Do today's kids remember a time before the internet? - Page 2

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I for one, can't imagine how I used to kill time at work before the internet.
I can't believe that reading the newspapers and talking to my fellow employees (gasp) is what what I used to do.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Very fun topic. I am 37 years old. I grew up during a great time of computing progress. My school had a computer lab of Vic 20's when I was in grade 5. Not too shabby!
My first computer was an Atari 400 with a whopping 16KB of RAM. I did not get a modem until I got an Apple IIC and then I was sort of lost as to what to do with the darn thing. I eventually learned about BBS and had fun playing some text games...hmmm...funny...not sure what else I did on a BBS now that I think back.
Anyway, I remember my young nephew asking me about "the days before the Internet" as part of a school report. He wanted to know how I patched games back then. That is, it is just such a fact of life now that every computer game needs a patch of some kind, he wondered how it was done in the past. I explained that part of the solution was that the games were better tested back then (and yes, much simpler and did not have to support the variety of hardware of today) and did not usually need a patch.
I recall when I finally signed up for the Internet in 1993. I was always on the hunt for a new website to checkout. If I saw an ad on TV for soap and it listed a website...BAM I would be checking it out.
Ah...just too many memories of all the exciting changes over the years on computers. I could write a book. (hmmm...interesting idea...)

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I'm 38. My first computer was an Atari 1200XL. I think I got it for Christmas in 1982. I remember getting a 300 baud modem and logging on to Compuserve. Back then, there was no local number for me, so there was the per minute charge for the long distance phone call AND the per minute charge for Compuserve. My parents couldn't have been very happy.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

In the spirit of “mine is bigger than yours”:

I wrote my first program on an IBM 704 (I’m guessing that most of you will have to Goolge this)

When I was a kid, not the Internet, not TV but radio.

And I walked several miles to school in waist high drifts, uphill both ways.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Drat! That beats me and my experience with the IBM 4331 Series and the System-370 Assembler. But at least, it was a multi-user system! We each had our own terminal capable of processing an entire screen's worth of information in five seconds!

I remember the hardware for this machine. The circuit boards used mainly wire-wrapping as circuit paths, and the removable hard drive units were massive, resembling the USS Reliant in Star Trek II.

And no, those weren't the "good old days!" I'm writing this post on a Fujitsu U810 UMPC which, despite being underpowered by today's standards, is probably a hundred times more powerful than that old 4331 that filled a small room! Throw every old computer out there in a museum!

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I remember logging on to BBS's in the early-mid 80's on my Atari 600 and Commodore 64. I did the same with my Amiga 500 in the late 80's.

When I went to college in 90 as a CS major I used my Amiga to connect to the internet all the time. This was before the web and them fancy internet browsers. Good old fashioned command line stuff. Ahhhh those were the days.

I think the first time I used a browser was Mosaic on my Amiga 1200 when it was first released.

After that it was a steady stream of PC's running various versions of Windows and Linux. They all connected via dial-up. I didn't get broadband until around 2002 when Bellsouth finally offered DSL in my small town.

Now I'm 100% a Mac guy with 6Mbs DSL using Firefox. Man have things changed in a short span of time.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I still have a 30 AWG wire-wrap tool, and know how to use it!

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I did not see my first computer until my first Navy training as a weather observer in 1979. My first job in the Navy (1980) was at a weather data analysis command in Monterey CA, which was a huge computer facility. I picked up on how to operate computers pretty quickly from there, and since about 1984 or 1985, we have had a computer in our household. It was an IBM we bought before the Navy moved us to Puerto Rico, and that I used to do all of my college work while going to night school, and working as a DJ/TV journalist for the Navy radio and TV station at Roosevelt Roads.

We got "online" for the first time in about 1995, I think, on a Mac, so my son has been around the internet since he was about 10 or years old.

Now I am an educational technology integrator in an at-risk elementary school in Virginia Beach, teaching teachers how to effectively use technology (including the Internet) in their lessons, and teaching kids how to safely and responsibily use the resources they have available to them. Great job!

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

My son is 15 and has it made. His XBox is hooked up in our theater. While others that he is fighting are playing on their TVs, he is playing on a 113" screen. Many of his local friends that he plays with online with know this. He makes sniper shots when there is only speck of someones helmet above a wall. His friends can't even tell that there is someone there. Another big advantage is the surround sound. He can hear people coming up behind him. Anyone with only stereo would not know this.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Amazing, all those other "poor" kids trying to compete on their "little" 40" HDTV's

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I remember back in the days of the APPLE II GS, green monitors, 5.5" floppies, and Oregon Trial. When AOL wasn't really the "internet", but more of a dial up email, news, and IM feature. Dial up speeds were 2,600 baud for me.

I remember when downloading music became popular when I was finishing high school, the invention of napster. I can still remember the first product website I saw that I could click on the image, and then spin the image 360 degrees in a cirle. That was a wow moment for me.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

That's 5.25" floppies (which were being phased out in the IIgs days) and 2400 baud. I had a //e.

I think Lew's experience has us all beat though. Imagine the days when "Do I have enough floor space for this computer, or will I have to build a new room" was a serious question.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I don't know about that. The US Navy used those darned first-gen 8" Winchester drives until around year 2000 to store Tomahawk cruise missile mission data. In order to swap out the drives you had to remove and replace the v-belt for the motor drive! For a long time I was an expert at such "legacy" stuff. IIRC they called it the "piccolo" drive because it was so much smaller than the earlier-generation 14" Winchester drives.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I've still got an original IBM PC (1981) that I bought for my daughter when she was in the fifth grade or so. CGA card, serial card....the whole gambit. It still works....and actually pretty well all things considered. Still have the original DOS 1.0 through 2.? three ring IBM manuals and a few boxes of disks. Why???? I just don't have the heart to throw the old girl out.

Mort

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I'm 23 and I dont remember not having it.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Maybe the most amazing thing about the Internet is that nobody really predicted it 30 or 40 years ago, like they predicted advanced space travel, flying cars, etc., that haven't materialized.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

30 - 40 years ago? Try 15 years ago.

Reminds me of the following Time Magazine which was issued Oct 15, 1992. The issue was filled with predictions of all kinds of technological advances that would affect our lives, but not once did it mention anything resembling the Internet. A few short years after the issue was released the World Wide Web revolutionized the way we live our lives. They completely missed it.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I had a Vic 20 and a Kaypro II. It was quite a rig back in the day!

I'm 38 and I wish that I had the internet in its current form back in the high school days! As it was my child hood sounds like an Ernie Cline rant! I've been online since 1996 and it was tough back then. You prayed that your ISP had a local number but it rarely did. Yeah it was mega expensive then since you were paying a long distance fee and a per minute fee to wait on that nude fake of Kathy Ireland to download which took about five minutes.....

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

There are naked pictures of women on the Internet?

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

The first computer that I owned was a COSMAC Elf, based around the RCA 1802 CMOS microprocessor. But talk about being a basic set: you had to enter machine code by hand. The first real computer I owned was a Morrow Micro Decision which ran the CPM operating system. The makers of CPM, Digital Research, was later approached by IBM to partner with them on the first IBM PC. Digital Research, in a business move of intergalactic stupidity, gave IBM the run-around so IBM ended up giving the business to an unknown startup called Microsoft instead.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

That looks like the first place I ever worked in the Navy! Except I don't see the massive hard drive platters we had to change out every 6 hours!

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

The IBM 704 came out in 1954; the disk drive, two years later.



IBM inventor Rey Johnson with world’s first disk drive, the RAMAC 305

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

From Wikipedia:
IBM 305 RAMAC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

5 MB for $3200 per month. And that's in 1957 dollars! Today, we can buy a 5 TB array for a single payment of under $1000!

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I've actually seen one of those RAMAC disc drives. I interviewed for a job at Hitachi several years ago, where they had bought out the old IBM disc business in San Jose. Hitachi had the RAMAC drive in their visitor lobby.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

quoth the Wikipedia

Marketers...

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

> 30 - 40 years ago? Try 15 years ago.

15 years ago I was already using it, so it wouldn't have been too hard to predict.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Not the commercial World Wide Web as we know it. I remember accessing the Internet at college as late as 1992, and it was nothing resembling what it is today. The real turning point for the World Wide Web didn't really begin until 1993 when Mosaic was introduced.

It wasn't even until April of 1993 that CERN agreed that anyone could use the Web code and protocol royalty free.

Things did happen quickly after that, but in late 1992, the Web as it has now integrated itself into our lives, just wasn't generally forseen.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Guess we were a bit slow out here. I was in university from 1988 to 1992, and towards the end (around 1991 or so) I knew that there was some form of network set up, I think a BBS of sorts, but if you wanted an account you had to specifically request one, whereas today an email account would automatically be assigned the day you matriculated. I wasn't a complete technophobe -- during my time as secretary of my faculty's student union club, I made the transition from using a typewriter to word-processing correspondence, minutes of meetings and other paperwork. I still remember buying those concertina stacks of paper with guideholes, printer ribbon for dot-matrix printers, whilst plain paper (or letterhead) had to be manually fed in and lined up one sheet at a time...

At a career fair recently at my uni, I asked about their email addresses, since some were just (relatively) random letters and numbers, probably related to their enrolment numbers or something, whilst others were not, but all had the university's domain. I then told them that back in my day, we didn't have email at all. They were positively horrified...

I seem to recall email invading the office around early 1996 -- I can place a date to this because shortly after email access was available, I joined a mailing list for fans of Arsenal football club, and later that year I attended my first ever game at Highbury, with help from someone on that mailing list: tickets were near-imposible to get for big games unless you paid over the odds to a tout, but he had a friend in the box office. So I paid only face value for our 'derby' match against Tottenham Hotspur, when otherwise I probably would have had to pay treble or more.

Nowadays, who can imagine not having email for work? But sometimes I wish it wasn't so pervasive, I've resisted having a Blackberry foisted onto me, though I do remotely check email via internet when needs must. What happened to walking out the door at 6pm and leaving work completely behind until 9am the next day? Instead some danged client or the boss will call the mobile, demanding that something be done "urgently"...

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I learned that kids today playing a variant of hide-and-seek no longer count and shout to begin, but instead send text message when the game is begun. It's these basic behavioral changes that always surprise me.