How To Send An E-Mail In 1984

[travanx]

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 am the same age, Orgeon Trail Gen. Had an Apple IIC to start my computer adventures. First email address was through a BBS. That was a really fun time period as you couldn't really talk to many people about computer anything. One of the people I ended up meeting in HS, was taking over one of LA's Loveline callin phone numbers for a long time. Going to college in '97 with fast internet back then, was amazing. My roomates had a T1 line installed in a later apt., and were running web servers.

I wonder how many kids nowadays know about the old phone modems? I still get told by those older than me about punch cards but have never seen one in action before.

 

[Insula Gilliganis]

Geez.. can't believe no one posted this yet..

 

[westrock2000]

Pretty sure you use the mouse

 

[cyclone3d]

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!

Nice. Back in the day, I upgraded my motherboard with the max SRAM it could take. I think it came with 64k and I upgraded it to 256k.

That added L2 cache make a decent improvement in speed.

 

[raz-0]

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.

Hey sometimes it came in useful, like on the telephone in the vice principal's office with the physical lock on it. I met a pretty fun girl with questionable judgment with that trick. You just need to know that the point isn't technology is cool or that you are smarter than someone else, but that authority can go fuck off and not tell me what to do. Large swaths of teenage girls modeled their entire lives on that notion... cause they were like super mature and knew what they were doing and junk.

 

[Mugato]

HAHAHAHA There are so many great freaking quotes in there. And why was the behemoth sitting there way to close?

Things are starting to happen...
I'm now waiting for the computer to answer me...
An area of Presto.
What do you use it for? I use it to keep household records, like what's in the freezer...WHY NOT JUST GO LOOK IN THE FREEZER.

BYE JANE

 

[cyclone3d]

What do you use it for? I use it to keep household records, like what's in the freezer...WHY NOT JUST GO LOOK IN THE FREEZER.

When you have children and the freezer is packed full and you also have a deep freeze it would maybe make sense to keep a list of what is in the freezer.. although we don't

 

[Red Falcon]

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.

Awesome story, thanks for sharing!
I started around 9600-14.4Kbps, so I missed out on a lot of what you older guys did; I'm really jealous.

Well, since it is (Rounded) Pi Day, and we are talking about 1984, here is my Raspberry Pi (iMagic Pi mini-ITX case) connected to a composite monochrome monitor from 1984!

Oh, and if you thought the modem in this video is old, check out this working modem from 1964!!!

 

[pendragon1]

That's cool. Look at the build quality on that thing and it still works!

 

[Nvidia_ATI]

This is hilarious! Megalith, many thanks for sharing! We have come a long way in 32 years. I got my start with computers using PC that did not have any hard drives. They had 2 floppy drives called A and B and there was a whopping 640kB of ram! I remember being so excited when DOS 4 was released. I was thrilled with revamped commands like edlin :-D Would you agree that the pace of advancement and innovation has slowed down in the last few years? For instance, Moore's law is on its last legs.

 

[Deleted member 245375]

That video of the modem from 1964 was awesome, thanks for sharing. It also gives me a way to explain the difference between 300 and 450 baud and that 50% speed boost: when you watch that video and he's doing the login process, you'll note that because of the extremely slow speed of the connection that as data comes into the laptop over that connection, the characters that end up being displayed on the screen can be seen scrolling across left to right, almost at a speed similar to what a fast typer can do. The letters just appear slowly one after the other, and that's somewhat like how 300 baud activity happens: the characters appear slowly one at time almost like you had a piece of paper covering them and you slid the paper slowly to the right uncovering the text underneath.

Now, at 450 baud with that whopping 50% speed boost, the characters didn't appear one or two at a time slowly as they displayed across the screen - at 450 baud they literally blinked onscreen, the entire line of data would just appear, blip, blip, blip, done. First time I did actually connect at 450 baud using the CompuServe VIDTEX software just floored me because of how fast it was compared to even 300 baud. Yeah, I know, it's laughable by today's standards where an entire page of information like page 2 of this entire thread just kinda blinks onscreen fully rendered and displayed in most modern browsers on modern computers, but for me and friends seeing it happen it was a watershed moment being able to "finally" get something faster than 300 baud.

Those were the days, I swear, always fun to discover something new and interesting with technology as it began to spread and develop new paths almost daily. From pure monochrome green/amber screens through 8 color, 16 color, 256 color, into millions and billions of 'em. I have very fond memories of owning an Amiga 500 just after it was introduced and seeing pictures in 4,096 colors that even today stand out as some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen on a computer display (good old trusty Commodore 1084S, loved that damned monitor I really did). It was simply stunning to see such incredible color reproduction at that time and again by today's standards it's pretty much obsolete but even so, it was always fun, always.

Now things are taken for granted so quickly and dismissed that it's somewhat sad when it happens. Reality has this high fast pace nowadays where what's incredible today will be tossed to the wayside tomorrow - in my youth such progress took years compared to stuff that happens in days or weeks now so we had a lot more time to appreciate such leaps and bounds when they happened.

I come from a time when people communicated like this post - long, (hopefully) thoughtful commentary or discussion - and today's world seems to suffer from the tl;dr bullshit which I abhor: if you can't get your point across in one or two sentences at best the majority of people just ignore it, sadly.

Progress sucks sometimes.