[migz123]

It is unimaginable to think nowadays that there was once a time when computers had no hard drives - if you wanted to use a Word Processor, you had to MANUALLY load it everytime with a bunch of huge and real floppy discs!! There was no mouse, so you had to TYPE in every command. If you didn't know the commands, you would have had to buy a book costing $100+ that would tell you how to do it. A 12" monitor was called "jumbo screen!" What was cool about it was that when you turned the computer on, it would boot up faster than the monitor would. But the only thing you would see is a blank screen and a flashing cursor though :shock:

Another sign of the times: Not too long ago, my daughter, 12 years old said "Daddy -- you used to have a funny car."

"Why?" I said

"Remember your white car?"

"Ya ... " (recalling my beloved '89 VW GTI)

"You had to use your arms to roll the windows"

":shock:"

Go ahead, post about the funny past!

 

[pauljo]

Ya know, these new fuel injected Suzuki's don't have a choke lever - they don't even have a fuel petcock (little three position lever with On-Off-Reserve settings for the fuel feed). There is absolutely no challenge to starting one. Well, I guess with the scooter you do have to remember to have the kickstand up and squeeze a brake lever - the V-Strom doesn't even require those little details.

Ever own a kick start single cylinder street bike? I'm talking about kick start only - no electric starter at all. I had two. Now those were a worthy challenge to start. For my 1980 Suzuki GN400 single, you had to twist the fuel petcock to the 'On' position, turn the ignition key, set the choke, swing out the starter lever and crank it gently until you felt resistance from the piston reaching the top-dead-center position of the compression cycle, squeeze the compression release lever on the handlebar, then jump on the starter lever. If you got everything just right, it would start.
If not, then perhaps try a little different choke setting, reposition the cylinder, squeeze the compression release, and kick again. The tricky part was the choke. If the bike was dead cold, pull it all the way out. If the bike was fully warmed up and had just been turned off for a few minutes - no choke. But if it was partially warmed up, you had to guess - somewhere in the middle would work (probably).

The worst thing was if you accidentally stalled it, partially warmed up, in traffic, with a passenger on the back. The pressure was on, 'cause the car behind you was already honking its horn... :twisted: Now you had to have the passenger get off so you could fold up the passenger foot peg and fold out the starter lever. You had to go through that starting drill, hoping that you set the choke to the proper partially open position. Once started, the passenger had to remount the bike.

Then there was the time when I kicked, and kicked, and kicked... without so much as a single pop from the engine. Somewhat exhausted, I finally noticed that I must have inadvertently hit the kill switch on the handlebar, switching it to the Off position. Arrghh!

My first motorcycle, an ancient Ducati single, did not have a compression release lever like the Suzuki. That make it harder to kick over. And it would occasionally backfire when attempting to start it, which would result in the kickstart lever being thrown back upward with great force, darn near breaking my foot in the process. Ouch!

Ahh... The good old days... :?

 

[billmeek]

It is unimaginable to think nowadays that there was once a time when computers had no hard drives - if you wanted to use a Word Processor, you had to MANUALLY load it everytime with a bunch of huge and real floppy discs!! There was no mouse, so you had to TYPE in every command. If you didn't know the commands, you would have had to buy a book costing $100+ that would tell you how to do it. A 12" monitor was called "jumbo screen!" What was cool about it was that when you turned the computer on, it would boot up faster than the monitor would. But the only thing you would see is a blank screen and a flashing cursor though :shock:

My first computer not only did not have a hard drive, it didn't have a floppy either. It was 3 months after I bought the computer, a '82 Tandy Radio Shack model III, that the cassette drive was available to store programs. The only option I had to keep a program (manually typed in) was to leave the power on and hope for no power outages.

I just bought a off-lease ultralight Dell laptop (700 mhz, 10 gig hdd, 256 meg mem, 24x CDRW) from Dell on ebay for $505. That is less than my first 10 meg (NOT gig) hdd cost ... and weighs less too.

Bill

 

[abm]

lucille?

" I hear your'e having problems with your computer lucy, can I help.?"

Oh, Alan, I dont know what's wrong, this is not like the wang system I used to know.

" SO whats the problem?"

I cant make the little arrow move around .....

" You have your mouse plugged in...."

what's a mouse?

"I'll be right there"

See, Im steppin on the pedal and it still doesnt work !!!

" Lucy that's not a foot pedal, that's a mouse...you move it with your hand to point to things on the desktop. "

(She looks at her real desktop, ya know the desk.....the furniture desk...)

""no lucy the computer desktop on the screen with the icons"

Alan, she says, what does religion have to do with these computers.


(She was a devout Orthodox Christian , and they revere iconography of the saints.)

"Lucy, we might have to start from the begining here, today's computers are not like the ones you used to know in the 1900's."

 

[billmeek]

Re: lucille?

See, Im steppin on the pedal and it still doesnt work !!!

" Lucy that's not a foot pedal, that's a mouse...you move it with your hand to point to things on the desktop. "

What's so really funny about this is I work in tech support for a large computer company (rhymes with Hell) and have actually had a lady call in because her "footpedal" no longer worked. This woman had been surfing the web for 4 months using just the keyboard.

Bill

 

[migz123]

Everything I do now has some sort of connection to the internet. Everything. Be it a little research, communication, heck even my business is net based.

Even down to the most mundane things, like just getting a dog tag for my dog -- I went through the net. I found a real cool one too, and at a great price. Three days later, it was at my door.

I find myself thinking once in a while -- how the heck did I survive the past without the net? :shock:

 

[Tassieburger]

Yes, I know this is a REALLY old thread, but I had nothing else to do (I suppose I'm meant to be sleeping).

One day I was discussing endangered species and so on with my six year old son. He had read how lots of animals were in danger of going extinct. I told him lots of animals had already gone extinct since I was his age. His reply- You mean like dinosaurs and things?
Gee, thanks, son. :shock:

 

[flintbobbi]

oh that is funny!

 

[4DThinker]

I'm in that age group where our first computers had cassette tape players or cartridges to load programs with. You didn't really need anything to save files on because no one had created a wordprocessor yet. My PC was a Texas Instruments 99/4A or something like that. I tell my college students this story and most don't believe it, or wonder what a "cassette tape player" is anyway. They all have MP3 players or phones that store and play music files now.

5.25" Floppy drives showed up within a year of buying that 99/4A, but one needed the periferal interface box, about desktop CPU size, to hold the Parallel Printer Port, Drive controller, and the internal floppy drive. It was the first word processing and for some the early spreadsheet programs, that forced us all to get into floppys.

My newest computer has no removeable floppy media drive. There are slots for every type of digital memory card, though, and both CD and DVD burners. Times have changed. I see HDTV capacity DVD disks on the near horizon. I hope, if it hasn't happened already, that new digital cameras will send their pictures to my computer or printer or TV wirelessly. I'd also like to see completely wireless OLED monitors. Perhaps they'll get to be so efficient that can be run from the light energy in the room. Their image can come via blue-tooth from the PC embedded in the top of your desk.

 

[Selias]

Yuppers, I grew up in tube technology and transgressed to solid state.
I thought 8-track was awesome!
My first computer was my PET (CBM = Commodore Business Machines, later known just as Commodore). I then owned a VIC-20, a few C-64's and onto the Amiga. The PET and VIC-20 had cassette tape (datasettes) and so did the C-64's (unless you paid a few hundred dollars for a 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies). The Amiga you had to swap 3.5" floppies. We used to think a harddrive was totally unnecessary. let alone the fact it was unavailable until the mid-80's. At our high school we used TTY's (teletypewriters). You know the ones you had to push the keys down 3/4" to type a character? They used paper punch tape to save a program and we all walked around with rolls of tape in our pockets for our 1K-4K programs (4K was a tape-roll about 4" in diameter). and we connected to the school district's main frame using acoustic modems (plug handset into foam) at 110 baud. Speedy demons we were. Shortly after that we moved into the jet age of 300 baud. We didn't see much faster until the 80's (2400 and upwards to 9600) and it was just around 1990 we finally broke the sound barrier to 14.4K baud! I found the 16 bit Amiga a better machine (compared to the 8 bit XT's with their amber screen or green screens). I had millions of colors, sound, ray-tracing and so much the IBM machines could not offer, all run by seperate chips rather than task-swapped off the CPU. We even produced TV commercials with graphic swipes and animations (including morphs) back in the late 80's! The video Toaster was the cat's meow and the Amiga was the Premiere gaming and developement platform (before Gould and Ali 'went south' with the cash). The 90's saw 28.8K baud for most of the decade and we finally hit the peak of 56K baud close to the turn of the century. Other than T1's the only high speed internet was ISDN (56Kx2 - 2 pairs) and only the extremely rich or businesses saw those.
I was fortunate enough to rent a room from a tech support person for an ISP in the mid-late 90's (in Las vegas) who had ISDN and shared the connection with them.
Oh, forgot to mention we used BBS' back then (80's into the 90's) as the only 'internet' that existed was CompuServe and you paid around $10/hour to /go to areas of interest to read topics. When 'internet' started appearing in the early 90's it was html text pages, pine (text processor for mail), archie/veronica and reggie to search for FTP sites to download a file you wanted and shell accounts. Soon afterwards (around 1992-1993) IRC (Internet Relay Chat) appeared and it was a mess of servers using different software ('Over'Net, Undernet, etc. etc.). I spent a great deal of time on IRC back in the early to late 90's (when I was VegasStu rather than TexasStu). I found IRC to be a great release for me after working in the casinos all evening/weekend. Chatrooms are now so commonplace it's not funny, AOL (who used to charge per minute) took the idea and developed their own internet world, largely restricting any access to the 'real' internet (or any applications that when beyond their controlling domain). Many think that AOL invented chat rooms. LOL

 

[Brewman]

Who remembers having to get up and touch the TV to change the station?

Growing up, having the pliers was the same as having the remote is today.
The tuning knob broke off, and dad wasn't about to spend the few dollars for a new knob.

And you had to put balls of tinfoil on the end of the rabbit ears.
Not sure it helped, but everyone did it.

 

[Ken OBSC]

Yes, I know this is a REALLY old thread, but I had nothing else to do (I suppose I'm meant to be sleeping).

One day I was discussing endangered species and so on with my six year old son. He had read how lots of animals were in danger of going extinct. I told him lots of animals had already gone extinct since I was his age. His reply- You mean like dinosaurs and things?
Gee, thanks, son. :shock:

Little Boy minds seem to work in the same way.

When my 38 year old son was 4 or 5 he once asked my wife: "Mommy, when you were a little girl and dinosaurs roamed the earth......"

I never heard the end of the question I was laughing so hard.

Now, my wife complains that she's never heard the end of the this because I repeat it any chance I get. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[Selias]

We never had a remote until cable boxes had the 25' cord with the 40 switch remote box. Remember those? "Hand me the remote" entailed talking it off the top of the TV and untangling it from around the TV.
Oh, and I can totally relate to the needlenose remote! LOL

 

[Ken OBSC]

My first computer experience was punching cards to get my data into the FSU IBM 1600. You dropped the stack of cards through a slot and some guys wearing white lab coats (true) would pick them up and disappear into the COMPUTER ROOM and when you came back the next day your stack of cards was wrapped in hundreds of sheets of green-bar paper.

My own first computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 with 2K RAM. I made a major investment of about $49 to get the 16K RamPack. I wrote and sold 60+ room Adventure games in 16K of BASIC.

I demo'ed a 25 x 25 cell spreadsheet program to the Engineering College and the university president.

I thought I was the cat's ass when I got a Sinclair QL, tacked on a "whole" half-Meg Ram, and made up my own 7.5" Quad Density dual drive storage system using components bought from Computer Shopper magazine. Those disks could hold (sit down) 700Kb per side. Yup, 1.4 megs of storage!!

I wrote a database program that eventually kept all data on my mailorder customers, did my billing, invoicing, accounts receivable reports, inventory, and printed weekly re-order forms.

I also did free-lance writing for computer magazines reviewing hardware and software. I did the review of the much bally-hooed Commodore 64 "Portable", or luggable for Popular Computing magazine. This 30pound suitcase computer had a huge 4" screen.
:lol: :lol:

Ah, the joys of (16K) memory lane.....

 

[january14]

Wow.. You people are really old. :lol:

I seem to recall the first time I put Gasoline into an automobile I was driving. There was a Gas War on at the time and the station I chose to fillup was where the family always filled up.

The price of that Gasoline was 29.9 Cents.

One of my first real jobs was a a computer Operator. The first machine I worked on did not have a console or a teletype attached to it. It had no disks and used a Card Reader to load the job that was being run. The first thing it had to do was load the Program from Tape (the Reel to Reel kind of tape), and then it would start processing the data, which sometimes was on IBM Punch Cards. If the program ran fine, you were presented with a series of lights (your most basic Binary), which when matched against the pattern in the "run Book", would tell you if the program was successful or not. I believe that computer had a whopping 4 K of memory. The printer for it was as big as an Executive Desk + a smaller Secretarial Desk. The computer itself was the size of two Executive Desks side by side. The tape drives were around 3 feet wide and 5 feet tall. They were Vacuum pumped (as opposed to the more modern Spring Loaded). The Card reader itself was about half the size of a VW.

**** thing really filled a room.

The good Ole' Days of computing.

Joe

 

[pauljo]

OK. Anyone remember when your car radio stopped working & you would pull all the tubes out of it that looked dim, take them up to the corner drugstore and plug them into their tube testing machine? Once you identified the bad tube(s), you bought replacements right there. And you could reward yourself with an ice cream soda at their soda fountain!

Marge worked behind the soda fountain at the nearest corner drugstore. Older gal (thirty-ish), brunette, long legs, short skirts - and she drove a white 1964 GTO convertible with a blue top. OK, it was an automatic, not 4 on the floor. But she was hot! Lotsa teen age boys buying ice cream sodas when that GTO was parked outside!

Funny. Some days I am challenged to remember my own phone number. But I remember Marge. :lol:

 

[Selias]

AH the nostalgia of it all.. batch systems, penny candies, cherry cokes and ice cream malts, tube testers, dime stores, saturday matinees, drive in resturants, drive in theatres, LPs and quality family time watching the wonderful world of disney right after mutual of omaha's wild kingdom.
I used to think the tube testers had the most-position switches of any contraption ever made and you'd get dizzy if you looked at all the sockets at once for too long a time. LOL

 

[january14]

I had forgotten all about the tube testing machines. I was just a little kid then, but I remember looking at them and wondering what it would take to make one work.

And, Wild Kingdom... Watched it every week, Until the show where Marlin and Jim tried to wrestle that huge ass snake when they were knee deep in water somewhere in South America, I think. Just thinking about it now gives me chill bumps.

I was always shocked that they didn't die on that show.

(I am not a fan of snakes)

Joe

 

[Brewman]

I used to work for a subsidiary of Mutual Of Omaha, and we had to watch that show every week or we'd get fired. Ok, I made that part up, but I do remember watching that show. Toward the end, Marlin just sat in the jeep watching Jim wrestle the deadly creatures.
Overall, I enjoyed the show. I associated it with Saturday TV.

Remeber the Wild World of Sports, too. I can still visualize that agony of defeat ski jumper. (OUCH!)

 

[Pinwheel]

dang y'all are old. LMAO

I'm just kidding!!!!

My dad tells me stories about how a soda use to cost a nickel and all that. I think it's neat.
Once my boy gets older and we are paying $5+ for gas, I can tell him....when I started driving, gas was only 89 cents a gallon.