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*Why the hell would they end the video with the modem noise?*
Could you imagine if you take the host and the couple that was demonstrating their computer were to transport into today's world?
right up there with love, sex, secret, and... god.Password 1234 lol
Why has no one mentioned it yet?
There are two grills in this vid, HAWT!!
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).
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:
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.....
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.
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.
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