How To Send An E-Mail In 1984

I was 2 years old at the time. Could you imagine if you take the host and the couple that was demonstrating their computer were to transport into today's world? I think their mind would combust.


*Why the hell would they end the video with the modem noise?*
 
Goodness.. I remember going 'online' with the Commodore 64, but jeez, this felt like they were trying to make it so easy that it was awful.

BTW, I'm pretty sure his password was 123. lol
 
Hmmm, I bought my first modem in 1984, 300 baud but I think it did support dialing.
 
redmasc said:
*Why the hell would they end the video with the modem noise?*
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That's not modem noise, it's data tape noise. Many computers that were popular back then had audio in/out jacks to load and save data, intended to be used with an audio cassette, some of them had fancy computer controlled cassette decks too. Plus, it saves on paying some guy to write catchy music for the end credits.
 
Very much a remember when. Sometimes there really isn't much new. I did dimilar thing in 1988 with my Zenith XT.
 
MNKyDeth said:
Why has no one mentioned it yet?

There are two grills in this vid, HAWT!!
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In the early days of computing it was far more gender equal, it was only later it became a male dominated thing. My mum was the IT expert at school for instance and able to program games into the bbc micro (which she did for us at home too).
 
Meaker said:
In the early days of computing it was far more gender equal, it was only later it became a male dominated thing. My mum was the IT expert at school for instance and able to program games into the bbc micro (which she did for us at home too).
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Oh come on, it was meant to be fun. I was using a computer in 1979. I was online before AOL and I was building my own computers before there were Pentium CPU's. So hard to joke nowadays.....
 
The saddest part of all was that their keyboard was probably superior in typing tactile feel compared to anything we can buy today. God I miss those old IBM/Keysonic clicky keyboards.
 
I remember the first time I fired up awesome new 1440 baud modem, I thought I broke it when the sound started lol.
 
Ya know, hi tech then probably amazed the users. What we take for granted today will incite laughter from people 25 years from now.
 
At least they weren't using an acoustic coupler! I remember thinking it was so cool, showing off to my friends how you can dial their telephone number using rapid taps of the hangup lever. Oh god, there are shameful acts you can never forget.
 
My first time "online" was in 1977 at a whopping 50 baud using the Dow Jones News and Information Retrieval Service on a $2200 USRobotics 300 baud modem - the local POP (point of presence) for Dow Jones just couldn't connect at better than 50 baud due to the lame plain old telephone service (POTS). I could type faster than the damned thing could send. A few years later I ended up using an acoustic coupler and what a nightmare that ended up being - that was years before error correction came along so anything that caused vibrations, including the typing I was doing, caused noise and corruption and totally wrecked the connections.

Gradually moved to 300 baud, then 450 baud (seriously) on an "overclocked" Commodore 64 modem that could be pushed to faster speeds by adjusting some of the timing parameters with POKE commands. I had a CompuServe account in those days (I was one of the first 100 consumers to use CIS long ago, even remember my original User ID: 70001,98) and had one of their system engineers check and he was totally freaked out that it showed me connected at 450 baud - it doesn't seem like much now but that literally was a 50% speed boost that I got for free. In those days 300 baud connections were $3 an hour, 1200 baud was $12 an hour, and there wasn't anything in between in terms of billing so I was able to get that 50% faster speed but the POP registered me at 300 baud so, I paid the low price (and it did get expensive at times).

300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14.4, 28.8, 56 (aka never happened but 53Kbps was very possible, especially in new housing developments with better wiring), then a jump to cable after 25 years on dialup, what a difference that made. Finally went from being a damned good HPB (high ping bastard) in Quake games to an LPB that wrecked the competition and ran through 'em like the proverbial hot knife through butter.

Nowadays I'm on a 100 Mbps cable line, wouldn't mind more speed but I'll live. Maybe Cox will do another bump here at some point and push us up a bit more on the Premiere plan but I'm sure they'll jack the price up yet again when they do.

We've come a very very long way since I first got started with data communications "online" that's for damned sure. Most folks just have no idea what it took to get to these multi-megabit and now even gigabit speeds, sadly.
 
Uhh lol. Haven't made it but 90seconds into the video and:

I wouldn't want a washing machine with that many knobs on it, much less a modem. My USR 57.6k modem had zero knobs!
Love how he talks about how simple the connection is - as he dials the rotary phone.
Dude's password is "1234" :p

Edit: Got through the whole thing. She's definitely wrong at around 5:05 when she says the least successful method of catching the data transmission is to place a microphone near the TV; listening to the beeps, clicks and screeches and imitating them with whistles, clicks and a duck call should be even less successful than a microphone near the tele.
 
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When Hayes introduced the 1200 baud modem I was like a kid in a candy shop. Especially after owning their Smartmodem 300 baud modem for many months before upgrading.
 
This video is awesome but just a bit before my time. I got my first computer in 1987, I was 8 and it was the greatest thing ever. I don't think we had internet until 1992/93 though. If we did my mom didn't tell me about it.
 
I was sporting a TI99/4a decked out with a speech synthesizer and a TI Peripheral expansion box with an extra 32K mem card (for a whopping total of 48K of system memory.... oh ya, livin' large!!!), a RS-232 serial interface card, and a floppy disk controller with a 5 1/4" single sided, single density floppy drive.

My system looked like this:
ti994asystem.JPG


I used to use a Volksmodem @ 300 baud to hook up to BBS's all around the state/country... data would stream to the screen at a rate that I could keep up with it, reading the text as it came in. This was well before the internet... BBS's were the shit back then! I remember having just upgraded to a 1200 baud modem the year before this and the data would stream in so fast that I couldn't keep up with reading the text as it appeared on my screen - blew my mind at the time.

Didn't have email, but you could post messages to bulletin boards (BBS's), which was the equivalent of posting to a web site, and also leave private messages to other users - sort of like PMs here. Lots of BBSs had software you could also download.

Still have this sucker in the attic somewhere... I was 18 back in 1984. Times and the tech have changed just a bit since then...
 
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Supercharged_Z06 said:
I was sporting a TI99/4a decked out with a speech synthesizer and a TI Peripheral expansion box with an extra 32K mem card (for a whopping total of 48K of system memory.... oh ya, livin' large!!!), a RS-232 serial interface card, and a floppy disk controller with a 5 1/4" single sided, single density floppy drive.

My system looked like this:
ti994asystem.JPG


I used to use a Volksmodem @ 300 baud to hook up to BBS's all around the state/country... data would stream to the screen at a rate that I could keep up with it, reading the text as it came in. This was well before the internet... BBS's were the shit back then! I remember having just upgraded to a 1200 baud modem the year before this and the data would stream in so fast that I couldn't keep up with reading the text as it appeared on my screen - blew my mind at the time.

Didn't have email, but you could post messages to bulletin boards (BBS's), which was the equivalent of posting to a web site, and also leave private messages to other users - sort of like PMs here. Lots of BBSs had software you could also download.

Still have this sucker in the attic somewhere... I was 18 back in 1984. Times and the tech have changed just a bit since then...
Click to expand...


Yep, had almost the same exact system but added an NEC amber monochrome monitor and Smith-Corona daisy-wheel printer for "word processing"! Dang was the system unfriendly--the keyboard was the worst and wouldn't print a full line of text without wrapping. Used it to display "WELCOME TO 1984" scrolling across the screen for the New Year's party on December 31st, 1983. A friend in Cali hooked us up with Compuserve and we "chatted" back and forth via the internet using the slow-assed modem. Several friends got interested in computers by using it and went on to do things with that career. I threw the whole mess off a balcony around 1988 and swore never to touch a computer again. Kept to that oath until about 10 years ago--my did things change during the interim--thankfully!
 
"It's very simple"
~proceeds to unplug/plug stuff and confuses 98% of the audience~

Nerds were arrogant jerks even back then. I went online around that time and I'd never want to actually explain to anyone how I did it. Even then I knew nobody would understand.
 
I remember being on Fidonet in the 1980's on a 1200 baud modem, and later flipping out when someone got a 9600 baud USR modem, and started downloading games...
 
Tiberian said:
My first time "online" was in 1977 at a whopping 50 baud using the Dow Jones News and Information Retrieval Service on a $2200 USRobotics 300 baud modem - the local POP (point of presence) for Dow Jones just couldn't connect at better than 50 baud due to the lame plain old telephone service (POTS). I could type faster than the damned thing could send. A few years later I ended up using an acoustic coupler and what a nightmare that ended up being - that was years before error correction came along so anything that caused vibrations, including the typing I was doing, caused noise and corruption and totally wrecked the connections.

Gradually moved to 300 baud, then 450 baud (seriously) on an "overclocked" Commodore 64 modem that could be pushed to faster speeds by adjusting some of the timing parameters with POKE commands. I had a CompuServe account in those days (I was one of the first 100 consumers to use CIS long ago, even remember my original User ID: 70001,98) and had one of their system engineers check and he was totally freaked out that it showed me connected at 450 baud - it doesn't seem like much now but that literally was a 50% speed boost that I got for free. In those days 300 baud connections were $3 an hour, 1200 baud was $12 an hour, and there wasn't anything in between in terms of billing so I was able to get that 50% faster speed but the POP registered me at 300 baud so, I paid the low price (and it did get expensive at times).

300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14.4, 28.8, 56 (aka never happened but 53Kbps was very possible, especially in new housing developments with better wiring), then a jump to cable after 25 years on dialup, what a difference that made. Finally went from being a damned good HPB (high ping bastard) in Quake games to an LPB that wrecked the competition and ran through 'em like the proverbial hot knife through butter.

Nowadays I'm on a 100 Mbps cable line, wouldn't mind more speed but I'll live. Maybe Cox will do another bump here at some point and push us up a bit more on the Premiere plan but I'm sure they'll jack the price up yet again when they do.

We've come a very very long way since I first got started with data communications "online" that's for damned sure. Most folks just have no idea what it took to get to these multi-megabit and now even gigabit speeds, sadly.
Click to expand...

Yeah so many things we take for granted right now. I remember when we switched from mpm3 to v.42bis data compression so that finally, your BPS rates didn't DROP when your data was incompressible. Before that you'd plan carefully, turn on data compression, read and reply to your messages as quickly as possible to save on connection charges, hang up, reconnect with mpm2 for error correction without data compression then fire up xyzmodem/catfur to transfer files one at a time. Now we have automatic RSS feed parsing and automatic updates so it happens while we sleep, brilliant! And skintones look so much better without rasterized pallettes, when I was a kid, we could just pretend that those big pixels were nipples.

Speaking of first time online...
The package
The actual game

Ah progress.
 
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B00nie said:
The saddest part of all was that their keyboard was probably superior in typing tactile feel compared to anything we can buy today. God I miss those old IBM/Keysonic clicky keyboards.
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That was a classic BBC micro, not sure of a A or B. Most UK schools had several of them by 1985. I did my Computer Studies O level on them and we also had a network in 1986 too! Was great fun sending text messages to other machines. We snuck into the studies room and had a look through the user manual the teacher left on the desk that had all these commands. I miss those times.
 
B00nie said:
The saddest part of all was that their keyboard was probably superior in typing tactile feel compared to anything we can buy today. God I miss those old IBM/Keysonic clicky keyboards.
Click to expand...

You can still get them! In new 103/104 USB versions even!

Unicomp, Inc.

I still have several old clicky keyboards that I have hoarded over the years -- and my own day to day keyboards at home and at work are old NMB OEM Philips mechanical keyswitch versions from 1991, connected via an AT to PS/2 adapter to a PS/2 to USB adapter (hideous, but it works).
What is amazing is that I am a VERY heavy user as a programmer and IT support person, and used to be a heavy gamer too, and this keyboard STILL hasn't worn out -- and even the letters are still visible and barely worn (only the A, C, S, and M, are faded at all -- though the left shift key is a bit hard to read, but that's because I once dropped a hot soldering iron on it).
 
1984, I remember it -- and my computer from those days -- well, and I was already "online" via modem.

In 1984 I had an Apple //e with a Hayes MicroModem ][ (300 baud) and was already an active member of several BBS systems (and had friends who ran them locally).

Ah yes, those were the days.

Anyone on here remember Rusty & Edie's? ;)
(though I don't think it showed up til 87 or 88)
 
MNKyDeth said:
Oh come on, it was meant to be fun. I was using a computer in 1979. I was online before AOL and I was building my own computers before there were Pentium CPU's. So hard to joke nowadays.....
Click to expand...

My first build had a 386 CPU., and 4 very expensive 256KB simms :)

My first hardware mod was piggy backing 3 TTL logic chips in my RadioShack color computer, so I could access the full 64KB of ram, instead of just 32KB.
 
nutzo said:
My first build had a 386 CPU., and 4 very expensive 256KB simms :)

My first hardware mod was piggy backing 3 TTL logic chips in my RadioShack color computer, so I could access the full 64KB of ram, instead of just 32KB.
Click to expand...

My first PC that I built was a Turbo XT with a blazingly fast 8Mhz NEC V20 processor in it.

And I remember sitting up all night helping one of my best friends build his unbelievably fast 386-33Mhz PC -- which was a real screamer for its day.
The motherboard was manufactured by Hokkins Systemation Inc (HSI) and I remember trying to get all the proper SRAM's for the cache memory that went on the board (which we then had to install, one at a time, along with all the memory IC's).

Once we had everything working we "celebrated" with a big breakfast at Waffle House!
 
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I was in the U.S. Air Force from 1971 to 1994. the first thing I had to do was while I was at lackland afb, tx I was sent to Kelly afb to type binary code into paper tape spools and bring them back to the computer building at lackland. it was about 4,000 square feet and had 10 inch reel to reel spools of magnetic tape like was used for tape recorders. light was passed through the paper tape to make data imprints on the magnetic tape. it looked like something out of a sci fi movie. the temp was always at 68 f to keep the computer from overheating.

more stories to follow
 
rediornot said:
I was in the U.S. Air Force from 1971 to 1994. the first thing I had to do was while I was at lackland afb, tx I was sent to Kelly afb to type binary code into paper tape spools and bring them back to the computer building at lackland. it was about 4,000 square feet and had 10 inch reel to reel spools of magnetic tape like was used for tape recorders. light was passed through the paper tape to make data imprints on the magnetic tape. it looked like something out of a sci fi movie. the temp was always at 68 f to keep the computer from overheating.

more stories to follow
Click to expand...

Back in college, I actually had the misfortune of having to regularly use paper tape to load some custom software into an aging PDP 8e -- after first toggling the boot code in with the front panel buttons. It was a royal pain.
 
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