1981 primitive Internet report on KRON

[Swede]

It'll never catch on,I tell ya.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQ

[NewJeffCT]

1. I know, why go to your home computer for $10

when you can go across the street and buy a paper for 25 cents?

[slackmaster]

2. Wonderful!

Thanks for posting this.

[RC]

3. You're right. 'sides how many have the expertise to operate a computer?

It'll never catch on.

[ddeclue]

4. Trash 80 Model I keeps getting shown in the piece...

I used one of those back then...

Didn't get the paper though...

I also loved the rotary dial phones...

:rofl:

STILL not the most primitive computer I ever used...

I started on a PDP-8E with a teletype terminal back in 1978. We loaded programs in off of paper tape.

[Jackpine Radical]

8. IBM 1620 in 1964.

[ddeclue]

12. MAN you're old!!! ...just kidding...

:rofl:

I wasn't even born until 1966 so you've got me beat but I still came along with the very first wave of "microcomputer" hobbyists when the PET, the Altair, etc. were first coming out and I even pre-dated them since PDP8 was actually a mini from DEC, not one of the new home brews.

It was right about the same time that I got started that the first Apples were being sold (for about $1300.00 at the time which would be more like five or six grand today if adjusted for inflation..)

The Apple II's, Trash 80 Model I's, and Atari 400's were second generation.

C64's, Trash 80 Model III's, Atari 800's, TI-99's and IBMC PC's were third generation.

C128's, Amiga's, Trash Coco's, and 512's, PC-XT's and Apple Lisa were fourth generation.

Fifth Generation were the first Mac's, and clone PC's based on at least 286 chipsets.

After that the market pretty much reduced to x86 vs. MacIntosh 68000 where it remained for a long time.

After that the Mac's switched to PowerPC and then finally every thing is Intel based but it's still Mac vs. the traditional x86 Windows boxes and now it is more about O/S's than H/W.

I think the next major step will be the traditional windows box companies migrating away from Micro-Borg OS into open source O/S's like FreeBSD, Fedora, OpenSun, etc.


Doug D.

[Jackpine Radical]

14. I learned BASIC on a Trash-80 & got a little 1K Sinclair to play with.

Then an Osborne (all z80 machines), then an IBM Convertible 8088 w 512K RAM, then on to an endless succession of 286, 386, 486, pentia, etc. I'm writing this on a Macbook & also have a Lenovo core-2 duo XP machine for the things I can't run on the Mac. I'm working to convert entirely to the Mac eventually. I might make it by the time I can afford to retire.

[hunter]

10. Paper tape and punched cards were wonderfully satisfying.

I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because when you were writing code you were actually making something you could hold in your hands. Or maybe there was a "popping bubblewrap" quality to it.

[ddeclue]

13. Suprisingly I never did Hollerith cards...

I went straight from paper tape to 8" single sided low density floppy in 1979 or 1980.

I then had to take a step backwards (or sideways) when I moved to a new school and we had a trash-80 model one - cassette tape.

The first computer I had was a VIC20 and I eventually got a tape loader for it and a modem but the first computer I ever bought was a Commodore 64 in my senior year of high school in 1984. They had just dropped from $585 to $200 and it was the first thing I ever bought with a paycheck.

I kept that C64 all through college and never bought anything new from 1984 to 1992 when I bought a 386SX/20 box from Radio Shack under their "Tandy" brandname - I just used the school's computers if I needed something more powerful. I did get a floppy drive though and more software including the GeOS O/S for the C64 which was nice.

The C64 was a great hobbyist micro because you had the whole bus available to you out the back end of the box and could bank in and out the ROM over the RAM so that you could modify the O/S to do all sorts of cool tricks.

Doug D.

[hunter]

15. I was 8-bit Atari all the way, well into the 8-bit twighlight.

My 800XL is tricked out with extra RAM using a somewhat wicked motherboard modification I did back when I didn't have to wear glasses for such fine work. My disk drives were modified too. For a time I also had a 3.5" drive running.

I never played much with the 8 bit Commodore. There was one for sale at one of our local thrift shops the other day and I almost bought it but then I didn't because my wife and I have pretty much agreed I should follow the "12 computer rule" -- that is I can only have twelve old computers at any time, and I'm a bit over my limit now.

Lately I only get rid of computers if the capacitors explode when I turn them on or they suffer some other catastrophic sorts of failure. The inexpensive PC clones were the very worst (all of mine have died) yet the old Amiga, the Ataris, and the Apples still start up quite happily.

[NashVegas]

5. Cool. Remember "Governor Moonbeam?"

He wanted to build a network and people called him crazy for it.

[ddeclue]

7. It would have to wait until Al Gore could invent the internetz...

:rofl:

[BlooInBloo]

6. That's awesome!

[hunter]

9. In 1981 the good people of California were subsidizing my internet use.

I've pretty much kept everything I've ever written on a computer except my early psychotic usenet rants, many of which remain unexpectedly accessible to anyone anywhere anytime if they know the proper key words. There are a few word combinations I'll NEVER google for fear of what the spiders might drag back.

I do amuse myself sometimes looking for other people's embarrassments, especially slash. Kirk and Spock always had a wild, though deeply closeted, sex life. And if you really want to know, Uhura and Scotty actually ran the Enterprise and they never let their own rich sex life together jeopardize the safety of the ship and her crew. They were sort of like Mom and Dad whenever Kirk and Spock were hiding away nowhere to be found playing bondage games against some throbbing conduit in a Jeffries tube.

Throughout the years I've often been amazed me how easily my early BSD stuff transfers to new machines. A lot of the stuff I wrote in proprietary formats would slowly become more bothersome to access until I converted it to a common unix format. But nowadays it doesn't matter at all because I can emulate every machine I commonly used on my Debian desktop.



I like to think I made some very small contribution to the development of the internet by being a screwup. If not for dorky people like me who spent years and years doing utterly stupid stuff on the internet before it opened to the general public, then we might not have survived the great AOL invasion so gracefully.

[originalpckelly]

11. Awesum!

:rofl: