Question for the old farts around here ;)

[Russ]

<< my dad said he could remeber his first computer, which had a 20 MB hard drive. >>



Oh geez, now I need a nap!

Some tidbits from my youth:

Big Hunk candy bars, 5 cents.
Hostess Twinkies, 12 cents.
Fruit pies, 13 cents.

Scrounging enough pop bottles to turn in and pig out on the above, priceless.

Building Heathkit and, as part of troubleshooting same, taking vacuum tubes to the grocery store to test them.

Russ, NCNE

 

[Russ]

PS: From later in life. Bought my first VCR in 1979. It was a Panasonic Omnivision VI, weighed about 50lbs., and cost $950.00 at Monkey Ward's. One video store in town, cost $79 for a membership, and $7.99 for tape rental.

Russ, NCNE

 

[apoppin]

Don't forget gas prices. Under $0.30 a gallon for premium (and the service attendent pumped it for you, cleaned your windshield and checked your oil).

I remember when LA has many clear smog-free days in a row (and uncrowded freeways at times - rush hour was that - an hour around 5-6 pm)

 

[SOONER]

I remember when almost NOBODY I knew had parents that were divorced and everyones moms were at home when they got home from school. If you only had one parent then the other one must have died.
I remember sitting on the floor watching an old tv console that stood on 4 skinny legs. When something went wrong with the tv we called the &quot;tv repair man&quot; and he would come to our house to fix it. Seemed like he was coming about once a month.

 

[HowardStern]

I remember when MTV used to play music videos.

 

[raz]

TV repairman? What's that? I remember when the old B&amp;W started to act up, me and my brothers would see who could get Dad's shoe off first so we could fling it at the TV...and if that didn't work poor ol' Dad would lose another shoe...and if THAT didn't work somebody would have to give the ol' boy a good whack on the side (the TV, not Dad).

 

[Pliablemoose]

I remember my dad bringing home a 6 digit LED calculator powered by batteries, our 1st color TV, 1st remote control TV, cars without catalytic converters, leaded gasoline, and I want my jet pack &amp; flying car, thank you very much:disgust:

 

[creektech]

In grad school we got REAL excited if we got to check out the portable teletype with a 300 baud acoustic modem--almost all of our work was on punch cards.

For a HOT deal I once bought an external SCSI 160MB hard drive marked down to $398 from $999!

 

[kursplat]

i remember how much fun it was playing with the tube tester at thrifty's
man that was tech
got to go listen to the dead sing touch of gray now kids
&quot;the fat man rocks&quot;

 

[apoppin]

Did I mention, Doctors made house calls. The technology might not have been there but the personal touch sure was.

And MDs were affordable.

 

[GrumpyMan]

Thank god for those aliens coming down here and helping us to speed this technology thing up a bit, otherwise I would still be chiseling this out on a stone tablet.

 

[WombatWoman]

I remember feeling mighty old when I overheard a child asking &quot;Mom, what does it mean when they say 'to wind a watch'?&quot;

...and I realized that I had not owned a watch that needed winding for over twenty years.

 

[iverson]

Drive-In Movies
Sunday blue laws. Nothing was open on Sundays but drug stores and grocery stores
900 lb. black and white tv's on rickety little metal carts
Going to your friends house in the summer because THEY had central a/c
Not having central a/c (southern thing}
Recording albums to cassette tapes ONE song at a time
The convenience store {before they had gas pumps} near my grandmother's house where
they actually came to your car and took your order and brought you your stuff
Full service gas stations with mostly clean restrooms
Seeing the first night of MTV
Seeing the last episode of MASH
Watching the first man on the moon
Metal oil cans you had to open with an opener or those spout things
My first three head cassette deck
Reel to reel tape recorders.
8 TRACKS lasted about 3 months before breaking
Only three networks and PBS if you could pick them up
Not having cable tv of any kind till i was a senior in high school
No cellphones, cd's, internet, personal computers etc.
Two lane highways and leaded gas.
When walkmans were THE shiite
I NEVER stayed inside when i was a kid unless I was sick or in trouble.
Having to use your imagination to find something to do
Being taught to duck and cover in school

 

[Frglss]

This is good.
1st color TV w/ rabbit ears in '62
living in a brand new home in town on a dirt road
a brand new Dodge Rambler station wagon
3 or 4 guys serving you car at a gas station w/o you asking
1st man on the moon
the very 1st portable 8 track that cost a ton (a tape was dragging so I shot it full of WD40 and it was a Learjet )
'69 Cougar I bought for $1100 and had to fill up for .029.9/gallon
leaving our bikes any and everywhere
never locking the doors or windows
swamp coolers and on the roof ducted!
buying an &quot;air conditioner&quot; for the car that was held in place by rolling up the window
never wearing shoes in the summer
going to see &quot;Hell's Angels&quot; at the theater, buying a coke and a candy bar for less than $1
soda fountains in all the drug stores
stores that advetised &quot;Air Conditioned Inside&quot;
the 1st black kid in school
minimum wage was $1.00/hr
tornado and bomb drills
Kennedy being shot and getting let out of school
1st TI calculator that was the size of a laptop and weighed more
Beta VCRs
Craig Powerplay car 8 track w/ built in &quot;high power&quot; amps
when the speed limit was cut to 55 mph
when &quot;Spider&quot; bikes came out
cigarettes machines that charged .35/pack
Boone's Farm wine
drive up banks
milk delivered to the house in bottles
Grit being sold door to door
Hot Wheels
The Big Foot pics in Argosy
8 mm home movies
Polaroid instant cameras
8 oz Cokes in a bottle for a nickel
pharmacies that delivered the day you called
Dr.s that would come to the house
1st hippies, then yippies
the Beatles 1st LP
&quot;lawn jockies&quot; weren't an uncommon site in yards

 

[Tiger]

Russ,

You built Heathkits?
Complete, un-built Heathkits are just about priceless now.
An SB-220 Linear amp can bring up to $500.
I wish they were still in business.

 

[Tominator]

Now I do feel old...

I still have a working 8 track...AND a Beta VCR....

 

[hans007]

<< i was so stubborn to leave DOS all of my friends had windows 95 and I was like &quot;Damn you people need to respect the true reliability of DOS, this windows crap always crahes!&quot;

Which I kept believing...
Until I installed Windows 2000 >>



Me too, i hosed my entire computer trying linux a week before the RTM build of win2k came out. Win2k is the best thing ever.


I am 20 years old. I have grown up with computers and watching them get better and faster it really is amazing. When i was 6 we had an epson qx-10 running cp/m. it had some games. I've watched microsoft go from nothing back then, to a giant mega death compan. When i was 10 me and my friend programmed basic on ancient apple IIes, and played sierra's quest games. Boy were those graphics awesome. I remember when we had space quest 3 and had our first sound card. A prototype sample unit from creative labs (called soundblaster at the time). I was like, no way this sounds great. By the time i was 14 or so we had doom 1 and well that was amazing. The leaps and killer apps though just aren't quite as big as they used to seem. Like back then it was like OMG color printing, or OMG 256 colors. Like really big jumps. Now its more evolution, before you had to buy a whole new computer because you just couldn't keep up with the new software's requirements but now i think its just games really. The internet really is great, i remember being on bbs's and ATT and prodigy. Used to sit there with my dad (he worked in the industry) and build 386s and stuff. Aw the good old days.


And back when i was in the philippines before i immigrated, we had a rotary phone and a record player. And i think about those days, as i sit here in my room, typing on a 700mhz laptop with an ethernet connection to a router in another room, and really those days of being on BBSes at 2400 baud and hacking away at my autoexec.bat so i could play nba live 95 with 8mb of ram and a 486-66 were far better days, back when only the truly hardcore could actually use a computer. Even better, dragging all our computers to my friend matts house in 9th grade, at the protest of all our parents, and spending hours configuring our 10base2 isa nics in dos, and checking all of our coax and finally playing multiplayer doom2.

 

[whizbang]

<< PS: From later in life. Bought my first VCR in 1979. It was a Panasonic Omnivision VI, weighed about 50lbs., and cost $950.00 at Monkey Ward's. One video store in town, cost $79 for a membership, and $7.99 for tape rental. >>

I heard that one of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd died due to head injuries from a VCR when their plane crashed in the mid-70's. If they'd had a portable DVD, he would probably just have had a bruise. How's that for technology?

 

[Hamburgerpimp]

I have an old Athlon SlotA CPU around here.

 

[ShotgunSteven]

Console systems. I still have my dedicated PONG machine from when I was younger.

 

[ShotgunSteven]

<< This is good.
when &quot;Spider&quot; bikes came out
>>



Damn, one of my older sisters had a Spider bike. All those tassles coming out of the hand grips, bright green paint with metallic flakes in it. Unless we are thinking of different things. Anyone remember those Big Wheels bikes for kids?

 

[etech]

Buying shoes at Browns shoe store and seeing how they fit in the flouroscope, X-ray machine.
Paying $100 for a caculator from Sears that was little better then a 4 function one.
Watching the moon landing live.
Getting a bicycle with a bannana seat. Rode that thing everywhere around town.
The first LED digital watches.
Going to the 5 and dime store.
Integrating the two high schools(black and white) into one.
Hooking up a huge roll of copper wire to make an antenna for a shortwave radio.
Getting to work on the first IBM XT computers at work. Writing a menu progam in basic for them. Calling the company we got the CAD software from to get the mouse ports so I could use the mouse in the menu. Getting the first IBM ATs in and saying damn, these are fast.
Riding the milk truck and having the driver lock you in the freezer because you were being a pain.
Mowing the yard with a reel mower.
Being on a phone party line.
Chatting on a beep line on the telephone. In this town if you got a busy line it would beep for awhile and then you would get a clear line. Other people that did the same thing could get the same line. It was like a early BBS. Spent way too much time on there also.

Dang, I'm feeling old now.

 

[Bostonboss]

My Commodore 64 in 1985, playing Zork and Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. Never could finish that game. Then a year or so later I was reading about AOL and wondering if I should buy stock in it. What a NON move I made there.

 

[Thump553]

My parents are about 80, I think their generation went through a whole lot more changes than any other generation. My uncles were literally farmboys from Ohio whose first real trips from home had such things as D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge for their destinations.

The absolute biggest change in my life was when the Berlin Wall came down, without nuclear winter. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that could actually happen.

Technologically, I've seen a number of things, but for day in, day out, I would say the invention of the facsimile machine. In the 70's a friend who was an attorney for the government showed me a machine in their office that could transmit documents at about ten minutes a page. Before that, there was only teletype.

Personally I think its the little changes, like fax machines, cell phones, remote controls, ATMs, longer-lasting, safer cars,etc., more than the so-called computer revolution. Computers and the internet still have a very long way to go.

Hambugerpimp: That is my current computer.

Russ: what is a &quot;hack room&quot;?

 

[Russ]

<< You built Heathkits? >>



Tiger,

Yep, my father and I used to build them together; a couple of color tvs, stereos, assorted radios, etc.



<< Russ: what is a &quot;hack room&quot;? >>



Thump,

Picture a wooden paddle about 2 feet long, 8 inches wide, with air holes drilled in it. Most of my school career, mine was the favorite practice ass.

Russ, NCNE