Any old school players (1 Viewer)

[pltrgyst]

Was thinking the same thing, lol. 14.4k was like my fourth speed upgrade. A telephone acoustic coupler was the first ATT mainframe connection from home....

Yep -- 300 baud all the way. Altair/IMSAI, then Heathkit ... And if you later had a Commodore 64 which promised speeds up to 9600 baud, but didn't even have crystal-controlled frequency, you had to adjust the potentiometer of the R/C circuit just right, or you got -- nada.

CompuServe and various dial-up BBSes -- man, I do not miss those days at all.

It's like our parents remembering horses and buggies...

 

[Taghkanic]

Newbie.

Oldschool bandwidth use: My mom got a TRS-80 Model 100 portable c. 1983, to type notes as a reporter for a Massachusetts newspaper. Town meetings would sometimes run late, at which point she either had to drive to the main newsroom (far from our home) to file the report, and get home after midnight, or delay filing the story until the next day.

She somehow convinced the paper, which had just begun to get computerized, to set up a way for her to upload the text of her story via the Tandy’s 300 baud POTS modem.

It made a horrible racket connecting (those who know this sound, know it), but it worked. So she could both file late and get home at a reasonable hour from work.

So my own mother was probably the most tech-savvy person I knew in the early ’80s. I don’t know how it happened, but now she’s that standard pushing-80 parent who needs me to show her how to attach a photo to an AOL email....

 

[Rebelwork]

I graduated in 83. They were just starting to offer computer classes in the early 80's...

I have a cousin who is a vice president of a computer anti virus company for banks. I asked him how got moved up so fast to vice president. He said back in the 80's no one wanted to be a geek. So it wax easy. Us geeks got paid...

 

[pltrgyst]

Oldschool bandwidth use: My mom got a TRS-80 Model 100 portable c. 1983...

That was a ground-breaking machine at the time, even with that limited display -- what was it, 8 lines? I had one, along with an external floppy drive -- which weighed as much as the 100, so you really didn't want to carry it around. But it didn't get much use, since we also had one of the first IBM Portable PCs (the "luggable" 5155), to which I was able to add an after-market internal 20MB (MONSTER!!!) hard drive. My wife worked for IBM at the time, which helped a lot in getting my hands on things...

For any ancient computer geeks, this was our home event in NJ, at what is now the College of New Jersey:

"The Trenton Computer Festival, founded in 1976 was, up until 3/10/2020, the oldest continuously-running personal computer show in the world.[1][2] It is considered to be the first major fair for personal computer hobbyists.[3][4]

It was founded 1976 at Trenton State College by Sol Libes and Allen Katz with the assistance of the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey (ACGNJ).[5][6] The initial event drew a crowd of approximately 1,500, and featured lectures, vendor tables, and an outdoor computer market, all aimed at the amateur computer hobbyist.[7]"

Altairs, IMSAIs, S-100 bus clones, and Intel SDKs everywhere!

 

[Taghkanic]

That was a ground-breaking machine at the time, even with that limited display -- what was it, 8 lines?

I think so, but effectively more like 4-6 lines maybe when in text-entering mode, since iirc the top and bottom were taken up by “menu” items etc.?

Great battery life, though.

 

[pltrgyst]

....Great battery life, though.

IIRC, it ran on four AAs!

 

[RussB42]

At 78, I can even remember my Parents & Their Friends playing poker almost every weekend.

Old time poker, Stud, Draw, and others.