The pre-internet as we know it....
 

You feel old?
I met my wife online in '84 and was already in my late 20s.

Given the WWW was only invented in 1989, you'd have a job meeting her "online" in 84. Unless you both happened to be research scientists working on the first TCP/IP WAN. Sorry to burst your truth bubble :(

I said I met her online. We met on CompuServe. I think first subscribed to CIS in 1982.
There were ways to get around back, albeit it at 300 baud.
The public had telnet available to them too.

Aaah those were the times. I remember getting online short after I saw WarGames for the first time, which I suppose was around '85. Great pictures everybody!

yeah, great pics and i remember the old handset in the modem on the Comodore64 with monochrome screen...lol that was in 1982 if i remember right. used to make simple dos games back then.

My gosh, you are old :o

I played with CompuServe in 1984 but somewhat discouraged due to other issues (like writing failed BASIC programs with no way to save them). I was a frustrated young boy back then.

Not meaning to hijack the thread. . .
but
Told you. :)
I think there was a way. I believe you had a special computing area to write to.

I had a Tandy 1000 EX computer - with no hard drive (We didn't know what hard drives were back then). Also, we had no way to write to the 5 1/4" floppy drive.

Maybe revive an old thread
What was your first computer?
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=183555

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.

We were online back in 1981.

Using fixed lines from one factory to another. Not the www as we know it, but quite surreal looking back now.

Back in those days it was all Unix, Pascal and Fortran.

hmm i remember seeing a documentary about the first generation of nerds
building their own systems, hosting BBS boards running up phone bills of several
thousand dollers way back as mid 70's around 76.

Think its still availible on google vid, ill take a look if i can find it.

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here we go..
http://video.google.com/videosearch?...umentary&emb=0

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hmm select the top left video called part 1- Baud.

Hey, FORTRAN :)

That was the first language I learned and programmed in, on the UK CEGB* Mainframe in the late 1970's (my dad worked for them, and sneaked me in to use one of the office terminals).



[* Central Electricity Generating Board]

You have two wives? I don't know whether to congratulate you or console you :(

After BASIC, I learned some Pascal - that was wild at the time, considering what I was used to. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like had I kept on learning - what I could have done.

The first languages I learned were Fortan and Cobal as well (long since forgotten anything about them lol). Worked in a large computer shop in the early '80's running big IBM 3081 water cooled mainframes. We used to load our job JCL's (Job Control Language) from punchcards using machines like this :)

I wasn?t a geek, so I learned Graphics and CAD since the beginning :D

I started in the early 80's learning basic on a DAI_Personal_Computer and assembler on mainframes.

(big fun starting a mainframe by programming a boot loader by flipping 16 (binary) switches in the front, every time giving a single instruction. Once completed booting (20 minutes entering binary code), you could use the card or tickertape reader to load additional software. And if you where really lucky you where allowed to write some data to a huge diskpack of 4Mb total.

Not at the same time.

My first language was Basic which I learned on a PET. It was the first computer class offered at our high school. Soon after, we got an Apple II at home and my Dad stole my cassette player so we could save programs we wrote. Ah, memories.... :D
http://i.techrepublic.com.com/gallery/1478-500-433.jpg

Bunch of old timers around here! :p

Since CIS has been brought up, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned FIDOnet yet. Or offline QWK packet readers. Or BBS packages like PCBoard and Wildcat.

For the C= crowd, do you remember playing with 300 baud coupler modem? :D

Feels like only a few weeks *sigh*

Just checked wikipedia, and apparently they formed in 1979.

Rapscallion

Of course. Probably had that connected to my Atari 800.

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How about plink?

This thread makes me feel like a youngin. The only time I've heard about half whats being talked about here is in other threads on other forums.

Lucky you, I don't even know what the heck half of this stuff is (the older computers) ... Born in 1994... Don't think I'll know much about the past, but more about the future :)

Oh, my.... I think I have some concert t-shirts older than that. :erm:

:D I know I do. My son was born in 1992.