those were the days...

 

Hi,

I was there with my modem and living in fear of my dad when the phone bill arrived.  1200 bps, text interfaces and some file areas to download from.  Now at home 200Mbps on fibre, with everything you could imagine a click away (for bad and good).

But of course apps use 1000x more bandwidth.

After using my modem to access BBS systems all around I got into Fidonet which eventually got me into my career in the Internet world. So I guess for my parents the investment in the phone bill helped get me independent and off their hands in the end!

In your clip the presentation style is also so dated!  So very serious.

 

Edited December 20, 20187 yr by Elbow

Say what?

 

As far as I remember from my young l33t hax0r days in the 80's you got charged per call, so assuming no-one picked up the phone (bane of my existence late 80s/early 90's @ home), then you were golden.

2 hours ago, Elbow said:

for bad and good

Now that you mention it... I heard something funny the other day. There have now been several cases of men who essentially have ED because of overexposure to porn (this is not the point of the story, it's part of a funny outcome that comes later). Apparently some boys get addicted to this stuff as young as 14 and by the time they get sexually active a real woman just doesn't measure up. So it turns out that you can cure this... if you get off the porn, then in time your ability to perform returns. However they noticed a curious difference in the recovery times between younger and older guys: The older guys recovered MUCH quicker. The reason: Broadband internet. The older guys got addicted when the speeds were low, so the click-dopamine cycle was a lot longer than for the younger guys!

:-)

Edited December 20, 20187 yr by plonkster

In my days we didn't have porn, you had to wait 10 minutes for a low rez image to download.    Or borrow someones Scope magazine, with the nipples artfully airbrushed out, or later on, stars..

Or giggle at the lasciviousness of leisure suit larry 1 in 2 or 3 color's, purple and white, and black?  

Dating myself here 🤣

Edited December 20, 20187 yr by shanghailoz

6 minutes ago, shanghailoz said:

you had to wait 10 minutes for a low rez image to download

Some guys I knew at Uni would harvest the caches of lab computers for porn. The cost for data was quite high at the time, and many of us even browsed with image loading disabled in the browser.

Edited December 20, 20187 yr by plonkster

In completely unrelated news, I heard banging outside. I live rural, so went to look, and it was guinea fowl attacking their reflection in my car door!

Shoo'd the bastards away.

Only in africa haha!

Also get baboon's, and other assorted wildlife, but so far they haven't gone for the car!

1 hour ago, shanghailoz said:

As far as I remember from my young l33t hax0r days in the 80's you got charged per call, so assuming no-one picked up the phone (bane of my existence late 80s/early 90's @ home), then you were golden.

Yeah, except when you thought it would be more interesting to dial into a bbs in Joburg or overseas.... 

 

in the  80s you got the complete ms word on three 3.5" floppies, i was in government and max allowed pc storage was 10mb with a 16 colour rgb display - you really were a big shot with a 80286 then.... apart from the mainframe guys that is

enjoy the attached!

dial up.mp3

Edited December 20, 20187 yr by gabriel

1 hour ago, gabriel said:

ms word on three 3.5" floppies

That would have been the late 80s. Early 80s we were running Quill, Abacus (Psion software), Wordstar, WordPerfect. There were some mention-worthy products like Geoworks (complete suite, worked fine on a 286, but you needed a 386 to run Windows at the time. Then suddenly Microsoft just took over everything. Everyone wanted Word (even though it sucked compared to WordStar 6.0), and nothing fit on a single floppy anymore.

 

That dial up clip brought back some memories. Man, THOSE where the days ... bleeding edge every day!

286 was like WOW, the 386 ... now you're cooking.

And lest we forget ... 

8 hours ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

And lest we forget ... 

wow, win8.1 on floppies... that must be photoshopped, not?

Floppy disks only had 1.44MB of storage so you would need about 2,307 floppies for Windows 8 ??

Edited December 21, 20187 yr by gabriel

23 minutes ago, gabriel said:

wow, win8.1 on floppies... that must be photoshopped, not?

WWW says it is fake, for it would take 3711. :-)

And that was stiffies. 360 the first, the upgrade to 720, then again to 1.44 newer and 2.88 the last I saw.

Floppies, whole new ballgame.

 

 

One of my servers (just a file sharing machine now) is still NT 4 Server, and I still have the original disks

Also have Windows 3.11 on 1.44 Floppies/Stiffy in my cupboard - Still Sealed original

Still feel old, my first PC/Programming was on a ZX80, plugged into TV and with 1kb expansion box

15 minutes ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

stiffies

 

15 minutes ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

Floppies

Try explaining to your wife why the floppy was larger than the stiffie.

(Technically they were both floppies, the one just had a hard case... but in local lingo we called it a stiffie).

1 hour ago, KLEVA said:

Still Sealed original

auction them here 

1 hour ago, plonkster said:

Try explaining to your wife why the floppy was larger than the stiffie.

when i told her about the 3.5" floppies she said "you mean the stiffies..." - what can say 

On 2018/12/20 at 7:54 AM, gabriel said:

those were the days...

 

man! Those were the days! Did you record the software they sent?