Remember When
Quote: AZDuffmanI still have a list somewhere of practical jokes, many computer related since it came off USENET. The things people used to fall for.
In college I wrote a simple program that just put on the screen a simple login prompt that looked just like the standard one. People would try to login and I would capture their username and password. I had access to multiple professors accounts and was able to give myself the same credentials as the professors.
Quote: DRichWe had a mainframe computer in high school
We had filing cabinets. The library
had a microfilm reader that was
pretty amazing. The AV dept had
16mm movies they would wheel
into classrooms.
Quote: DRichIn college I wrote a simple program that just put on the screen a simple login prompt that looked just like the standard one. People would try to login and I would capture their username and password. I had access to multiple professors accounts and was able to give myself the same credentials as the professors.
My favorite from the jokes is they had a simple program that sent a random ASCII character to a random terminal then went back to sleep for a random period. Guy said when they saw construction guys checking all over for "line noise" they pulled the program.
On a similar note I remember in high school taking one of those career surveys. The counselors were so excited if you asked. Fill in the circles kind of thing IIRC. But they had to "transmit" it to Harrisburg, again IIRC, for scoring and return of results. This was maybe 1987 and seemed so exotic. When my brother turned his in they had him wait and warned it might take longer because it was a windy day and the wind would shake the phone lines and slow the transmission.
At the same time a buddy was in to BBS systems. He was in one of those nerd networks where you got the numbers to call. He did not grasp toll calls and his phone bill was $35, a huge amount then. After that his parents throttled his phone use. Then he found a credit card "carbon" and used it for a pay BBS. I think that worked for a month.
Back to the TV show, if you remember all this you will love it. For me it was like going back to then in time.
Quote: AZDuffman
At the same time a buddy was in to BBS systems. He was in one of those nerd networks where you got the numbers to call. He did not grasp toll calls and his phone bill was $35, a huge amount then. After that his parents throttled his phone use. Then he found a credit card "carbon" and used it for a pay BBS. I think that worked for a month.
I spent all of 1986 on BBS's with my 2400 baud modem (that was fast then). I was able to hack the local Teleconnect phone service so all my phone time on the computer was free.
Quote: DRichI spent all of 1986 on BBS's with my 2400 baud modem (that was fast then). I was able to hack the local Teleconnect phone service so all my phone time on the computer was free.
I did not have a modem but with just a few friends boy did we have programs for the Comodore 64. M.U.L.E was crazy addicting and Project Space Station was one you could play all night then come back the next night and continue the game. Some were good some were not as good but I still prefer them to what is out there today game-wise. It is because of Project Space Station that I can describe what Geo-Stationary orbit is and how it works better than any average person. No kidding. If it comes up people ask how on earth (no pun) I know that. It makes you sound smart. All from a flipping pirated game disk.
Quote: mcallister3200Semi related to this discussion of the way technology has evolved, highly recommend the Netflix documentary the Social Dilemma. As I type this from my addiction manipulation device.
Just had a company training this week said to watch that. But I killed my netflix subscription last month.
Quote: mcallister3200Semi related to this discussion of the way technology has evolved, highly recommend the Netflix documentary the Social Dilemma. As I type this from my addiction manipulation device.
I think that those who grew up with all this tech stuff are perfectly happy with it
to me - texting, posting, etc. does not compare well to face to face or even phone conversations - it's all kind of unsatisfying
and video calls don't do anything for me at all - I would rather have a regular phone call
one 8nvestigative reporter ßaid she took a shower after reading the suspects posts.
Quote: FleaStiffI recall tracking a murder suspect who lived in Marietta,GA s7burb of Atlanta, 8nto Usenet's AL T group instead of ATL group.1uite an adventure.
one 8nvestigative reporter ßaid she took a shower after reading the suspects posts.
Are the alternate letters intentional or result of fat fingering on a phone? I really can't tell.
I, along with two of my friends, started hanging out in the computer room during free periods and after school. None of us had signed up for the programming course... we just figured things out ourselves. In the interest of keeping this post short, i won't go into the details of what we were doing on the computer. Suffice it to say that it resulted in frequent crashes of the OS. Rebooting the 1130 took about 45 minutes since the OS had to be loaded from cards (IBM saw no reason to give us a tape reader). Eventually the lady from IBM got pissed off with the three of us and we were called in to the Principle's office, which was a first for all of us.
Keep in mind this was 1969. The principle really had no clue what exactly we had done that had gotten the IBM rep upset. On top of that, we didn't fit the profile of the kids who normally showed up in his office. All 3 of us were taking the advanced math and science courses and were on the school chess team. Not your typical juvenile delinquents. Never the less, he gave it his best shot, fixing us with a stern gaze and telling us to stop doing whatever the hell it was we were doing. We said OK and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. To keep the lady from IBM happy (she was actually a pretty nice person) we stopped crashing the CPU and also signed up for the official FORTRAN course so we had an excuse to be in the computer room.
Quote: DRichI spent all of 1986 on BBS's with my 2400 baud modem (that was fast then). I was able to hack the local Teleconnect phone service so all my phone time on the computer was free.
In 1978 I was working for a computer company (now defunct) that provided me with a TI Silent 700. This had an acoustic modem that ran at speeds up to 300 baud. One week we had a big snow storm and I ended up working from home for two days, spending hours at a time using the TI to connect to a PDP-11 at the office. After I had quit for dinner on the 1st day, i got a call from the phone company. Seems they had been contacted by somebody who had been trying to call my house but kept getting a busy signal. The operator had checked the line but instead of hearing either a conversation or a dead line, had heard this strange and unrecognized warbling tone none of the phone company engineers could identify.
It wàs fat fingering 9n my keyboard 5hat lead me ALT when m6 sus0ect wâ in ATL whiçh sdtoo for Atlanta, his city of 4è8denc3 at 5he time5he Ramsey's lived there and he sustained severe 5rauma,Quote: cmlotitoAre the alternate letters intentional or result of fat fingering on a phone? I really can't tell.
Quote: TumblingBonesIn 1978 I was working for a computer company (now defunct) that provided me with a TI Silent 700. This had an acoustic modem that ran at speeds up to 300 baud. One week we had a big snow storm and I ended up working from home for two days, spending hours at a time using the TI to connect to a PDP-11 at the office. After I had quit for dinner on the 1st day, i got a call from the phone company. Seems they had been contacted by somebody who had been trying to call my house but kept getting a busy signal. The operator had checked the line but instead of hearing either a conversation or a dead line, had heard this strange and unrecognized warbling tone none of the phone company engineers could identify.
I remember hearing a story about a guy who "worked from home" in the early 1980s. It was a piece on some local magazine kind of show. It seemed very exotic. I finally started working from home around 2010. I did for a few days when we had the G-20 in town and getting to the office was impossible, but that was just a day or two. My dad saw me once when he stopped by to help install a window. He was simply amazed. 15 years before he saw an office I managed but this was more impressive to him. He did not have a clue what I did or how I did it, just that I was working from home.
When I worked the courthouses you often had to make your own office. Some gave us space and some did not. One that did not I would work on a picnic table outside weather permitting. The thought came to me that even in college in the early 90s I could not have imagined that. Then I thought about how I used to have my own office yet would not trade back if I could. When the virus scare is over I may or may not go back to the office.
Quote: AZDuffmanI remember a buddy insisting IBM was made from "better parts." An IBM was $5000 back then, many cars were just $10000.
It probably was, back then.
I remember buying a TI programmable calculator that could read/write magnetic strips back in 1980 for about $200, when the compatible HP cost $700. Two years later, the TI's 0 and 1 keys stopped working.
There was a story going around about an HP salesman who had someone come up to him and say, "Hey, my TI does the same thing for 1/3 the cost!," and the salesman said, "Can it do this?", then he took an HP calculator, threw it against a wall, stomped on it a few times, then turned it on and it worked perfectly.
Quote: EvenBobI paid $1500 in 92 for my first puter. Could have got a good used car for $1500.
Not counting my old Atari 800, my first computer was an Atari 1040 ST (1040 stood for 1 MB of RAM), which cost $1000, not including the special monitors it used (yes, plural - one was color (it had two modes - 320x200 16-color out of 512, or 640x200 4-color) and the other was 640x400 monochrome). I paid more like $2000 for my first PC-compatible in 1988. I remember being impressed by 640x480 16-color graphics.
Quote: DRichI remember doing stock trades on Compuserve. I think it was $19.99 or $24.99 a trade.
I remember buying airline tickets on Compuserve, using its version of the American Airlines system. I also remember that, in the early 1990s, my travel agent's system used the pre-3.0 version of Windows where you couldn't resize the windows.
Quote: TumblingBonesThe first time i got my hands on a computer was 1969, my senior year in high school. As part of the whole post-Sputnik push to get more US kids into science, IBM was providing schools around the country with low-end computers (we had an IBM 1130). They even provided a full time on-site IBM staffer to operate it. This came with one of the earliest versions of the iconic Lunar Lander game. You used the 16 toggle switches on the console to control fuel flow. There was no steering, you just came straight down and tried not to crash.
I was the same way, but it was 1974, the computer was at the local community college - for some reason, the computer science department had an 1130, while the data processing department had a 360 - and I was 12 years old at the time. Also, the version of Lunar Lander this one had didn't use the toggle switches; you typed in a fuel burn rate for every 10 seconds.
Quote:Rebooting the 1130 took about 45 minutes since the OS had to be loaded from cards (IBM saw no reason to give us a tape reader).
I don't remember the 1130 having a tape reader - unless you count paper tape. Then again, the one the JC had had a disk drive (removable plastic disk packs - each one held something like 180 kilobytes, but remember that there was only 16 KB of RAM in the computer.
Quote: lilredroosterit's all kind of unsatisfying
and video calls don't do anything for me at all - I would rather have a regular phone call
I hate Skype, I never look at
the person when we're
talking. But I hate phone
calls too, always have. I
absolutely love texting.
Say what I want, send it,
done.
Buckminster Fuller never had
a phone. He said it was like
having a rope tied to your
ankle and anytime somebody
wanted you they just jerked
on the rope. Amen, brother.
When I'm on the phone all
I want to do is escape.
Quote: ThatDonGuy
I remember buying airline tickets on Compuserve, using its version of the American Airlines system. I also remember that, in the early 1990s, my travel agent's system used the pre-3.0 version of Windows where you couldn't resize the windows.
I remember doing that also. I believe it was the Apollo system that American Airlines designed that was available on Compuserve.
From what I remember it was all text based and you had to know the cities airline codes to book it.
eg. 1139 LAS SFO 07131988 David Jones followed by the credit card number.
Quote: DRichI remember doing that also. I believe it was the Apollo system that American Airlines designed that was available on Compuserve.
From what I remember it was all text based and you had to know the cities airline codes to book it.
eg. 1139 LAS SFO 07131988 David Jones followed by the credit card number.
American Airlines used Saabre - the Compuserve version was called Eaasy Saabre.
Quote: ThatDonGuyAmerican Airlines used Saabre - the Compuserve version was called Eaasy Saabre.
Yes, that is right. It was Easysabre.
Quote: TumblingBonesThe first time i got my hands on a computer was 1969, my senior year in high school. .
Were you ever part of the Apple vs. Windows online flaming war over which was better or was that for the up and comers and noobs?
Quote: billryanMy high school got its first computer the year after I graduated.
I graduated in 67. No bar codes
yet, no plastic grocery bags,
no self checkout lanes. We
never pumped our own gas,
had land line phones only,
and the only time we ever
heard the word computer
was on Star Trek. Pay phones
were literally everywhere,
we got 90% of our news
from newspapers and news
magazines, and girls who
got pregnant in HS were
expelled and almost expelled
from society.
Quote: EvenBoband girls who
got pregnant in HS were
expelled and almost expelled
from society.
not all that long ago it was a burdensome negative stigma for a woman to have been divorced
they used the word "divorcee" and it falsely implied a licentious woman
the negative stigma did not apply to men, only women
Quote: EvenBobI graduated in 67. No bar codes
yet, no plastic grocery bags,
no self checkout lanes. We
never pumped our own gas,
had land line phones only,
and the only time we ever
heard the word computer
was on Star Trek. Pay phones
were literally everywhere,
we got 90% of our news
from newspapers and news
magazines, and girls who
got pregnant in HS were
expelled and almost expelled
from society.
Only part that surprises me a little is the gas. As a kid in the early 70s I remember we only pumped it about half the time and my mother never ever when she got gas at all. She hated having to do it.
Quote: AZDuffmanOnly part that surprises me a little is the gas. As a kid in the early 70s I remember we only pumped it about half the time and my mother never ever when she got gas at all. She hated having to do it.
To this day, my mother has never pumped gas.
Quote: DRichTo this day, my mother has never pumped gas.
It took forever for my mother to do it. As kids we would pump it if we were with her after age 10 or so. Eventually there were times when she had no choice.
Once in a station some older woman asked me to help her. When I did she asked "and that is it?" Looking back might have been first time she had to pump her own.
There was one brand of gas where the help was like a racing pit crew. One guy checked the oil while another cleaned your windshield while others checked your air pressure. They all wore white uniforms with silly hats and bow ties.
Quote: DRichTo this day, my mother has never pumped gas.
I’d bet darkoz hasn’t either.
Quote: AZDuffmanOnly part that surprises me a little is the gas. As a kid in the early 70s I remember we only pumped it about half the time and my mother never ever when she got gas at all. She hated having to do it.
It changed in the early 70's.
In the 60's if you even touched
the nozzle they would come
out screaming at you because
you were trying to steal gas.
It was a real pain because you
had to wait your turn till the
pump jockey got done checking
the oil and tire pressure of the car
in front of you.
Quote: AZDuffmanIt took forever for my mother to do it.
My GF in Santa Barbara refused to do
it. She drove all the way to the outskirts
to the one place that still pumped gas.
these flavors - Dr. Nehi, Nehi Chocolate, Nehi Root Beer, Nehi Lemonade, Nehi Wild Red, Nehi Blue Cream, and its more classic flavors Nehi Orange, Nehi Grape, and Nehi Peach.
my favorite was Nehi Grape - delicious - lots of sugar to keep you interested
they sold out and got to Royal Crown and then Dr. Pepper and stopped making the flavors
worst soda ever made IMO - "cream soda" - yuk
A close second would have been Nedicks Orange Soda. I'm not sure if it was national as Nedicks was a local NYC institution. It was Starbucks before Starbucks.
They must have had close to 100 different locations, all around transportation hubs or shopping districts. At a time when dirty water dogs ruled NYC, Nedicks hot dogs were grilled, and served on a toasted buttery roll with spicy mustard with just a hint of relish.
In the early 1970s, it was one of the few places that served hotdogs for breakfast.
Strangely, you could not buy Nedicks Orange soda at a Nedicks, only from delis and supermarkets. The stores sold Nedicks Orange Drink instead.
Quote: billryanI love cream soda. It's been years since I had one, but it will always be my favorite.
A close second would have been Nedicks Orange Soda. I'm not sure if it was national as Nedicks was a local NYC institution. It was Starbucks before Starbucks.
They must have had close to 100 different locations, all around transportation hubs or shopping districts. At a time when dirty water dogs ruled NYC, Nedicks hot dogs were grilled, and served on a toasted buttery roll with spicy mustard with just a hint of relish.
In the early 1970s, it was one of the few places that served hotdogs for breakfast.
Strangely, you could not buy Nedicks Orange soda at a Nedicks, only from delis and supermarkets. The stores sold Nedicks Orange Drink instead.
I'm travelling around the country in my RV
I did part of the route 66 tour, the Mother road
I visited Pops in Arcadia OK. Its on route 66
Largest selection of soda pop I have ever seen
I wanted to try something different since the choices were overwhelming
Had sarsaparilla.
was one of those old 1940's phones
with the double bells that was so loud
you could hear them ringing in houses
when you were on the sidewalk.
The phone is in the kitchen and so it rang
10 times before my dad staggered out
there. The whole family was behind him
because in those days nobody ever
called at 3 am with good news. As soon
as my dad said "I accept the charges' my
mom started to wail. Somebody had died,
my grandmothers father, 96 years old.
To me it was a mystery that he was still alive.
He was born the year after the Civil War
ended. He was older than rocks. My dad
was very upset and I was pissed that we
got woke up. I made the mistake of saying
that wouldn't he be just as dead in the
morning, why didn't grandma wait till
then to call. My dad shot daggers at me
with his eyes.
We got a similar call at dinner time 3
years later that his dad had died. The
big deal with that was my dad flew
back east for the funeral. Nobody flew
in 1965, it was monumental. It's the
only time my dad ever flew, My mom
never did.
Everybody had this phone. They were
indestructible, they never stopped
working. You can find them at antique
shows or Ebay and they still work.
People had them for decades.
Have you composed it by yourself?
I wasted lots of time with that baby
Pac Man was 2nd - but not really a close 2nd
Quote: lilredroosterSpace Invaders was my favorite arcade game by a longshot
I wasted lots of time with that baby
Pac Man was 2nd - but not really a close 2nd
I had Space Invaders and Ms Pacman
in the bar around 1980. What money
makers they were. The drunks would
get a roll of quarters from me and
play all night. I made enough off
those games every month to
pay the utility bills, the insurance,
and my home utility bills. Owning
a bar is like owning a money printing
machine.
Quote: EvenBobI had Space Invaders and Ms Pacman
in the bar around 1980. What money
makers they were. The drunks would
get a roll of quarters from me and
play all night. I made enough off
those games every month to
pay the utility bills, the insurance,
and my home utility bills. Owning
a bar is like owning a money printing
machine.
loose lips sink ships.
No one ever asks “what time do you have?” these days. It’s always “what time is it?”.
“What time do you have” makes no sense in the age of cell phones, because everyone has the same exact time.
Such clocck.
Casablanca, ithink.
B
Phoenix. Got it in 67 for $300, a huge
amount of money. Same as $2400
today. I dearly loved this car. Huge
interior, push button tranny, floated
down the road on a cloud. 383 under
the hood, super fast. Wish I still had
it. It was a 'space age' car and felt
like it.
I've never heard of that model Dodge. From the lack of chrome, I'm thinking it was a low-end car.
My first was a 1964 Nova wagon, the most basic of cars.
Quote: EvenBobThis was my first real car. 1960 Dodge
Phoenix. Got it in 67 for $300, a huge
amount of money. Same as $2400
today. I dearly loved this car. Huge
interior, push button tranny, floated
down the road on a cloud. 383 under
the hood, super fast. Wish I still had
it. It was a 'space age' car and felt
like it.
This was a time when some cars were "gentleman's cars." Just manly and showed success, I love this one, very manly car:
Quote: billryanIt's cute that you think $2400 is a lot of money.
In 1967 $300 was a lot of money.
I was taking home $55 a week in my
job, so $300 was almost a month and
a half's wages. It's really cute that
you had a rich daddy who spoiled
your ass so you had no concept
of living in the real world.
My dad took out a loan of $50
for Xmas presents in 1963. Took
him 6 months to pay it back.
Cute, huh.
Quote: EvenBobIn 1967 $300 was a lot of money.
I was taking home $55 a week in my
job, so $300 was almost a month and
a half's wages. It's really cute that
you had a rich daddy who spoiled
your ass so you had no concept
of living in the real world.
My dad took out a loan of $50
for Xmas presents in 1963. Took
him 6 months to pay it back.
Cute, huh.
My father died when I was 19 and I had to put off going back to school for two years before my Mom was able to work. Cute, eh?
If someone spent $2400 on a car today, no one would say it is a lot of money. My neighbor just spent $70,000 on a stupid SUV. Now that is a lot of money.
Get that junk off the road, no one thinks using a 30 year old computer is cool, it’s pretty much the same thing.
