Before Hedy, There Was Barbara Lamarr

Nice trip down memory lane, its surprising how fast things have moved on, I remember merging the novell network storage space of several university colleagues to be able to get enough space to install the first version of Mosaic. We didn't have the kind of space to play with that I did back at my dorm (80Mb harddrive, no less!)

Although most things on that list are long since obsolete, there is still a thriving MUD community online.
Anyone looking for a richer and more imaginative gameplaying experience than the likes of World of Warcraft, I'd advise you to check out http://www.mudconnector.com and the current top mud www.3k.org (my personal favourite).

Those 3.5" floppy disks with the hard protective case and sliding metal window was a great innovation. I've always thought that the original CDs should have been designed the same way. However I guess the original design team for the CD figured that they would only be used by audio buffs who were used to vinyl records and would know how to avoid scratchs.

I remember in the 70s, my Dad having a Commodore PET 2000 in the house.

Man we thought we were living in the FUTURE!

Seems that printer was in light mode.

My mom used to bring home her 80lb portable computer and set the phone receiver on the computer hook to download the latest code every night and print it out on our dot matrix. I'm still astounded that our family slept so well during those years.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ for BBS Documentary. Excellent video!

Oh my gosh! I forgot all about those things. I remember Logo from my elementary school days. We did that all the time during some class. I can't remember which.

And Prodigy! Oh my god! I recently downloaded MadMaze. Then there were the NOVA "specials" on there. Man, I loved Prodigy.

I loved Mystery House! I never found the treasure, I think I got stuck in the attic trying to remove a brick? I remember when you typed in any 'bad' words, the program would say goodbye and close down.

I was less fortunate. I was born in India who had never seen a TV until 18. But when I got into computer school in a big city, they sat me in front of a terminal. It was some sort of Sun system donated to school by Sun Microsystems.
My first job after school was designing dialog boxes in Visual C++ 2, and later in 4.2, and the computer ran Windows 3.51 with 4 MB RAM and 180 MB hard disk. When they upgraded my RAM from 4 to 16, I sort of threw a party, just for myself and a buddy :).

You speedy speedsters crack me up. 300bps shoots text out at a perfect reading pace. Why would you need anything faster?

My first computer was just 12 MHZ with a 30 meg hard drive, 3.5 floppy drive, 1 meg Memory (but you could only use 640K), 4-Color CGA video card and monitor, 2400 baud modem with MS-Dos. It came with a free 9-Pin printer that was just faster than writing. (video above shows a 24 pin)

Everything has improved by about 10,000% in speed and durability. The only thing that hasn't changed must since the early 1990 is Unix/Linx.

I find it funny that Alex is acting like he's old or something! Yeah, I remember these things, but not from my childhood.

should he have included the abacus Miss? :P

Thanx a lot. Now I feel even older. I remember much of this and more.

Now you've made me miss my old 386... The "turbo" button made it

Thanks for the trip down Memory lane...oh and reminding me of how old I realy am F**kers :)

My wife, who is seven years my junior and wasn't all that interested in computers in her youth to begin with, has actually banned me from reminiscing about stuff like this...

I had an Amiga 500, then a 1200. I paid a small fortune (out of my allowance) for a 20 MB (yes, megabyte) harddisk and that was a cleap clone to start with. I've still got it and I've made an image of the WorkBench that runs on an emulator on my PC now. I still remember modems quite well: we had an extra telephone line installed and my uncle paid for that in exchange for me being his companies webmaster. I'd made the most Godawful website for his company: one very long page with job openings. Yes, I was one of the worlds first Webmasters, when that still meant something ;-)

Mind you, I kinda stopped learning about new stuff somewhere around the introduction of stylesheets and its gotten to the point I'm testing out a Mac these days, because I can't be bothered trying to get stuff to work. And I'm... 34.

Oh how I remember Prodigy! Thanks so much for mentioning it - I consider it the begining of my love for the internet yet no one else seems to get it.
I was the only one of my friends to have such 'internet access' - which meant that every one thought I was weird and didnt understand chatting via the 'instant messgenger' type program. I remember being able to change my screen name every other day (or everyday if I chose) because there were so few users it didnt really matter. What amazes me is that I did all this at around 11 or 12, and now I wouldnt even be able to do anything I thought was fun (joining chats with older users, randomly searching profiles and having mine searchable) with all the age restrictions. I still talk to one friend I met on Prodigy; we met by one of us randomly searching profiles for other users that lived in our area and
were similar age, we then moved to talking via AIM and now we usually communicate via Facebook!

You forgot to mention hard disks. My first PC (a 286, by the way) had an astounding 34 Mb of storage (yes, kids, it says "Mb", not "Gb"). My second hard drive (a Pentium 100) had a full Gb (just like the pendrive I have now in my pocket). After that, 3.9 Gb, 20 Gb and 80 Gb.
Ah, the good old times...

Actually CompUSA is still around, but they only have 24 stores left and are owned by TigerDirect.
http://www.compusa.com/

I had one of the original 128k Macs and bypassed the brandname IBM for a Panasonic Sr. Partner (a 45lb "luggable" portable computer)

Uh.... the 3.5" floppies in the original 128k Macs held >400k<, not 1.4mb. The OS, a small application like Write or Paint and a few documents would fit on them, but usually a LOT of disk-swapping was involved.

And yes, CompUSA has returned. TigerDirect from Miami has bought the name and are re-opening stores under the CompUSA name. They just opened one in West Palm Beach but I haven't been able to get to it yet....

aahhh...memories...*feeling nostalgic*

To pre-date the PC by just a little bit. How about how cool it was to up grade your calculator (Texas Instraments of course) each year before school started.

I remember LOGO! We used it in my second grade GT class. We had to draw an entire picture with different shapes using the turtle. I found it tedious at the time, but it'd pretty cool to remember.

The best thing about computer classes in elementary school, though, was playing Oregon Trail on the Apples after you finished your typing lessons.

It was 1982, I think. Canada's new lottery, Lotto 6/49, was about to commence operations, and I was one of the first computer operators. I actually helped to physically move the computers into the Computer Room.

It was a bigger job than you might think. Each of the 3 DEC PDP-1170's was the size of 5 soda machines, cost over $1 million, and had an ENTIRE MEG of RAM!

The Hard Drives were the size of washing machines, and took a stack of seven 14" discs in a tiered platter. The drives held 750 Meg.

We ran 4 provinces worth of retailer terminals off this system...which is probably the source of my frustration with bloated code. If we could do so much with so little, why do modern programs have to be so huge?

What? Those were 20 years ago? How about when computers were the size of a school building?

CSI, I seem to remember that for a short while after they first came out, some CDs at least came in protective cases. You’d shove the whole case into a slot, and the drive would remove the CD from the case for you so you never had to touch the CD.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of memory! I eventually upgraded to a Commodore Vic-20, and then a Commodore 64. Programs were saved on cassette tape before Commodore came out with a disk drive. My first modem was 300 baud; it seemed as if I could almost type as fast as the modem could download. The first commecial online service I was on was Quantum Link, which was strictly for Commodore computers. I never had as much fun with an online service as I did with Quantum Link. When I finally moved up to a PC, it had a whopping 640K of memory, and a 5MB hard drive.

Good article but some inaccuracies in there. Doom was certainly not unique in how id marketted it. There was a long tradition of shareware where the model was either
(a) give away and see if people will pay
or
(b) give away the first level and see if people will buy the others.
Wolfenstein is an obvious example since it was also by id.

Mystery house was certainly not the first computer game to contain graphics. It was the first text adventure to do so though.

Alex, you're such a pup.

In one place I worked we used a computer the size of a Honda Civic for testing microwave oven controller boards. The "drives" on that thing were as big as a jumbo pizza at Godfather's. Held about 100MB if I remember correctly. Or was it 10MB.

The first true PC I bought was an ancient PC XT. The hard drive had a problem where it wouldn't spin up when you first powered it on; a little percussive prompting (a whack to the side) would usually get it going. The first Mac I bought for home use was a second (or third) hand SE. It had 2MB RAM in it and a 20MB HD. I ran QuarkXPress on that thing, doing multi-page color layouts for commercial printing. Yes, multi-page color on a 9" grayscale monitor. No wonder my eyes are the way they are.

Before those two I had an Amstrad Word Processor -- basically an all-in-one computer with a green-on-black monitor, a floppy drive and a dot matrix printer. Ran some variant of C+ (I think) and used a weird proprietary floppy disk design. It got me through college though. And before that I had an Atari 2600 (I think); attempted some programming on it, but because I couldn't afford the floppy option, I used a cassette tape for data storage instead. Slow, slow, slow, then wait, wait, wait, then slow...

Another random memory... We had a Mac LCII, and I found a stellar deal to max out the RAM on that thing for $65. It had 4MB, and I added another 8MB (even though it'd only recognize 10). Just the other day I bought a 1GB stick of RAM for way less than that. One of the first things I had to do in my first tech support job in a print house was buy a replacement drive for a Mac Quadra 950. That 1GB SCSI drive cost well over $1,000.

Oh, also, I have an old Mac clone that I was able to rescue before my old employer sent it to the recyclers. It's a 68000 dash 30fx, basically a hot-rodded IIfx in a large case. That thing, when purchased new with a 19" CRT, a scanner and interface card and 96MB RAM cost over $40,000.

Cheaper, faster, more compact.

Hah! I remember some of this stuff from elementary school like the impact printer. It's funny how technology just sort of silently progresses. Before you know it, These marvels of the modern era are nothing but antiquities.

You forgot IBM's computing machines that the Nazis used to keep track of all the people they captured. It was archaic but the system was like the precursor to Excel, allowing them to categorize every single prisoner in terms of where they came from, what camp they went to, how they died, why they were captured (Jewish, Homosexual, Gypsy, etc). It was terrifyingly efficient for the Nazi regime and definitely qualifies as a computing system. Ah, technology.

My father still use his old dot matrix printer from 20 years ago. It's the best printer I have ever see in my life.

Pros: Easy to use, print clear readeable letters everytime without any mess, works with ink ribbon that almost never runs out of ink, cannot be destroyed

Cons: Takes a long time to print ( About 10 - 15 min for a page full of text ), can't print colors, can't details like facial detail very well, noisy

I got a Epson Stylus photo RX620 now and i'm afraid to use it because it drinks ink... litteraly... like some sort of printer who came back from a trip through the desert or something.

I had the old fashioned modem with the cradle that your phone handset sat in, it was 2400 baud and I thought it was the sh*t!

I wished I had kept an article that I read once, in Time magazine that said that with T1 speeds, the internet had reached its limit!

Thanks for the post!

I didn't play Mystery House (had King's Quest a couple of years later, I guess) but putting that aside, that was my life you just posted - from the 1980 PC clone to your even mentioning MUDs, which I had frankly almost forgotten. Thank you for reminding me of all those beautiful moments.

Well now that you have made me feel REALLY OLD.... actually I am feeling rather propped up: there aren't many references you made that I haven't used or didn't recognize (but where was my dear TRS-80?). I am a stay-at-home mom who has, apparently, been on the cutting edge all these years! I am so cool! I have to go tell my kids!

THANK YOU for compiling this beautiful post!

I believe the day I created a circle with the Logo turtle was the most technologically proficient day of my life. And I think this is the first time I've seen the Prodigy screen in color!

Oh, and I was using some very very old dot matrix printer paper I'd found in my classroom the other day to rip up for ballots in a classroom vote. The high school students were confused that the edges had to be ripped off!

I wasn't around at the time of these computers. I remember playing around with computers when they just started to advance into the windows 3.1 and 95 era. We had an old computer, it couldn't have been more than 50 Mhz with a few gigs of HD space. I was so excited when we got a modem for it. I played a lot of dos games, most of which I got on a free demo floppy disk I got in a bin at Best Buy. It had games like Jill of the Jungle, One Must Fall, and some fishing game. I also had another game, Space Chase 2 that I got at best buy for like ¢25. Tyrian is a game I really remember playing. I made a copy for my friend (Don't Copy that Floppy!) and we loved it. Someone ported it to the PSP and I play it all the time now!

Ahh, I remember my dad's 14.4 and how cool it was. We had Compuserve, and it was awesome. I started tinkering around with extra parts, building computers pretty young. I remember discovering that the Pentium I didn't need cooling at all. The damn thing doesn't know how to overheat. And those old video games were the best -- Space Quest and Commander Keen. Sierra made all the best games back then.

Ahh our old Toshiba MSX with 'Microsoft 1.0' from 1982, I think we got it in '88 (when i was 3) and it's still the best little computer ever, slot cartridge games and the
10 run
20 something
30 repeat
40 etc
programming language, I could never do anything special with it as a youngster but my brother managed to program a pretty addictive simple racing game using huge pixel blocks.. figures he makes money with computers now actually.

Thank you so much! i've been trying to find "LOGO" for so long. I forgot what it was called, but I remember using it as a kid in 2nd grade during library.

The C64 speaks for itself.
!

Haha I remember all that stuff. Funny not a lot of people know about BBS's. I also remember the first mouses that were a rolling ball on the keyboard. I thought they were "fun".

Geez, the first computer I worked on was a PDP 10 and you had to enter your program by flipping toggle switches.

Later, I used paper tape to record and enter programs.

The Commodore 64 with its cassette drive was a HUGE advance in technology!

I started primary school in 1970, I remember my dad being invited into the classroom a year or two later to show everyone the marvel that was his electronic 'pocket' calculator, no one in the class had seen one before!

By time I was 17 I went on to further education in one of the few schools that had decent computer technology. They had 4 terminals connected to a mainframe a few miles away via modem, it was some sort of business partnership with a few local schools. The modem was basically a device that the old fashioned telephone handles had to plug into.

In the computer room there were paper tape and punched card readers/writers for storage and programing.

Somewhere at my mom's house languishing in a closet is an old Mac Plus with 1K of RAM--but it would run the old original SimCity. Somewhat earlier, when I was a senior in high school we learned to program basic on a roomful of Apple II's (that used the floppy floppies). Those of us who mastered it got to go to programming competitions in Texas. Yes, we were about as popular as the math club or the Latin club.

Awww, I still have a Compuserve account. I'm like, the only person I know with one. My husband wants to get rid of them, but I like the retro. Also, did you know the first people to meet online, then get married met on CS? True story.

The game we played growing up was Mask of the Sun. And there was no way to save Raoul, which was very frustrating.

I also had these Choose Your Own Adventure-type books that required you to write in BASIC-provided programs to get clues. Neat.

Mask of the Sun:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/mask-of-the-sun

I tried to locate these books I was talking about, but couldn't find them online. Did I make this up in my head?

My favorite text-only game was Ballyhoo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballyhoo_(computer_game)

Well Eric seems to have stolen my thunder since I too had a Sinclair. Don't remember the model or even what it did. All I remember is it had a membrane keyboard. Then I too went to a Vic 20 and then up to a Commodore 64 and eventually a C-128 and finally a C-128D that had a built in floppy drive! Used to punch holes in the floppies with a specially built device made just for that. Course later I found out a regular hole punch would work just as well. I didn't understand why if one could use both sides of the floppies they didn't have two notches in them already. I heard the other side was not certified so using it might end up with bad consequences. Donno if that was true. I was on Prodigy also. Seems I hung out on the BBS for HOURS each day. Had a bunch of BBS friends. Even Started are area called Navy Breakfast. We all call it Plodigy since it was slow as molasses. If memory is correct they originally had no time limits but they later changed that probably because people like me used to log on for many hours a day. Am sure they finally realized they were losing money and went to time limits. I think we all bailed out when they did that. GGGG Somewhere along the line I was on Quantum Link. I ordered a huge soft back book from them that had tons and tons of software I could DL. I think that's was about all you could do on QL? Interesting side note. Some years later I decided to join AOL, or as those in the know called it "AO-Hell". I keep getting an error that said my credit card was already in use and finally had to call them. They told me they still had my CC info from when I was on Quantum Link which later on became AOL. (There's a trivia Q for you! GGG) I was also on something called GE-nie. It was owned by General Electric and some smart person decided to allow others to use their data links after regular working hours and on weekends. So they made some extra money on something that would have been sitting around and not being used. Don't remember exactly what I did on it. Think it was all BBS type stuff. Soooooooooooo that's some of my trip down memory lane. Oh yeah BTW, ref the cassette drive the Vic-20 used. It was nothing but a standard cassette player/recorder that they changed the speed on so a regular cassette machine wouldn't work and they could charge an outrageous price for the drive at the same time. Lastly, that was back when most of the Commodore software has some kind of copy protection on it. Which naturally brought about disks you could buy to crack the copy protection. Seem to remember they would list the programs each disk would crack. Illegal as Hell I'm sure but WTH. GGGGGG Back then I was retired from the Navy living on a Naval Air Station overseas so I didn't worry too much.

CUL

PS My lousy memory just stirred up something else.
Must have been related to the Vic-20. You could buy huge soft back books that had a TON of Commodore Basic
programs. Then you could spend hours and hours hand typing all this code into the computer and then saving it to a cassette. Used to take me AGES for one lousy program. Invariably they wouldn't work because all it
took was one wrong character and you were up the creek until you then went back and checked it out letter by letter which took even longer! The "good old days" of computing. GGGGGGGGGGG

Now I have MS Vista Ultimate (they forgot to add "piece of crap") which is about the most disgusting OS I've ever tried to use. This is called "progress"!

boy I feel old, I remember punch cards, IBM 11" floppies and time before windows.... dos anyone??? but thanks for the memories.

"Gettysburg: The Turning Point" on a Commodore 64!

Wow. I spent many days and nights playing that.

The first PC I bought was from PCs Limited -- the precursor to Dell (I think Michael Dell ran it out of his dorm room). I sprang for the full 640k of RAM (512 was standard) and opted for EGA graphics. So cool.

I also remember building a heathkit computer with my dad -- he sprang for 4k of RAM vs. the standard 2k, and I think he paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege. No monitor -- it had LEDs and you programmed it with switches.

Then again, I also remember when calculators cost hundreds of dollars. Three years later they were a pop tart prize.

Good times back then, when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth...

I want a t-shirt with that "Mystery House" picture

Aaah, this takes me back. One thing though: you forgot Oregon Trail! That game was my grade school introduction to computer games.
The sad thing is, that in another 10-20 years, things like the ipod, laptops, land lines, and other now-modern technology might end up on this same kind of list.

FIDONET! Man I loved the BBS days. Downloading my messages for that day. Good times. I still remember being in absolute awe when I wrote to someone in America and they WROTE BACK! Albeit it took about a week for my message to get their and their reply to make it back to me.

I really miss the BBS days. The net in all it's shiny glory just doesn't hold a candle to the excitement of those days. Remember calling up a BBS in Ireland to get the "Jesus on E's" demo on my Amiga.

Those truly were great days.

Anyone remember when you had to be Novell certified?
How about Lantastic?

Does anyone remember Commander Keen?

Wildnet Echo Mail ring any bells?

Wow. How nostalgic. Thanks. I remember all of this and I also had Prodigy. But how old does it make me to admit that the first computer I worked on (a shared one at my first job after college) used 8 by 8 floppy disks? There were 2 slots for these ginormous floppies on the side of the computer monitor. Come to think of it I think the monitor, hard drive, and keyboard were all one machine....

I would've put InaComp as the computer store and not CompUSA, but each his own.

The first computer I worked on was an Apple IIE.

SparkS, Quantum Link had games you could play. They had an online casino (no real money involved, just some kind of tokens), and an MMORPG of sorts. I forget what it was called, but you could wander around a virtual world, interact with other players, and buy and trade things including different heads for your avatar! You could buy a shovel and bury things, or dig up stuff other people buried. No leveling or combat, though.

What a great article! My first computer was an Apple II+ (I was working at Wang Laboratories back then as a COBOL programmer). When I finally upgraded to the 286 I was ftp'ing files (games)from funnet.fi. To download files I used Archie, Veronica or Jughead (yes, they ftp'ing software). Since there was no web, you didn't know what you were getting (you had to go by the file names)until you ran the downloded files. Yep... so much has changed. And it's been a real blast to have been along for the ride.

Great article, but Doom wasn't the first Shareware game (if nothing else, id's first earlier game Wolfenstein 3D was shareware and incredibly popular, but there were many shareware games before then also.) And Mystery House is far from the first computer game with graphics... maybe the first Apple ][ game with graphics at best.

the only thing that my first computer was capable of was running a Never Ending Story themed coloring book.

Moon: Was that by any chance a MicroProse game?
or maybe SS!? MP was my all time favorite simulation
company. I just tried to get Silent Service II to run on this POS Vista. No luck. Now I'm trying on an XP Pro system.

Eric: I vaguely remember that but that's about all. I suffer badly from CRS* disease.

Regards

* Can't Remember Squat

Where I live in central Pennsylvania, broadband Isn't available yet, and the fastest dialup connection we can get is 28.8

A standard modem rate is 56K even in Pennsylvania. You might want to try another service provider.

I am sad for you.

8-bits FTW!

READ ERROR B
Please rewind tape

also, the first computer game with graphics was the first computer game*, a thing called "space war" made wayyyyyy back in the sixties

* with the exception of computers playing chess and draughts

I was in a large singles group on Prodigy. We used to hold weekend parties in hotels where two hundred or more would show up, and one time Prodigy sent down its own representatives with a bunch of freebies. But then they started charging by the hour... We painstakingly moved the whole group to BBS, FidoNet. It was difficult for the less technical members and we lost a lot, but fortunately it wasn't long before we had Internet and IRC. The Prodigy screen above brought back some, er, interesting memories.

Step 1 - Atari PC with a plastic "soft" keyboard overlay. Step 2 - Radio Shack Color Computer (COCO) with a blinding 8 bit speed. BBS access with a 56k modem telephone. I loved all the old games (some with no graphics). Saving and loading programs was done on a cassette tape recorder. Then came the "advanced" soft floppy disks with a clunky so-called hard drive controller. Step 3 - RS 286 and learning RS DOS and basic programming. Step 4 - upgrade to a 486 machine, 60 mb internal HD(wow!). The biggest thrill then was MS DOS, learning it from scratch, writing your own menus and a sort of operating system for your own machine. Leisure Suit Larry, how I miss you. Todays "Instant Messaging" was begun way back in the beginning with the BBS access, just type away and switch your modem, send/recieve. You could even have a mailbox, no spam, no viruses, no advertising. Along came Bill Gates with his Windows, hello commercialism, say good bye to the good old days. Wish I kept my COCO 3 and all the floppy disk games. Oh yeah, most were pirated (early warez don't ya know)... Thanks for the memories...NiteOwl

My father was a teacher for business calculation. Before computer time (EARLY 70s), I had a lot of fun with a mechanical calculator. I still own it and I am sure that my understanding of algorithms origins from those number wheels turning in front of your eyes if you move the crank. If you wanted to do a division, you had to start from the highest number, turning the divider wheel backwards, substracting the divisor from the dividend once every turn, until a bell rang to tell you that the result was below zero. Then you turned it back one turn to bring it back into the positive, shifted to the next decimal number and so on... When he bought his first Sharp calculator, we all thought this would be sufficient for all calculations a person could possibly need to make in a whole life: sinus, cosinus, logarithms, all by the press of one button and without having to memorize all those many steps for calculating it just by using "+" and "-" in endless combinations...

I remember doing punch cards in college, as mine was one of the early unis to have an actual on-campus "computing center". Learning Fortran and watfor, what a hoot. 5 years or so later, I was using BASIC at work and wrote one of the early quality control cusum charting programs applications on some kind of HP machine, with RPN, of course. We bought an Apple IIc for home use, although I can't remember why.

My first IBM really was an IBM - IBM DX2. As I recall it cost nearly as much as my first new car ~$4K . 15 Megahertz, with a push button "turbo" to run at about 25 MHz!! About as much memory as a cheap cell phone.

In the early 1980's I got hooked up at work - which utilized a mainframe and a field of IBM dumb terminals. My job required access from home, so I had a 70 pound dumb terminal (372 ??) on my bedroom floor. Acoustic phone coupler at 300 baud. I could literally watch each letter or number form on the screen.

Now I complain because my work system takes 30 seconds to boot up, and I have a 1 Tbyte HD at home.

I guess I've dated myself clearly enough......

Memories, eh.. I joined the PC bandwagon in 1989 with 386sx machine made by Osborne. Exact model was MiStation16, it was pizza box -styled and came with whopping 40Mb hard disk. 16 MHz and 4Mb of ram were amazing improvement against my (still trustworthy) C64. It had 3,5" floppy drive, which accepted both 720kb and 1,44Mb disks. Later on, my storage capacities upgraded due bearing failure up to 80Mb. There was also a program called 2Format, which allowed to store 2Mb of data to a single 3,5" floppy. That was great!

I did my first complete system install was MS-Dos 6.22 + Win 3.11 at age of seven after I messed thigs up with DoubleSpace. Boy, my father was angry because of that and equally surprised when I fixed it all by myself. 4Dos rocked my world of MS-Dos and I've missed it since Win95 came along. Until recently, of course: Linux fixed my aching.

Cool games from that era were (but not limited to): Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D, Street Rod 1&2, Ducktales, One Must Fall 2047 and F1 GP. I also recall lots of Autodesk Animator & Triton FastTracker usage.

BBS:es surely were the thing and we ran our own BBS with my friend too. Our bbs was replicated on two different machines and depending from my or my friend's parents, we switched the location of our 9600 baud modem between our houses.

I blame my current level of geekism to that 386 and my father. Thank you both. Since our next computer was 1st gen Pentium, I had to learn to code and entertain myself with an aging system. Ultimate consequence of that is my current job coding with Delphi and C.

Your screen grab of 'Doom' looks more like Duke Nuke'em... Doom was more like Wolfenstein, more pixelly. That's Duke in the little picture at bottom...he'd shift his eyes back and forth.

My first machine... RatShak Model 1. Cassette... 16K RAM. Boy I had fun hacking that thing... with help from TrashUG. First job had a Data General Nova 1600... boot using front panel switches to load paper tape, then that loader loaded the 9-track mag tape application (radio telescope, UTRAO).

Haven't seen Crystal Cavern mentioned... xyzzy and all that. "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all different"... my first text adventure. I think I first played it on a PDP11.

Still got the Model1, as well as a PCsLimited clone with Windows 2.0. HS science project used relays to count to 7 in binary... got third place (!) out of only three competitors at regional. Bet that's changed...

what set aside doom to the other fps programs was that it was the first fps shareware that allowed for network playing - that was made it so fun.

my first computer was a ABC 80 Luxor Z80 with 16K RAM 1977, it cost in those days the equivalent of 2000 US. I spent lot of time hacking in listings in BASIC and learned programming that way. Then around 1986 I got a PC taiwanese clone with no hard drive but with a 5"1/4 floppy drive. Later that year I got a discarded 10Mb harddrive from Ericsson - yes they did PC's back then) but it was damaged and had only 7MB usuable bytes, but for me that was enormous! Remember borland turbo basic/ turbo pascal, now that was real compilers!

About 12 years ago my autistic son showed a talent for working on his school's Commodore 64, so his father decided to buy us a PC and pay for "Windows lessons" for me. Before that, my last encounter with computers was in high school in Data Processing class. All I remember is filling in boxes on data cards with a pencil, feeding them into a HUGE machine that literally took up a whole room, and waiting breathlessly as it spit out the results. Magic, it was. Never guessed all these years later I'd be an award-winning webmistress! An awfully old webmistress, apparently, but still.

I think I started with a cheap EduComp(?) plastic-cam non-electric 'computer' around 1977. Then in 1980-81 I built a Heathkit H8-H19 system - 1 MHz 8080 processor, 16Kb RAM (quickly upped to 80Kb), an octal (base-8) keypad, a 300 baud modem. And three 91k 5.25" floppy drives for US$1200, for total storage of 273k, just enough for WordMaster and the MS Cobol-80 compiler with CP/M 1.4.

(My wife, with no previous soldering-circuitboarding experience, successfully built the HeathKit H14 printer. But she was already a professional programmer, proficient with wire-programmed circuit cards and punchcard coding, on mainframes where data-drum rotational latency needed to be considered in I/O timings.)

I quickly moved up to a Heath-Zenith HZ90 system (twin 4 MHz Z80 processors, MP/M multitasking, twin 360k floppy drives) and a 1200-baud! modem, blazing fast! Then I went hogwild and got a Godbout-Compupro S100 box with an 8 Mhz Z80, 258kb RAM, twin 1200kb 8" super-floppy drives, and even a 5Mb hard disk. Ooh, expensive...

Then some other CPM/MPM systems, including the nifty little PMC MicroMate, and a couple workhorse Televideo semi-portables. And Sinclair ZX80s and ZX81s, for which I commercially wrote financial software. And an Atari 800, a TI99a, a PET-20(?), And various other boxes and terminals, details of which I've forgotten. Networking and interoperability? Rudimentary at best.

And then I started on PC clones and had to leave all that old stuff behind, except some ANSI terminals as remotes. I tried an original Mac and was completely unimpressed. It's been downhill ever since. Now I stick to WinTel laptops, so I'm not tempted to constantly upgrade minor hardware and rewrite BIOS's and tweak interfaces. Actually accomplishing stuff - imagine that!

Nice post and thanks for the mention of my "nostalgic" aerhm... historic & extinct art preserving website :).

Hey, you picked my (personal) favorite ANSI from all the hundreds that are available on my site.. sweet!

I extended the content of my website a lot and its worth paying another visit. Some of the new highlights..

http://www.roysac.com/bbs.asp
http://www.roysac.com/learn
http://www.roysac.com/asciinudes

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

I was scouring the net to find infomation about my compudyne 486. Your site answered an important question about this computer as I didn't know that it was a 'house brand' for Compustore. You bring back memories of my first computers, and learning to use them. Thanks for making the effort to put down your thoughts

NCSA Mosaic was not the first graphical web browser. That honor goes to WorldWideWeb which was created a good two years earlier.

What a great story! So many memories came up for me reading this article. I learned to use computers in the mid-1980s, on an IBM similar to the one pictured at the top. The first thing I had to learn was to type! I played a sort of video/typing tutor program that was similar to an old Atari game. I would sit at the computer for hours playing that so I would learn how to type properly.

It was many years later when I finally enrolled in college, and majored in Automated Office Management. The primary operating system then was DOS 6, and all of the software was made for DOS. Back then, you could only run one application at a time - running multiple applications was unheard of, and when Windows 95 came out, I couldn't believe someone could run more than one app at a time.

Needless to say, as far as Windows was concerned, I felt it was making computers way too easy for the common person to use. I believed the mystery should be preserved, and keep computers complicated using command line only. I would exit Windows and use DOS anytime I could.

I also had a Commodore 64 as a kid, and had one of the first Pong games. What fun!

I remember seeing the first 66MHz computers, thinking they were blazing fast with 14.4 modems and 32MB of RAM.

Life was grand when technology was brand new...

.. aix... éramos tan jóvenes.. so long... now we live 4 this stuff