I used for dial up as well as a newer 56K Trendnet.
Also a 33.6 BOCA that I used some.
I ran a call twice dial in server for a while for my own use. But I don't have a real land line now-a-days.

Does anybody? Closest I've got is ooma.

[braukasper]

I will really date myself. My first programming (BASIC, high school) in 1971. We had to call a computer at UM, stored our programs on paper tape & wait 15 to 30 mins for an error code or result. Overnight for a complex program! Ahhh.... now those were the days!!!!

[Beer-lord]

I still have a few old baud modems laying around here somewhere. There was a time when, "Welcome, you've got mail" was wanted. I'm so glad those days are over.
The first hard drive I bought was a 10 meg (not GB) for $300 for the office. I thought that amount of space would last forever!

[RickBeer]

Started with computers in High School, using paper tape to send programs to a mainframe somewhere via "time sharing". Then we got a Wang computer with cassette tapes. In college it was punch cards. And if you made a mistake you had to do another, not the FANCY punch card machines that didn't punch until you hit the button for the next card. I once knew 5 computer languages - Basic, Fortran, COBOL, PL-1/C and I forget. First job out of college was programming in COBOL, that ended in 2 years, never went back.

First PC was an IBM PC with 64mb of memory and no floppy drives, and a monochrome monitor. Added memory, added floppy drives. 300 baud modem. In my Marketing class in grad school, we would enter our moves for a simulation game and people cheated by watching as they walked by. We entered false moves, then I went home and dialed in and changed them. We maxed out the winnings to all asterisks in 3 moves, then spent the next 7 moves teaching the others a lesson. Taught them that in business you play mental games with your competitors.

I remember being in Atlanta and buying Lotus 1-2-3 version 1A. I think I finally threw away the diskettes, should have kept them to sell as a collectible.

I used to track every computer I bought, with every new component, gave that up years ago.

My son recently helped me buy a Raspberry Pi which we then installed on our sprinkler system and I now can control our sprinklers from my smartphone anywhere in the world. No more going into the garage to turn on/off a zone and going back out, or watching it rain from an hour away and knowing I am wasting water. And can go into the garden, adjust something, and test it from the garden.

I just ordered a newer Raspberry Pi for $15... I am looking at what I can automate in my home, including thermostats (I have programmable thermostats like most people, but want to go to internet-connected thermostats). Many states/utilities offer rebates, ours is $50, so I can maybe upgrade for $30 per thermostat (we have two) and then be able to turn the heat on/off wherever I am.

[Crazy Climber]

But I don't have a real land line now-a-days.

Does anybody? Closest I've got is ooma.

I have Ooma, also. Used to have Verizon, but then my employer stopped paying for it (I work at home) and I couldn't justify the ridiculous monthly expense.
I love the spam-blocking capabilities that come with Ooma. With Verizon, I used to average 2 robo-calls per day. Now, I get 2 per month. And I'm paying ~ $800/year less. There is a bit of latency in the up direction, and people tell me the sound quality on their end isn't as good, but for that kind of savings, I'll put up it.

More on-topic, I started in 1980, in high school, programming BASIC on an Apple II Plus. No hard drive at all! Went to college and used punch-cards as a freshman (FORTRAN). Learned COBOL senior year, and my first job out of school was as a COBOL programmer.

I remember the first ads for the Apple Macintosh - it had a mouse! - and using one at work a few years later. The WYSIWYG nature of the the word processor was revolutionary, at the time.

Ten years later (mid-90's), at my wedding, a college buddy of mine was working for a hard drive company and told me how they were working on a major breakthrough: an internal hard drive for home PC's that could hold......one whole gigabyte!! My mind was blown. Surely, that had to be the upper limit of human capability. (I say this while typing on my 7 year-old home PC whose hard drive holds 1,000 TIMES that much....)

My first home PC (1995) had a 14.4k built-in modem, so I never had the joy of using a handset or wrapping an external modem in a towel. (I say this while connecting to the Internet at a speed that is, if my calculations are correct, over 5,000 TIMES faster than that....)

Maybe it's masochistic, but I have downloaded the old "You've got mail!" .wav file and use that for new email notification sound, to this day.

[RickBeer]

OBI costs $40 or $50, ONCE, then use free Google Voice and something like Callcentric for $1.50 per month E911 service. My annual phone bill is $18. If Google Voice ever goes away or isn't free, Callcentric offers packages that are very inexpensive, easily under $100 a year, depending on usage.

[mashani]

I think the first PC I used was an Apple II. Up to that point it was mini computers and mainframes.

For my own home PCs, after the C-64, I went to Amigas of various sorts. Then to PCs running OS2 and various shades of unix like operating systems. I avoided Windows completely except for running it embedded in OS/2 until Windows XP came out.

[bpgreen]

OBI costs $40 or $50, ONCE, then use free Google Voice and something like Callcentric for $1.50 per month E911 service. My annual phone bill is $18. If Google Voice ever goes away or isn't free, Callcentric offers packages that are very inexpensive, easily under $100 a year, depending on usage.

What is OBI?

[RickBeer]

A small VoIP (voice over ip) box. Plug it into the internet, plug a phone into it or into your wall jack, configure it and viola!

I use GoogleVoice and pay $18 per year for E911, and can have my phone ring anywhere.

OBi 110

I see no advantage in Ooma.

[berryman]

Commodore 64 and then DOS. who remembers....... That would be me a long time ago.........I can do 20x more now on just my IPhone , but now I'm in a comfort zone and no need to expand much......just my old Asus laptop and Iphone....
EDIT; More the 20x on my Iphone

[bpgreen]

Commodore 64 and then DOS. who remembers....... That would be me a long time ago.........I can do 20x more now on just my IPhone , but now I'm in a comfort zone and no need to expand much......just my old Asus laptop and Iphone....
EDIT; More the 20x on my Iphone

I bought a barebones kit 5 or 6 years ago and built a Linux server. My phone has a more powerful CPU and more ram, but the server has more storage.

[BigPapaG]

For me, it was...

Fortran and Punch Cards in college... Hated that...

Imsia 8080's, latching in bytes one bit at a time... Cool, but still tedious...

Various 8080 and 8088 PC's, most notably Zenith... Z80 upgrades!

Acoustic modems, Irma Boards for IBM 3270 emulation and communication, tape backups that never seemed to work reliably, 5.25" backups that to forever to complete and used stacks of floppies... Who remembers the large format floppy?

Commodore Pet, Commodore Vic20, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, Commodore Amiga, Commodore CDTV...
The Commodores were all about the Motorola processors...

Fortran, some Cobol, some RPG-II, Some Pascal... A ton of dialects of Basic, too many to remember...

I have forgotten so much since then, seems like a century ago but I know it was only decades...

I do remember writing a working machine language program for the C-64 that used that use hardware interrupt routines in a partition of protected memory that I created which managed two protected memory partitions of 11k each....

In those two partitions, each could have a running program with the interrupt routines managing requests for resources from each program in real time...

Yup, multi-tasking on a C-64, awesome, but pretty useless in 11k chunks... Yet, still awesome!

Of course, follow that all with multiple versions of DOS (and back in those days, some versions were hardware specific and only ran on a certain brand of PC!) Get you some of that!

USENET, Major DOMO...

The Internet... EMail, what a concept!

Multiple versions of Windows (who remembers Windows for Workgroups?), NT, Vista, Pro right up through Windows 10.

Text Messaging! Yikes!

iOS on the iPad, Various versions of Android and now Windows Phone.

P.S. You haven't wasted time until you have dialed into a Punter BBS at 300 baud! ( and I know I was on the Color Punter board a few times as well!)

And through it all, I have somehow been able to live without a BookFace account! Yeah!

[mashani]

More the 20x on my Iphone

From a raw computation standpoint:

The old mainframe I used could process around 16 million instructions per second. It was bigger then my Ford LTD, and required an AC unit larger then my whole house AC in order to not light on fire. It cost over a million dollars if your outright purchased it instead of leasing it. (something like 15 million dollars or more in todays money).

The old C64 was around 0.5 million instructions per second. It had about 1/4th the RAM of a low end version of the mainframe above.

A Rasberry PI2, is around 5 million instructions per second and costs ~$30 bucks. And it has 20x more main memory (RAM) available then a MAXED OUT version of the old mainframe did. For real.

My iPhone can process around 25 million instructions per second and fits in my hand, and so far has not lit on fire. But it costs more then 5 raspberry PIs.

My desktop computer is somewhat high end. My CPU can process around 250 million instructions per second. It's video card can process 1,215 million instructions per second with the right kind of parallel workload. (this is why video cards are used as the processor for things like distributed computing networks, and even as the CPUs in some modern "super computers"). My desktop computer is as powerful as many older "super computers" were in the right conditions. The amount of RAM and external storage I have is ridiculous compared to what those old computers had.

That's how much things have changed.

[mashani]

P.S. You haven't wasted time until you have dialed into a Punter BBS at 300 baud! ( and I know I was on the Color Punter board a few times as well!)

If you dialed into a Punter BBS that supported color then we go back further then meeting on this board... Because that was likely either mine, or one of the few folks I shared those code changes with. I send my changes to Steve, but he never added my changes into his code base AFAIK. So I was careful who I shared it with to make sure they had paid the man, because this was before he open sourced it. If the BBS was in NE OH, it was me, I was the only one.

He probably didn't adopt them because my changes would have only worked on a C64/Vic20 or the like at the time, a normal PET or the like would have done freaky things I'm afraid.

But I was catering to C64 users and kids who thought they were "3l33t" from all around the world so didn't care about the PETs and other green screen folks.

I did support higher speeds then 300 baud though LOL. Those "l33t" kids had fast modems.