It’s hard to believe that there was a time before high-speed
Internet access, wi-fi, or even USB. Back then, the word "computer"
meant a big beige desktop box with a bulky CRT monitor - not a sleek notebook
- and being online means you’re tying up the phone line to the consternation
of your mom.
Here’s what I remember from the good ol’ days of computing:
IBM PC Compatible
The original IBM PC (Model 5150)
My first computer was an IBM PC, except it wasn’t made by IBM - it was
a Taiwanese clone, euphimistically called "IBM PC compatible"
or an "IBM clone". In the 1980s, IBM marketed the PC (or personal
computer) as a response to Apple’s products - to grab market share, IBM
decided on the open architecture and many manufacturers rushed their own
computer brands to the market.
My old PC compatible computer looked similar to the original IBM PC (Model
5150) shown above. It had a green CRT monitor and ran MS-DOS the operating
system. Sometimes when I turned the computer on by flipping the switch
at the back, I’d get a mild electric shock.
The two black squares in the front are floppy disk drives (A: and B:,
respectively) - if you ever wonder why your hard disk is called C:, that’s
because it comes after the two floppy drives. Even after the floppies
became obsolete, the hard disk is still called C: out of convention.
By the way, IBM PC was developed in a very short time by a "skunkworks"
project, called Project Chess, at IBM’s Boca Raton Florida facility,
led by Don Estridge and Larry Potter. The team of 12 engineers was authorized
by the company to bypass the usual (and lengthy) IBM design process and
get something to the market quickly. Within one year, the team managed
to use off-the-shelf components to build the first IBM PC.
Sadly, once the IBM PC became a commercial success, the company put it
under the usual IBM management, which decided to restrict the performance
of the computer as not to "cannibalize" profits from higher-priced
models. As a result, competitors selling PC clones quickly took over the
market.
Mystery House
Mystery House is the first computer game I ever played - in fact, it’s
the only thing I remember about our Apple II computer.
In the game, you are an uninvited guest locked inside a Victorian mansion
with no way out. Inside, there are seven guests and a note about a hidden
treasure. While exploring the house, you start finding dead bodies …
and you have to discover the murderer before becoming the next victim.
Mystery House was created by Ken Williams and his wife Roberta. It was
the first computer game ever to contain graphics. Before it, computer
games depended entirely on text to tell their stories. Ken coded the game
in a few nights and Roberta drew the graphics. The game caught on quickly
and became the most popular game for the Apple II computer, selling over
10,000 copies. Shortly afterwards, the Williams founded a gaming company
called On-Line Systems which would later become Sierra On-Line and then
Sierra Entertainment.
Links: Play along at SydLexia
Macintosh Classic
I
didn’t own a Mac until grad school, when I was forced to buy one to write
a thesis (blue iMac, btw) - but I did play mahjongg on my uncle’s old
Macintosh Classic (128K? I don’t remember…) when I was growing up.
It was so different than my PC at the time: the Macintosh had a graphical
interface and a mouse! I remember fondly the little mac icon that smiled
when you boot up the computer.
Floppy Disk
Before hard disks became affordable, we had floppy disks. They were called
floppy disks because, well, they were floppy… The 5.25 inch diskette
could hold - get this - 360 KB. Twice that if you punched a hole on the
left side of the disk and put it the drive in upside down. To protect
the disk from being re-written, all you have to do was put a sticker over
the notch and the disk drive wouldn’t write on it.
When the 3.5 inch disk came out, we all thought that it was so cool that
you could store 1.44 MB worth of files on the things. So much space, what
would we do with it all?
LOGO
Ah,
Logo - now that was a fun computer programming language!
Logo was the first programming language I’ve ever learned, and to this
day, the only one I like and probably the only one I was ever proficient
at. Well, at least in making simple shapes 
The language is all about the turtle, an on-screen cursor that you use
to draw simple line graphics. You can tell the turtle to go forward 100
units, then turn left or right, and so forth.
Dot Matrix Printer
Ah, the screeching sound of a dot matrix printer! There’s nothing like
it … One minute you’re printing (noisily), and the next minute the darned
paper got off the reel and suddenly you’re printing at an angle … before
the stupid printer jammed. But if everything worked out, then there’s
nothing as satisfying as ripping the little strips of "holey"
paper on the sides.
Never heard a dot matrix print before? Count your blessings, but if you’re
curious, here’s a YouTube clip:
If you remember dot matrix printer, you probably remember creating "Happy
Birthday" or some other silly banners with this iconic software that
had since gone the way of dinosaurs: Broderbund’s Print
Shop.
Dot matrix printers are actually still around - they’re now called "impact"
printers, and, surprisingly, are more expensive than ever!
Modem
Ever
heard a modem "handshake"? No? It’s just like a fax machine.
My first modem was a 2400 baud (240 characters per second!), and over
the years I upgraded to 9600-baud, then to 14.4K, then 28.8K and so on.
With every upgrade, I felt that the speed improvement was incredible!
How fast is a 9600 baud modem? Consider this: after 1 minute of downloading
at 9600 baud, you’ll get 72 KB. A cable modem can download that in less
than a second.
With modem comes connectivity, which brings us to to our next item:
Bulletin Board System (BBS)
Remember the Buggles’ song "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Well,
Bulletin Board System was the Radio Star, and Internet was the Video.
For all of you who are too young to remember BBSes, they are computer
systems that you dial in (with a phone line, and yes, you get the phone
bill at the end of the month if it’s not a local call) to connect. Once
you’ve connected to a BBS, you can do things like post messages, upload
and download software.
BBSes often have highly detailed ASCII art - some are black and white,
but others are in full color, like this one below:
Image: Carsten Cumbrowski aka Roy/SAC
This one is for an elite board (which traded in warez or pirated softwares)
with two nodes (2 phone lines) run on two Intel 80486 or simply "486"
computers with 8 MB of RAM and a (then unbelievably huge) storage of 1
GB. And no, I wasn’t cool enough to be invited into an elite board …
See Carsten’s website roysac.com
for an amazing collection of ASCII art.
Oh, and this invariably happened at least once to those who have dialed
into a BBS: your mom picked up the phone while you’re online and thus
disconnected you just seconds away from when the file was supposed to
finish downloading!
Prodigy
Before the web, there were Prodigy and CompuServe. They were premium
online services, much like a proto-Internet, except they provide proprietary
content (and were both heavily censored - more on that later). Of the
two, I subscribed to Prodigy, which was more kid-friendly (and cheaper
- CompuServe charged by the minute!).
I remember fondly perusing their message boards, which were very popular
at the time (what was I doing? Looking up NES cheat codes, actually!).
I cancelled the service because of heavy-handed censors who admonished
me for having the word "damn" in one of my posts. That was enough
to put me on their watch list and I got harrassed for innocent words like
"cockroach." When Prodigy went out of business because of the
Internet, I wasn’t sad.
Doom
Doom took the computer gaming world by a storm in 1993: It wasn’t the
first game in the FPS (or first person shooter) genre, but it was unique
that id Software, the creator of the game, marketed it by … giving it
away! Doom was distributed as a shareware that you could download and
play for free (once you’re hooked, you have to pay for subsequent versions).
Doom was so popular that during lunch times, computer networks in university
campuses sometime grind to a halt as people log on to play the game!
CompUSA
CompUSA store in Santa Clara, California. Photo: Coolcaesar [wikipedia]
You guys probably remember it as the retail chain that went out of business
a year ago, but I first remember them first as Soft Warehouse. I even
bought a 486 "Compudyne" computer (their house-brand) for college!
In an effort to restructure or rebrand or whatever, the company changed
its name to CompUSA but forgot to change their horrible customer service
… Their service was so bad that ultimately the once largest chain of
computer superstores in the world went out of business.
NCSA Mosaic
Before the Internet Explorer, and Firefox browsers, there was the NCSA
Mosaic. It was the first graphical web browser (which was an improvement
over the text-only Gopher and telnet protocols).
Mosaic was designed by Marc Andreessen (then an undergraduate) and Eric
Bina. Even though you may not be familiar with this browser, you’re viewing
this webpage on a browser that is its legacy.
We haven’t talked about many things - Amiga, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons),
IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and countless other topics. And obviously,
your trip down computing memory lane may be different than mine (and if
you’re young enough, none of these things above - perhaps with the exception
of CompUSA - are familiar). So, tell us what you remember - share your
computing memory lane!
--> Haberin devamını okumak için tıklayın(Click to Read Source)...
Take a Stroll Down Computing Memory Lane - 09 Haziran 2008 Pazartesi 16:20:22:142
It’s hard to believe that there was a time before high-speed
Internet access, wi-fi, or even USB. Back then, the word "computer"
meant a big beige desktop box with a bulky CRT monitor - not a sleek notebook
- and being online means you’re tying up the phone line to the consternation
of your mom.
Here’s what I remember from the good ol’ days of computing:
IBM PC Compatible
The original IBM PC (Model 5150)
My first computer was an IBM PC, except it wasn’t made by IBM - it was
a Taiwanese clone, euphimistically called "IBM PC compatible"
or an "IBM clone". In the 1980s, IBM marketed the PC (or personal
computer) as a response to Apple’s products - to grab market share, IBM
decided on the open architecture and many manufacturers rushed their own
computer brands to the market.
My old PC compatible computer looked similar to the original IBM PC (Model
5150) shown above. It had a green CRT monitor and ran MS-DOS the operating
system. Sometimes when I turned the computer on by flipping the switch
at the back, I’d get a mild electric shock.
The two black squares in the front are floppy disk drives (A: and B:,
respectively) - if you ever wonder why your hard disk is called C:, that’s
because it comes after the two floppy drives. Even after the floppies
became obsolete, the hard disk is still called C: out of convention.
By the way, IBM PC was developed in a very short time by a "skunkworks"
project, called Project Chess, at IBM’s Boca Raton Florida facility,
led by Don Estridge and Larry Potter. The team of 12 engineers was authorized
by the company to bypass the usual (and lengthy) IBM design process and
get something to the market quickly. Within one year, the team managed
to use off-the-shelf components to build the first IBM PC.
Sadly, once the IBM PC became a commercial success, the company put it
under the usual IBM management, which decided to restrict the performance
of the computer as not to "cannibalize" profits from higher-priced
models. As a result, competitors selling PC clones quickly took over the
market.
Mystery House
Mystery House is the first computer game I ever played - in fact, it’s
the only thing I remember about our Apple II computer.
In the game, you are an uninvited guest locked inside a Victorian mansion
with no way out. Inside, there are seven guests and a note about a hidden
treasure. While exploring the house, you start finding dead bodies …
and you have to discover the murderer before becoming the next victim.
Mystery House was created by Ken Williams and his wife Roberta. It was
the first computer game ever to contain graphics. Before it, computer
games depended entirely on text to tell their stories. Ken coded the game
in a few nights and Roberta drew the graphics. The game caught on quickly
and became the most popular game for the Apple II computer, selling over
10,000 copies. Shortly afterwards, the Williams founded a gaming company
called On-Line Systems which would later become Sierra On-Line and then
Sierra Entertainment.
Links: Play along at SydLexia
Macintosh Classic
I
didn’t own a Mac until grad school, when I was forced to buy one to write
a thesis (blue iMac, btw) - but I did play mahjongg on my uncle’s old
Macintosh Classic (128K? I don’t remember…) when I was growing up.
It was so different than my PC at the time: the Macintosh had a graphical
interface and a mouse! I remember fondly the little mac icon that smiled
when you boot up the computer.
Floppy Disk
Before hard disks became affordable, we had floppy disks. They were called
floppy disks because, well, they were floppy… The 5.25 inch diskette
could hold - get this - 360 KB. Twice that if you punched a hole on the
left side of the disk and put it the drive in upside down. To protect
the disk from being re-written, all you have to do was put a sticker over
the notch and the disk drive wouldn’t write on it.
When the 3.5 inch disk came out, we all thought that it was so cool that
you could store 1.44 MB worth of files on the things. So much space, what
would we do with it all?
LOGO
Ah,
Logo - now that was a fun computer programming language!
Logo was the first programming language I’ve ever learned, and to this
day, the only one I like and probably the only one I was ever proficient
at. Well, at least in making simple shapes
The language is all about the turtle, an on-screen cursor that you use
to draw simple line graphics. You can tell the turtle to go forward 100
units, then turn left or right, and so forth.
Dot Matrix Printer
Ah, the screeching sound of a dot matrix printer! There’s nothing like
it … One minute you’re printing (noisily), and the next minute the darned
paper got off the reel and suddenly you’re printing at an angle … before
the stupid printer jammed. But if everything worked out, then there’s
nothing as satisfying as ripping the little strips of "holey"
paper on the sides.
Never heard a dot matrix print before? Count your blessings, but if you’re
curious, here’s a YouTube clip:
If you remember dot matrix printer, you probably remember creating "Happy
Birthday" or some other silly banners with this iconic software that
had since gone the way of dinosaurs: Broderbund’s Print
Shop.
Dot matrix printers are actually still around - they’re now called "impact"
printers, and, surprisingly, are more expensive than ever!
Modem
Ever
heard a modem "handshake"? No? It’s just like a fax machine.
My first modem was a 2400 baud (240 characters per second!), and over
the years I upgraded to 9600-baud, then to 14.4K, then 28.8K and so on.
With every upgrade, I felt that the speed improvement was incredible!
How fast is a 9600 baud modem? Consider this: after 1 minute of downloading
at 9600 baud, you’ll get 72 KB. A cable modem can download that in less
than a second.
With modem comes connectivity, which brings us to to our next item:
Bulletin Board System (BBS)
Remember the Buggles’ song "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Well,
Bulletin Board System was the Radio Star, and Internet was the Video.
For all of you who are too young to remember BBSes, they are computer
systems that you dial in (with a phone line, and yes, you get the phone
bill at the end of the month if it’s not a local call) to connect. Once
you’ve connected to a BBS, you can do things like post messages, upload
and download software.
BBSes often have highly detailed ASCII art - some are black and white,
but others are in full color, like this one below:
Image: Carsten Cumbrowski aka Roy/SAC
This one is for an elite board (which traded in warez or pirated softwares)
with two nodes (2 phone lines) run on two Intel 80486 or simply "486"
computers with 8 MB of RAM and a (then unbelievably huge) storage of 1
GB. And no, I wasn’t cool enough to be invited into an elite board …
See Carsten’s website roysac.com
for an amazing collection of ASCII art.
Oh, and this invariably happened at least once to those who have dialed
into a BBS: your mom picked up the phone while you’re online and thus
disconnected you just seconds away from when the file was supposed to
finish downloading!
Prodigy
Before the web, there were Prodigy and CompuServe. They were premium
online services, much like a proto-Internet, except they provide proprietary
content (and were both heavily censored - more on that later). Of the
two, I subscribed to Prodigy, which was more kid-friendly (and cheaper
- CompuServe charged by the minute!).
I remember fondly perusing their message boards, which were very popular
at the time (what was I doing? Looking up NES cheat codes, actually!).
I cancelled the service because of heavy-handed censors who admonished
me for having the word "damn" in one of my posts. That was enough
to put me on their watch list and I got harrassed for innocent words like
"cockroach." When Prodigy went out of business because of the
Internet, I wasn’t sad.
Doom
Doom took the computer gaming world by a storm in 1993: It wasn’t the
first game in the FPS (or first person shooter) genre, but it was unique
that id Software, the creator of the game, marketed it by … giving it
away! Doom was distributed as a shareware that you could download and
play for free (once you’re hooked, you have to pay for subsequent versions).
Doom was so popular that during lunch times, computer networks in university
campuses sometime grind to a halt as people log on to play the game!
CompUSA
CompUSA store in Santa Clara, California. Photo: Coolcaesar [wikipedia]
You guys probably remember it as the retail chain that went out of business
a year ago, but I first remember them first as Soft Warehouse. I even
bought a 486 "Compudyne" computer (their house-brand) for college!
In an effort to restructure or rebrand or whatever, the company changed
its name to CompUSA but forgot to change their horrible customer service
… Their service was so bad that ultimately the once largest chain of
computer superstores in the world went out of business.
NCSA Mosaic
Before the Internet Explorer, and Firefox browsers, there was the NCSA
Mosaic. It was the first graphical web browser (which was an improvement
over the text-only Gopher and telnet protocols).
Mosaic was designed by Marc Andreessen (then an undergraduate) and Eric
Bina. Even though you may not be familiar with this browser, you’re viewing
this webpage on a browser that is its legacy.
We haven’t talked about many things - Amiga, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons),
IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and countless other topics. And obviously,
your trip down computing memory lane may be different than mine (and if
you’re young enough, none of these things above - perhaps with the exception
of CompUSA - are familiar). So, tell us what you remember - share your
computing memory lane!
--> Haberin devamını okumak için tıklayın(Click to Read Source)...
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