SimonPeters116
Enthusiast
In replying to a comment in the Incoming thread, I inadvertently started dragging it off topic. So I've opened this one.
What has been involved in your computing journey??
I'll start by re-posting my original:-
The computer I'm using now, I built it originally and upgraded it. The one before was the same. The one before that was built by my local computer shop, then upgraded by me later. The one before that was the same.
I still have a set of 3.5" floppy discs, with DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1 on, I don't remember the specs of the first computer that was installed on. I do remember being excited at buying an Intel 386 cpu, and there was a turbo mode 😮 😆
Before any of those I had a Commodore 64, with cassette drive. You used to buy books of games, yes I said BOOKS. They had C+ code for the games printed in them, 10 - 15 games in a book. You had to transcribe the code and save it onto cassette, then load the game. They rarely worked. So I used to print them off on my daisy wheel printer, check them against the book line by line, to make sure I hadn't misplaced a dot or space etc. Then I'd break it down, rewrite it so the nested if-thens were in the correct order, etc and make them work. Load them, they became playable eventually, but they were really, really __________ <Fill in your own expletive here. I gave up after a few games. Learning C+ was fun, but when all the hard work resulted in junk I got bored. (I think it was C+, could've been C++, it was a long time ago)
I also remember going into Edinburgh, to a big computer peripherals shop, to buy a modem card. This was then installed into a slot on my motherboard. I'd started looking under the bonnet
Suddenly we had INTERNET
It was dial-up internet, @ something like 514kb/sec (514 rings a bell, but I'm not sure).
It was connected directly to the phone line, one or the other, not both, if you only had 1 phone line coming into the house. Most people did.
At the time, everyone was giving away internet packages on disc. AOL was a BIG player, Tesco had their own branded package, Freeserve was the one I went for. If you were sensible, ie Scottish and "careful with your money", you had your dial-up internet provider on your "friends" list with BT. Using internet in the evenings and weekends only would be 1p (£0.01) per minute. After installing the software, unplugging your phone and plugging in your computer, there it was, The Internet. Not forgetting the 'Dial-Up handshake', which is what you still get if you dial up a fax machine on your phone, but this was both sides of the handshake.
**** on tap 😲, but downloading a photo took a few minutes, you could watch the picture coming in, pixel by pixel, line by line.
Forums (Fora?) like this one were still in the future, but they were already on the horizon. We had special interest chat-rooms, (not called chat-rooms, but I can't bring it to mind). There would be a huge range of computer chat-rooms, like PCSpecialist, Radio hams, Tuning Ford Escorts, Trucking. Every subject you can think of, and probably more than a few you'd rather not. You could now chat with people who shared the same interest, all over The World, for a penny a minute. Amazing
And then Broadband, and personal internet exploded into the WWW as we now know it.
It had been knocking along quite happily at dial-up speeds, slowly expanding, but everyone wanted faster. With broadband, we got it
What has been involved in your computing journey??
I'll start by re-posting my original:-
The computer I'm using now, I built it originally and upgraded it. The one before was the same. The one before that was built by my local computer shop, then upgraded by me later. The one before that was the same.
I still have a set of 3.5" floppy discs, with DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1 on, I don't remember the specs of the first computer that was installed on. I do remember being excited at buying an Intel 386 cpu, and there was a turbo mode 😮 😆
Before any of those I had a Commodore 64, with cassette drive. You used to buy books of games, yes I said BOOKS. They had C+ code for the games printed in them, 10 - 15 games in a book. You had to transcribe the code and save it onto cassette, then load the game. They rarely worked. So I used to print them off on my daisy wheel printer, check them against the book line by line, to make sure I hadn't misplaced a dot or space etc. Then I'd break it down, rewrite it so the nested if-thens were in the correct order, etc and make them work. Load them, they became playable eventually, but they were really, really __________ <Fill in your own expletive here. I gave up after a few games. Learning C+ was fun, but when all the hard work resulted in junk I got bored. (I think it was C+, could've been C++, it was a long time ago)
I also remember going into Edinburgh, to a big computer peripherals shop, to buy a modem card. This was then installed into a slot on my motherboard. I'd started looking under the bonnet
Suddenly we had INTERNET
It was dial-up internet, @ something like 514kb/sec (514 rings a bell, but I'm not sure).
It was connected directly to the phone line, one or the other, not both, if you only had 1 phone line coming into the house. Most people did.
At the time, everyone was giving away internet packages on disc. AOL was a BIG player, Tesco had their own branded package, Freeserve was the one I went for. If you were sensible, ie Scottish and "careful with your money", you had your dial-up internet provider on your "friends" list with BT. Using internet in the evenings and weekends only would be 1p (£0.01) per minute. After installing the software, unplugging your phone and plugging in your computer, there it was, The Internet. Not forgetting the 'Dial-Up handshake', which is what you still get if you dial up a fax machine on your phone, but this was both sides of the handshake.
**** on tap 😲, but downloading a photo took a few minutes, you could watch the picture coming in, pixel by pixel, line by line.
Forums (Fora?) like this one were still in the future, but they were already on the horizon. We had special interest chat-rooms, (not called chat-rooms, but I can't bring it to mind). There would be a huge range of computer chat-rooms, like PCSpecialist, Radio hams, Tuning Ford Escorts, Trucking. Every subject you can think of, and probably more than a few you'd rather not. You could now chat with people who shared the same interest, all over The World, for a penny a minute. Amazing
And then Broadband, and personal internet exploded into the WWW as we now know it.
It had been knocking along quite happily at dial-up speeds, slowly expanding, but everyone wanted faster. With broadband, we got it
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