BN Critters - May 7th, 2008

[surfpirate]

WEDNESDAY, 7 MAY 2008


..... the Old AOLers are remembering the days "before that danged Yeller Album darned near ruined the magic".

[surfpirate]

OK, a history lesson for the noobies and youngsters out there. Back in "the day", we used to
access the internet by the hour. Yep .... we carefully counted the minutes of our plan to avoid
going over and paying that dreaded additional hours fee.

DOS commands, 5 and 1/4" floppies (they really flopped), and LISTSERV is how we communicated
to the masses ..... and we did it all on monochrome monitors on 14400 baud dial-up modems.
And "PC" stood for punched cards, not personal computer.

Then a young fellow named Bill Gates and his friends borrowed an idea from Xerox and created a
graphical user interface that became known as Windows. Coupled with the dominant browser
Netscape and those new fast 56K modems and we were web surfing!

Move ahead a few more years and AOL arrived on the scene, with a semi-closed community and
a controlled access to the big scary outside world of the internet.

AOL mailed out tens of thousands of these:



which promised 15 FREE HOURS on the AOL Network! Woohoo!

And in that AOL closed little safe community was born the precursors to today's BuffettNews forums.
Parrotheads found each other via the AOL Music Message Center and then set up moderated chat
rooms dubbed Parrot Key Cafe, Margaritaville Cafe and Club St. Somewhere. And in those chat rooms
friendships began .... stories were told ...... (((hugs))) and LOLs abound .....
...... and some pretty special things happened.

And our AOL bills soared.

~~~~~ surfpirate

[Snowparrot]

Hey, that's a lot of history!

Good grief, I remember when modem was such a new word we had to keep explaining it, and the main connection was by teletype machines....

When the Internet first began to be born, my connection was through my husband's office at the World Health Organization in Geneva. All the UN agencies were connected to the big, new thing over at CERN (go ahead, Google it!)--and I don't mean the particle accelerator; I mean the information network, the World Wide Web, that Tim Berners-Lee and friends were creating.

I didn't have email of my own in those days, so he would copy things he had received (from academic friends back home, mostly) onto a floppy (although by then they were the smaller, harder ones) and bring it home in his backpack, on his bicycle. I'd reply on the disk and he'd courier it back to the office....

Eventually we got a real internet connection of our own, but being in France, every minute of phone time was billed. That sometimes made it hard to stay in touch with our kids who were in Canada, New Zealand and parts of Africa at the time. But it was still faster than snail mail.
Of course, France had once been way ahead of all this WWW stuff, with its Minitel system, providing an online phone directory, mailorder sites for the big companies, municipal and national information, and those infamous "sites roses", some kind of soft-p***-chat.... that one paid for, extra.

And, yes, I am enjoying the strip!!

[surfpirate]

I didn't have email of my own in those days ......

My first email address was something like 549871856893 @compuserv.com

I purchased my first domain name in 1992 when no one knew what the heck a domain even was
Had to get it from Network Solutions (No GoDaddy back then, just one domain source), and it cost $120/year!

[lovin_jimmy]

lol, i remember those 15 free hrs things. my mom would always give me hers.
no computer to this day, but hey she finally got a cell phone!

didn't they used to have huge baskets full of those at walmart too?

[Dutch Harbor PH]

14K baud!?!?!? What luxury!!!!!! I remember 4800 baud modems.....

[C-Dawg]

my first computer was a Commodore 64plus (which I still have- in the box), and I learned basic in the first computer class my high school offered (back in 1981) on TRS-80's. Then I went to college to become a programmer and learned Pascal, Cobal etc....but decided I didn't want to be tied to a desk and gave up after a year....
First internet connection was thru AO-HELL on an old ACER 486....ah, the memories

[Carolinadreamin']

my first computer was a Commodore 64plus (which I still have- in the box), and I learned basic in the first computer class my high school offered (back in 1981) on TRS-80's. Then I went to college to become a programmer and learned Pascal, Cobal etc....but decided I didn't want to be tied to a desk and gave up after a year....
First internet connection was thru AO-HELL on an old ACER 486....ah, the memories

Is there a computer museum?

[PackPhanGirl]

ooohhh this is good stuff! I'm learning a lot here!!
I can't wait to see what happens next......

[nutmeg]

We had a Compuserve account too

My first job involved punching cards for the analytical lab at Dow Corning.

You would type the cards on one machine and "verify" them on another. There would be stacks of cards to be carried to the "computer room" A huge area with controlled access and climate.

There was all this "confetti" the little squares punched out of the cards. We even made Christmas wreaths (punch cards folded and spray painted gold)

Ahhh the good times....

[pair8head]

my first computer was a Commodore 64plus (which I still have- in the box), and I learned basic in the first computer class my high school offered (back in 1981) on TRS-80's. Then I went to college to become a programmer and learned Pascal, Cobal etc....but decided I didn't want to be tied to a desk and gave up after a year....
First internet connection was thru AO-HELL on an old ACER 486....ah, the memories

Is there a computer museum?

Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_History_Museum

[phjim]

I remember those days back on AOL ... the trouble was just trying to connect and stay on ... and all of those emails from discussions and debates on the LISTSERV

Things have changed alot since those days!

[peejay]

I'm glad we were poor now. I didn't buy a computer until 1997. But we did get the stupid AOL things in the mail. I now have a nice set of coasters.

[NYCsharkling]

Thanks for the history lesson!!!

This strip is not only funny but informative too!!!

[Skibo]

I used to be the king of DOS. Windows came along and I couldn't use a computer. I remember using a 300 baud modem to connect at school, but that was only to access the Vax and some other UNIX machine of which I do not remember. I remember when my PC being one of the most powerful in my dorm because I had a 286 processor, 2 floppy drives, a 10 meg harddrive and 640k of memory. Never got sucked into the AOL thing. My wife liked compuserve. AT&T was our first ISP. I still have them for email but am stuck with my cable company for the pipeline now.

[pbans]

Busy signals.....I just remember trying and trying to connect to AOL and getting busy signals.....finally connecting at sloth speed only to get booted after a couple of minutes......

Remember when a five second .wav file was just AWESOME?

[RinglingRingling]

14K baud!?!?!? What luxury!!!!!! I remember 4800 baud modems.....

300... You could read each line of type, letter by letter..

[Tarheel Tail-Gator]

Yes, I too went to college without the internet. I remember having PC's and word processors and wondering how previous collegians went through school with typewriters

The internet was just starting to gain popularity and there was no ISP in Boone, NC in the early 90's. My roommate had a Prodigy account and we had to dial long distance to Charlotte (at the old 20 cent a minute LD rates) to access dial-up Internet (which was also charged by the hour) to gain access to chat rooms that were text only.
Then, in the late 90's I moved on to selling dial-up, ISDN dial-up (a smokin' 128K in some lucky areas) and bonding 3 ISDN lines for 384K in even more limited areas and eventually partial T-1's, T-1's, DSL and MetroEthernet at 10M and 100M speeds (all in the short span of 7 years) Eventually started selling Sprint Wireless Cards that offered more bandwidth than the ISDN solutions from the past.

With Fiber to the curb in some areas, who knows what the future holds.

[surfpirate]

I used to be the king of DOS. Windows came along and I couldn't use a computer. I remember using a 300 baud modem to connect at school, but that was only to access the Vax and some other UNIX machine of which I do not remember. I remember when my PC being one of the most powerful in my dorm because I had a 286 processor, 2 floppy drives, a 10 meg harddrive and 640k of memory. Never got sucked into the AOL thing. My wife liked compuserve. AT&T was our first ISP. I still have them for email but am stuck with my cable company for the pipeline now.

My first portable connection was a TI Silent 700 .... a portable computer terminal manufactured by Texas Instruments in the 1970s and 1980s. Silent 700s printed with a dot-matrix heating element onto a roll of heat-sensitive paper. They were equipped with an integrated acoustic coupler and modem (300 baud) that could receive data at 30 characters per second! (thank you Wikipedia).

But most of all it meant freedom. I used to received those 3:00am phone calls telling me I had a SOC7 data error or something with our mainframe COBOL applications and had no other choice other than to get up and go into the office to research and fix the abend. The Silent 700 meant I could login from home, and sometimes diagnose and fix the error without going into the office!

Sweeeeeeet.

[LIPH]

I didn't get the internet at home until about 3 years ago.