A little tech nostalgia

Remember the good ol' days.

BBS boards,

When Ebay first started and people didn't know what antiques were really worth

When Youtube's content was all amazing and not weird sounds, shock videos, or toy reviews.

Remember AOL's "you've got mail"

Remember that feeling of going into Blockbuster and they had exactly one new movie left, and you got it. Remember
the smell of blockbuster?

How about the sweet sound of your computer connecting to your phone line, and getting totally kicked off when someone called!

Remember getting your first colored tv, you no longer had to wonder what color they were really wearing!

How about the first time you saw popcorn pop in a microwave. Sure the microwave was 6x the size of the ones today and sat on it's own cart, but
to watch that popcorn pop was really something.

Remember getting your first beeper, how cool and high tech you felt

Remember having an old cassette player and recording from the radio. Sometimes you could time it just perfect to only have music on it.

Sometimes I really miss those days!

a reply to: JAGStorm

Mmmm Blockbuster video and free popcorn!

I remember playing DooM on a BBS called Arena bbs. It had 4 phone lines where 4 people could play at once.

a reply to: JAGStorm

When i first got dial up Internet it was one of those Amstrad ones through a remote control on the television , long story short i forgot to disconnect and i got up the next morning and left for work and did not come back for weeks when the bill arrived i taped all the leaves of it together stood up on a chair with my hands raised high [ i am 6.3 ] and it went another 4-5 foot along the floor .

I kept that bill as a laugh up until about 3 years ago but i was dumb enough to buy Amstrads phone that phoned a premium number to check your emails twice a day and cost about £200 a year to run

You know what they say about a fool and his money that was me back then

Adjusting the "vertical hold" on the television set, to stop the picture from rolling.

Remember when computer magazines had free programs? All you had to do was type in pages of hexidecimal code, then go back through it line by line to figure out where you typed in something wrong, then wait for the next issue where they told you there was a misprint in line 535 where that 0E was supposed to be A8.

a reply to: JAGStorm

One thing that's always stuck in my mind about old technology, is one random night in like late 1999, when I was riding home on my bike as a 16 year old kid... talking handsfree to my girlfriend on my slick Ericsson T28, well she was on her revolutionary Nokia 3210.

I was seriously flipping out about how advanced technology had become and how amazing it was that we were able to so easily be just chatting to each other like that.

Yet now, just 20 years later, that feels like the full blown dark ages... It's a new world, I guess.

a reply to: Macenroe82

Remember when Walmart used to greet the kids with free popcorn and they had a fresh popcorn machine? Seems like forever ago.

I remember the days of GEnie
I remember one time, my older brother was downloading some program that was going to take several days non-stop & a ton of money per hour, and he made a point of telling everyone he could think of not to call, period, and why.
And of course 2 days in, someone called, kicked him offline, and everyone in the hemisphere heard his anguished shriek of "NOOOOOO!!! MOTHER##ER!!!!"

originally posted by: Brotherman
a reply to: Macenroe82

Remember when Walmart used to greet the kids with free popcorn and they had a fresh popcorn machine? Seems like forever ago.

Family Fares up here in MI have a coffee & popcorn counter, free for anyone. Some stores give out fresh fruit for the kids. My kids think they struck gold when we go to the ones giving fruit out, lol.

My first mobile/cell phone by Motorola did not even have a screen of any kind just5 or 6, lights at the side that told you if you were connected or not 1st one on the left in photo , what a piece of crap it was

a reply to: JAGStorm

Remember when invited the gang to watch the 68 Olympics at my place and a couple stared like "wtf" (color TV)

a reply to: JAGStorm

i remember getting my first pager.
expensive too

like $150

then the monthly fee so we could punch in a number and read it backwards.

you could 'spell' things like "les go to bed"
i forget the numbers

a reply to: JAGStorm

Before the internet, there was ARPA. I was on ARPA in 1978 for a project I was doing and used Control Data Corp as my ramp. I had a tty43 and 150/300 baud acoustic coupler modem. I remember making radios with tubes and then germanium crystals and transistors. My first computer was an atari 400, then CBM, then Apple 2, then the ibms and sun solaris boxes. I ran bbs's from 1982 to 1986 (then I was away in Africa for 4 years working in weapons R&D for the military/armscor/CI) and on coming back to North America, I ran more bbs's using us robotics 14.4k's and eventually 57k v90's. I'm so ef'ing old, I programmed in APL, Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, Assembler, Basic, etc. I remember when TV's were black and white and on legs and our half wolf/half border collie ate almost through the legs. I remember when dentists thought they were funny and pulled out coping saws to "saw off the pain" or electric drills with 1" auger bits. I remember when we played outside and most of us didn't die. There's some history lol.

Cheers - Dave

a reply to: JAGStorm

That Texas Instruments digital watch with dark red screen.

a reply to: JAGStorm

I still have my first PC. It is a Packard Bell 75 megahertz of nothing but pure power. With an Intel Pentium. It still has the original Doom game on it and still works. I am going to keep that until I'm dead. I did like Blockbuster.

I also remember when I was the antenna for the black and white tv.

originally posted by: Brotherman
a reply to: Macenroe82

Remember when Walmart used to greet the kids with free popcorn and they had a fresh popcorn machine? Seems like forever ago.

I remember my first time in Walmart, the "Made in the USA" signs everywhere, seriously everywhere. Good quality for low prices. Kinds like Ikea, but American.

Poor Sam Walton would be rolling in his grave if he saw what it has become!

a reply to: DISRAELI

I remember watching the outer limits on our black and white TV when I was just a pup. Scared the hell out of me at the time, still get chills when I listen to the intro ;-) That's when people acted, really acted. No CGI and all the effects and stuff, they had to be able to act to carry a program. Now it's just different takes on all the old plots and ideas, it's rare you actually something original on TV any more. I've given up watching it for the last 15 years, there's no substance, all filler.

Cheers - Dave

I remember the first car I bought with a solid state AM radio in it. Didn't have to wait on it to "warm" up so I could listen to it.
It had an automatic trans in it, too!

a reply to: JAGStorm

I remember my first computer. I built it myself from articles published in Your Computer magazine, published by Electronics Australia. Z80 based, called a Microbee.

The ROM's were written by someone called Matthew Starr. Never met him but a million thanks for the brilliant job, if he's still around.

You used to get cassette tapes of the latest programs with computer and electronics magazines (or pages of code). After upgrades, it ran CP/M and had a floppy drive (5 1/4").

I also remember the internet before the Web and Mozilla. Good old Gopher.

Them were the days.