Ancient Technology: Relive the Ol' Days in this thread!

[vicicasas]

zChris and I were chatting earlier on the new 1.0 release of Skype (which btw, has awesome sound quality compared to iChat... that is, when Skype isn't crashing) and we got to talking about our technological war stories: DOS, MicroTACs, 5.25" floppies ...

What are your earliest technological memories?

Some random thoughts:

- I always wanted to buy a Commodore VIC-20, if only for the name.

- I actually was geeky enough to buy the BASIC Programming cartridge (AND the keyboard controller) for my Atari 2600 game console. On a side note, can you believe we were all so gullible as to fall for the fantastical game art on the box covers of those horrid games? You'd buy the Adventure game and it would have a fantastic castle and a fiery dragon and a noble knight on the box cover and then when you finally power up the game, it's a blocky stick figure walking around a room made up of five lines and a rectangle.

- I also put in my fair share of game time on the ColecoVision and IntelliVision. God, those were great days.

- I remember the days when my cousins and I would fast forward to the end of all our Betamax rental tapes, just to see what they had taped over. As Forrest said (and I paraphrase), "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know when you're gonna find porn."

- And hey, how about watching FEN-TV from the US bases....

- I wrote my Psychology undergrad thesis on an IBM PC-XT, with a green monitor, on WordStar 6.

- I remember being a student during our computer class at DLSU (also with the aforementioned PC-XTs and WordStar) and one of the exercises was to execute the keystrokes that would remove all the WordStar menus from display and leave nothing but an empty screen. One of my classmates actually leaned forward and turned off the monitor so the screen blanked out, and did it in all seriousness. I guess he actually had the most elegant solution!

- zChris and I were reminiscing about the days when a hole puncher was actually a very useful tool to have around if you bought a box of 5.25" floppies.

- My first email address was something like vic.icasas@p9.h399.n751.z6.fidonet.org. The problem was, all my calling cards wouldn't fit in my wallet.

Feel free to chime in, you old fogies. You know who you are.

[vicicasas]

Originally posted by vicicasas
Feel free to chime in, you old fogies. You know who you are.

Also, I realize this topic should probably be in the Off Topic Forum, but the Jurassic Mac forum is just soooo lonely and neglected.

[wari_aktiv]

Up - up - down - down - left - right - left - right - B - A - B - A - Start.

That plus figuring out how to knock out Piston Honda, King Hippo, and Soda Popinski.

And hanging out with the most popular kid on the block, who had a Lazer Tag set. :lol:

A long time ago, it was all about who could press the buttons the fastest.

[totolabradog]

Aren't they reviving those old Atari games now?

I remember playing missle command, space invaders, night driver, Pacman and who can forget PONG! ang hirpa nga maglaro with those controllers!

Nintendo's Game And Watch, had Popeye and Octopus where my favorites!

Wow! i remember getting FEN! you could tell who had it hooked up from those arrow like TV antennas! That was my first taste of MTV! One of the most played videos back then was Mysterious Ways by U2!

My mom still has a working Betamax! I wonder if those Dallas tapes are still around!

More to come!

[Edited on 2-1-2005 by totolabradog]

[chairman]

Well here's my take....

1. The first computer we ever had was a commodore 64. Sometimes it makes me laugh and smile to think that i started out with a computer that you hoolked up to the T.V. The programs were loaded via cassette tapes. If you wanted to play a game you'd have wait awhile till the cassette tape reaches the desired point. You can't fast forward the tape to load the programs faster.

After awhile we upgraded to an external 5.25 disk drive. The commodore 64 had a whopping 64K (yes Kb and not MB or GB) of RAM. A far cry from my 1GB RAM which i user today.

2. I also used a PC-XT with the green and black monitor, used wordstar too, and all those old software. Then moved to a 386, 486DX. Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III and P4 before seeing the light and moving to a G4. Boy, I can't believe how I lasted all those years with a windows machine. Hehehe

3. Our first handheld was a Radio Shack pocket computer which looked more like an ovresized calculator which could do just a litte bit more than a calculator.

4. As for gaming consoles, Family computer with games like mario brothers, contra, donkey kong, etc.. then moved to a Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Playstation and now a PlayStation 2.

5. i also remember connecting to the net for the very first time using a 14.4 connection. At that time that was fast already!

6. As for celphones, we had a panasonic phone that was as big as your land line unit. Complete with shoulder strap to lug it around with you. But you looked cool before if you had that!

Come to think of it, we've gone through a lot of tech stuff from all those years. it's a good thing my dad is also interested in tech. Makes it easier to plead our case to my mom on why we need a new computer.

[vicicasas]

Originally posted by chairman
5. i also remember connecting to the net for the very first time using a 14.4 connection. At that time that was fast already!

I had a Hayes SmartModem 2400, and then i graduated to a ZyXEL internal 14.4.

My God, I'm getting teary eyed just typing these words.

[zChris]

- I used to hate computer class back then because they were teaching us to use Lotus 123 and, for the life of me, I could never ever remember the key that would bring up the menus! I used to press the keys with symbols on them aimlessly trying to get the menu to appear at the top of the screen!!!

- I used to play this game on a PC-XT called Tapper (or something like that), where you were a bartender and needed to pass people mugs of beer from a beer tap. I got high tech and upgraded to a 286 and when I loaded the game, I couldnt figure out why the game was moving like 5 times faster!

- More later....

[zChris]

Originally posted by vicicasas

Originally posted by chairman
5. i also remember connecting to the net for the very first time using a 14.4 connection. At that time that was fast already!

I had a Hayes SmartModem 2400, and then i graduated to a ZyXEL internal 14.4.

My God, I'm getting teary eyed just typing these words.

I remember vividly the first time I browsed the net. It was about 1995 or 1996 and about 7 pm. I was about to go home from work and passed by to asked my officemate what she was doing. She told me to sit down and go to this site called Netscape and type in any kind of topic I wanted to know more about in a text field and hit Search.

I was so amazed and just got lost on the net going from hyperlink to hyperlink. I went home like 2 hours later!

I think it was a 9.6 connection!

[jayveef]

my memories:

1. dad bought a Nintendo Entertainment System with the Gun for Duck Hunt and Hogans Alley. the NES also came with the Robot thingee which I couldnt hell figure out what to do with it to make it work

2. Our very first PC was an IBM Compatible CGA monitor. Battle Chess was the most beautiful game out. We had two laptops several years later -- the very first Toshiba LCD (monochrome) where I would play Flashback (remember this game?!). I also wrote my very first short story on Wordstar 6.

3. the very first game i ever played was Digger and Loderunner on a 286XT.

4. our second laptop was the first IBM Thinpad that had the "eraser / nipple" as mouse. We were running Windows 3.1 which I upgraded to Windows for Workgroups. I had not known about the Mac then. (huwhaaat?!)

5. Game and Watch -- Popeye, balloon fight, WWF

6. we have an old LP player here that still works. I dug through my old collections and found the rare Beatles' collection.

[hoho]

The first computer I learned to use and program on was an Apple ][. Then the Apple ][+ and the ][e. This was at a summer program called "My First Byte" run by MERALCO's computing division wayyy back in the summer of 1983.

The first computer that we owned was a Commodore Vic-20, with a whopping 5K of RAM! And a cassette deck for recording and loading programs on.

After that was my beloved Apple //c which served me well until about 1990 when we bought our first IBM-compatible PC which I needed for school.

That XT computer had a 1200bps modem, and a 20MB Hard drive! Eventually, I bought a 2400bps modem from Tridel, then later on got the external ZyXEL modem, which initially was 14.4Kpps, then with a PROM upgrade, sped up to a whopping 16.8Kbps.

After the XT came:

386SX-16Mhz
386DX-40Mhz
486DX-33Mhz
486DX-100Mhz

Then came the laptops:
Compaq Presario 6801 (??) Pentium 200 MMX
Dell Inspiron 4000 - Pentium III @ 500Mhz
Dell Inspiron 8600 - Pentium IV @ 1.75Ghz

Then the Macs:
Apple Titanium PowerBook G4 @ 1Ghz
Apple Aluminum PowerBook G4 @ 1.5Ghz
Apple Mac Mini G4 @ 1.42Ghz

Sometime in April or May of 1994, I also got the Apple Newton MessagePad 110. I still have it and my original Apple //c.

Edit: Speaking of the Atari 2600, remember when playing Space Invaders? When you poweron and hit another button (Start??) you'd get double shots off?


H

[Edited on 2-1-2005 by hoho]