25 Years Later

[mbarrick]

1977 Commodore PET

Twenty-five years ago when I was hacking away on one of these beasties I never imagined that I would be sitting here watching a movie on my computer, talking to friends thousands of miles away, manipulating photographs, and writing in my journal all at the same time on a computer, not to mention making my living off of the absurd things. But here I am. An interesting toy, a glorified calculator (actually my calculator has more RAM than a PET), has now become the cornerstone of my life. It's marvellous and absurd.

Comments

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

sadly enough i remember those computers, and apple lisas...scary...the first "computer" class i took in school involved working on a remote teletype which was networked with the university's computer...ha ha...

Memories...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

My first computer class involved punch cards and an HP "minicomputer" that had an 8" floppy.

Some fond geek memories:

TRS-80
Sinclair
Apple II (no c, or e)
... I spent hours playing Flight Simulator (1.0) on that Apple, trying to fly between the WTC towers - damn if it wasn't impossible not to fly into them.

Re: Memories...

[goth-posh.livejournal.com]

Hey! The TRS-80 was my first computer!!

Re: Memories...

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

i never did get to have a computer, but we did have a superpong...then an atari...then intellivision...i did work on the macs in the computer lab at university though in the early '80s...i have a couple of years on you...ha ha...

Pong!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Oh, man! You just reminded me of this game console we had in the mid-70's. "Telstar" it was called. It played pong, handball, and "hockey" - and eventually burned in on our gargantuan wood-veneer cabinet TV that used to take half an hour to warm up. LOL. There is a technology memory... turning on the TV half an hour before you planned to watch something and waiting for the tube to warm up. Right up there with battery-eating LED digital watches and battery devouring LED calculators that took a whole second to figure out a square root.

Re: Pong!

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

oh i remember all of those...the old zenith in the huge cabinet...remember telstar too...i had a scientific texas instruments t1 calc, it was a monster, but great for writing such funnies as hell, shell oil, and hello...

Do you remember GEM?

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Not the cartoon, but the Xerox operating system that Apple ripped off?

Re: Do you remember GEM?

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

no i don't remember it personally, but i have seen the show about the research facility in palo alto and the shortsightedness of the xerox executives...very hard to believe...i was an expert at intellivision though...

I have never seen one of those

[uberbabe.livejournal.com]

And I'm certainly not old enough to have played with them 25 years ago...

But I do remember puttering on my friends Tandy, till we broke it...

I also remember my friends dad he would tie up the phone line for this thing that he used to do with the computer where he would talk to other people on their computers through the telephone line.... we were all like "cha... like how lame is that?" Besides, it stopped us from talking on the phone (this was about 11 years ago now).

m3 l33t 80's h@x0r!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

In the early 80's I was a Commodore h@x0r - I could circumvent the copy protection on any program the came out for the PET, VIC20 or C-64. Even the ones with dongles (LOL - betcha don't know what a dongle is!). I went by the alias "Emperor Commodus".

Ich bin ein ÜberGeek!

Re: m3 l33t 80's h@x0r!

[goth-posh.livejournal.com]

I know what a dongle is...hehe...

Re: m3 l33t 80's h@x0r!

[uberbabe.livejournal.com]

You and your prince's sex life has nothing to do with computers!

You Cheeky Monkey!!!

[goth-posh.livejournal.com]

Dongle- A hardware device that is used to prevent illegal installations of software. The software is designed so that it will only operate when the hardware device is attached. Therefore only users who have the proper hardware device attached can operate the software. If the software is installed on another machine it will not work because the hardware device is not attached. Hardware keys are distributed to end users correspo0nding to the number of seat licenses purchased.

Re: You Cheeky Monkey!!!

[uberbabe.livejournal.com]

all this talk about hard and soft... don't tell me this has nothing to do with sex!

:p

From "Will and Grace"

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

"I didn't invest in Microsoft because I figured what man is ever going to buy anything from a company with 'micro' and 'soft' in the name."

Re: From "Will and Grace"

[uberbabe.livejournal.com]

LOL... that's a good one

Re: I have never seen one of those

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

god i can remember playing civilization on my friend's computer that long ago...and something about "orion", some space game...ha ha...

d-dial!

[bitogoth.livejournal.com]

good lord- i spent most of my middle school years futzing around chatting in d-dial... this whole thread is just a super-scary flashback... lol!

Here's a couple...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Remember when "Fido" was a network of BBS systems, not a brand of cell phone?
Remember when "PDA" meant "Public Display of Affection"?

Memories...

[cheekydevil.livejournal.com]

Remember acoustic modems, which you plugged your rotary phone into at what, 200 baud, and watched the text appear, character by character?

For that matter, remember acoustic phones?

Remember loading programs from CASSETTE? Yeek!

I actually had a Timex Sinclair as my first computer, with a whoppin' capacity of 2000k! Or was it 2k? Bitchin'!

Re: Memories...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Yup. I remember using 300 baud audio-coupled modems on rotary phones. As you can see the PET had the cassette drive built-in (swank!). And yes, the Sinclair would have been 2K, 2048 bytes! The PET was a "serious" computer compared to the Sinclair, as it has all of 4096 bytes! At one point I had a funky little hobby computer that Radio Shack put out in competition to the Sinclair (not a TRS-80, which was in the PET's class, but a tiny little thing with a chicklet keyboard). For the life of me I can't remember what it was called.

And I still have my rotary phone. Given that I've seen replica rotary phones in Liberty for $400, my genuine article (so old that the rotor is black, not clear) is probably worth some good coin. I have had children ask "What's that? Where are the buttons? How do you dial it?" - the irony being that you don't dial a touch-tone phone, but faced with an actual dial phone the connection to "dialling a phone" isn't obvious.