I moved the posts into this thread since we were sooo off topic..

I had a tape drive and then floppy drives. I used to write in basic and assembly language all the time. I had (still have it in storage) an Atari 800 and Atari 800xl. I went "online" to local BBS's and had a compuserve account... I used the Hayes 1200 baud smart modem.

Those were the days.

There we go.
Thread split, but maybe it should be pre-internet as we know it. :)

Done. :D

Thanks.

I recall using telnet to gain access to other networks.
Had friends big time into phreaking.
I remember a phreaking BBS in Colorado that people would use illegal 800s numbers to connect to.

I even remember my first email outside of CompuServe.
I designed a pilot's logbook using Filemaker and a guy from the Mayo Clinic contact me.

When I had a 2400 baud modem, I was rocking!
When I looked for an apartment I had to make sure there was a local CIS node.

signed,
73145,117

You were wooing women online before I was conceived :eek:

Yeah I was happy when the 2400 baud modems came out. We used to download games from the BBS's.

My friend was using long distance phone cards and making up account numbers to connect to BBS's and networks in other states to download games illegally. One day when he got home he had two FBI agents waiting outside his house. They left the computer but took all his disks and the cables to his computer. He had to pay back the calling card company about 10k....

You think that's alarming? Try being on the other side and realising it for the first time. Made me blink.

For me, the moment of realisation was when a young girl asked me if I remembered the Falklands conflict. I did indeed - counting them out and counting them back and all that.

"Oh, we learned about that today in history," she told me.

Ouch.

I got my revenge a while later, though. She was going on about how she really liked the Beastie Boys. "Are their fans still stealing VW logos?" I asked. I had to explain that this had happened over a decade previously.

"You ... you mean they're old?" she gasped.

Rapscallion

Just one. :)
It was a lot safer then.

I remember someone at Compuserve had a camera that digitized your image.
It was a bunch of characters. That was the first digitized pictures.

The thing back then, all girls were 18, blonde and hair and blue eyes.
Imagine that? Saturday night and all the best looking girls online. :)

It was easy to read between the lines.

A common acronym we would use is MORF? :)

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Ahhh? That wasn't a David, was it?
I got the same phone call from a friend of mine. He's in telecommunications now. :)

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Beastie Boys. I was working in the music biz and the Beastie Boys were playing at a record exec's daughter's sweet 16 party. I don't think anyone ever heard of them yet. :)
Wasn't that just a few years ago?

Email, SSH and IRC were created in the 60s and 70s. They haven't changed much. During the 80s and early 90s a lot of people were online using BBSes, Genie, AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve long before they got on the WWW. I met both my wives online long before the World Wide Web was common. Also the HTTP specification was published in 1984... just took until 1989 until it started becoming popular.

CompuServe

Founded in 1969 as a computer time-sharing service, Columbus, Ohio-based CompuServe drove the initial emergence of the online service industry. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computer users. CompuServe broke new ground again in 1980 as the first online service to offer real-time chat online with its CB Simulator. By 1982, the company had formed its Network Services Division to provide wide-area networking capabilities to corporate clients.