I was reminiscing the other day - the way that old men do... (I turned 40 in July) My nostalgia trip took me to computers. Remembering my first computer - a Franklin PC compatible thing with dual 360K floppy drives and a CGA "color" monitor. No mouse, no modem, no Ethernet NIC... No Internet. How boring. It was an 8088, with 512K of RAM. I learned to use DOS 3.3, and could make that OS sing.
Eventually, I BOUGHT a new computer -- a 386sx with a VGA monitor, and the upgrading began.
I used to read a magazine called Computer Shopper, which I don't think exists any more. It was the ultimate computer magazine for hobbyists. It was about 2" thick, and was about 40 pages of articles and about 400 pages of ads from computer companies that sold either complete systems or parts. Oh, what parts!
It was like being a kid with the Sears Wish Book - I recall poring over the newsprint pages, dog-earing the pages of companies where I could get something for $4 less than some other place. It was crazy - ordering parts from 7 different companies and then (before being able to track shipments online) trying to be patient whilst waiting for the packages to arrive.
You could tell what was going on if I was walking down the hall with "Shopper" tucked under my arm. Somebody'd better light a match.
I remember buying used a 1200 baud modem to get online on BBS's. Paid probably $100 for it. Nothing like the screech of the modem as you connected up at a blazing 12oo baud. Eventually, I ended up running a BBS called "The Circuit Board" in Corpus Christi, Tx. Max speed 14.4kbps, running on a Practical Peripherals modem. Ah, good times. I learned to program a bit in C, got the source code and modded the board to meet my needs. I had fun with it for a few years, until it turned into a job, at which point, I stopped doing it. Most of my users ended up being little 15 year old anarchists and people looking to leech porn pics, which I didn't offer up on the BBS.
The hobbyist in me began to die out, and I wanted to actually use my computer without having to wait for a BBS user to hang up. There was that wonderful F9 key that simulated line noise and dropped the connection.
Eventually, when I was attending classes at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, (or it may have been Corpus Christi State University at the time) I was given a shell account on a DEC Alpha, and the ability to get on the internet. Oh. My. God. What a cornucopia of access that presented to me. I learned to use Lynx to "surf" the web. All in Text. I thought that was so ultimately cool.
I would someday like to present Lynx to a "power" user here at work and see what they can do with it. I was really intrigued by this new "net" thingy. I guess this is before I knew it was the intarwebs.
Not sure what the first time I encountered a true graphical web browser was, but it was at work - using Netscape, and Chameleon TCP/IP on probably a Windows For Workgroups machine. How fun. It took 2 of us to get it to work. We didn't know ANYTHING about TCP/IP - being a Novell shop. If it were IPX or SPX, it would have taken me 4 minutes. We had a fractional T-1 running at 56K. It was SO FAST. When I left we had a 10 meg pipe.
-more later-
