What Are Your Favorite Computing Memories?

aussersterne asks: "Every now and then while reading Slashdot comments, I realize that most people have no idea that -the network was the computer- for decades before Amazon.com and Google ever appeared, taking for granted the rather boring state of commodity computing that dominates the marketplace today. Unix and dial-up shell users remember bang-paths, 110 baud BBSing, 'luggable' computers, UUCP, DC600 OS media, VT100s connected to dumb terminals, and 1152x900 8-bit color web browsing before most PC users had even shelled out for their first copy of Windows 3.x and the free 'serial mouse' it included. Middle-aged geeks, what are your favorite recollections from from the '80s and '90s computing, network, and hardware world, as full of platforms and innovation as it was? Which computer system is still 'your baby' all these years later? Anybody still have a running Sun2? A running FHL UniQuad? Anybody still use KA9Q?"

Comments

Woof, Woof!

[dave-tx]

Fidonet! And to a lesser extent, the Fido and Opus BBS software.

I thought this was a very clever way to propagate messages between BBS's. I guess I graduated from Fidonet to Usenet around 1990...if one considers that graduating, and not simply moving in to The Project.

Re:Woof, Woof!

[ag0ny]

Indeed. I had a Fidonet node running at home for several years (LuzNET 2 BBS, 2:343/163). I was using FrontDoor + RemoteAccess, until I switched to OS/2 and replaced FrontDoor with MainDoor/2.

I miss those days. Each sysop was responsible for the users posting from his BBS, so there was little trolling back then. The quality of the Fidonet message areas was very, very high: you knew people by their names, moderators did their jobs (or they were voted out).

Unfortunately, I had to stop running the BBS when I moved out of my parents' home. That was when Internet was already taking over, so there wasn't so much activity as in the good days anymore. It went from 60-70 calls/day to around 20-30 and just around 50 active users.

Now, with the Internet it is... well, different.

C64

[rmjohnso]

Though I'm not middle aged, I do have tons of fond memories of sitting in front of my Commodore 64 with my dad, learning to load programs and playing games with him. The two I remember the most are Threshold and Falcon Patrol.

Discovering the BBS

[Dolly_Llama]

This is entirely age dependendent I suppose, but the great Eureka moment for me was discovering the BBS circa 1990 from a friend, then on my own figuring out how to connect.

This might not seem like much, but it was my first independent project with a PC and I was 13.

btw, that first bbs was "Saimin" in Hawaii, and I to this day I still use the same handle.

Re:Discovering the BBS

[Pengo]

Yup, I remember the first time I realized there was other people that where as fanatical about communicating with others as I was. The world of BBS opened up my eyes to shareware and other tools that I had no idea existed as well.

Door games anyone?

The local Eau Claire, WI BBSUG was a bunch of old Hams. I made friends that I will remember for the rest of my life through that community.

The BBS community played a large role in to decide that computer programming and networking was definately where I wanted to be as I got older, and I can say with confidence that the BBS world changed who I am today to a large scale what I am doing and have been able to achieve.

I look back on those BBS years with the fondest memories of learning and exploration.

Sun2 ? ..feh

[L. VeGas]

I don't think a computer has been made that replicates the joy I had working with the Difference Engine.

Babbage was kind of a pain, though.

The day I got my 2400 baud modem...

[Txiasaeia]

...was my happiest computer moment. One megabyte took 77 minutes to download. My second-happiest moment was after I had bought MegaTraveller 1 for the PC, took it home, and discovered it required a hard drive. My Tandy 1000 (8088, 4MHz, 640k RAM, 2x5.25 LD drives) didn't have a hard drive, so through trial and error I had to put the required files on four floppy disks and insert them at appropriate moments (disk 1 to start up, disk 2 for the first four planet systems, disk 3 when I enter the spaceport, disk 4 for the last four planet systems). Getting around that hard drive problem was absolutely thrilling for me.

Memories

[CokeBear]

My favorite computer memories

#1: The smell of my ORIC-1 ..

[torpor]

.. as I unpacked it for the first time from its happy foam box, plugged it into the telly, and proceeded to clik-clik away on its beautiful little chiclet keys. oh, how i love that oric-1, even still today.. trips back home to the family wouldn't be the same without a quick crank of the treasurebox in the attic, a "10 PING; ZAP; SHOOT; EXPLODE; GOTO 10" or two ..

#2: Then, a few years later, the same smell (only much, much, much more intense) when I unpacked my first MIPS Magnum pizzabox, placed it on my desk, watched it boot, and prepared to port my code to it .. oh my, how the raw power of me, professional C programmer, felt that day.

#3: Booting Yggdrasil-Linux on my ol' 386 about 2 years after the Magnum experience ..


#4: booting new hardware i had a small hand in developing for the first time.

Apple //e

[molo]

300 baud pulse dialing modem on my Apple //e.. that only worked with a 40-column text all-caps terminal program.. no ansi, no vt100 emulation, just a dumb terminal. What joy.. and I was so behind the times..everyone had 2400 baud modems. Hah!

-molo

Poorly designed computer rooms...

[Undertaker43017]

I used to work for a company that forgot to include their computer room air handlers when they spec'd their generator load, so whenever we had a power failure it was a mad dash to the computer room to shut the VAX's down before they "fired".

I was reminded of this years later, when working for a different company, I walked in one day and the doors to the computer room were wide open! One of the mainframe system guys saw me and literally went white, he said "Oh... we had an air handler failure and forgot to call you. I hope the HP's are OK" I said well they should be, I checked them out, sure enough they had sensed the high temperature and shut themselves down (of course it did expose that my alerting system was not working correctly, in all situations). The mainframe had not faired as well, not sure what they fired, but it was expensive, as I remember. ;)

My fondest memory...

[drakaan]

Doing this to all the PET's and CBM's in the computer lab (my syntax is a bit rusty, so forgive obvious bugs):

10 POKE 144,88
20 ? CHR((INT(RND(1))*255)+1)
30 GOTO 20

Good ol' "POKE 144,88" disables the "run stop" key on PET, CBM, VIC-20, C-64, and C-128 computers...not sure if it works on the various emulators out there.

Frustrating lessons

[chh1]

Oddly enough, I found that my favorite memories of computing are from the many times I had to figure out exactly what went wrong with Windows 95/98.

While I realize that this shows me to be far younger than many Slashdotters, as well as much less technically skilled, I think I ended up learning a lot about how to fix many basic computer problems. I may not be a "computer guru" or even a "133t h4x0r", but it did get me up to what would probably be considered a modest level of understanding.

It may have been extremely frustrating, but I look back upon it kindly for allowing me to learn.

Pr0n!

[linzeal]

My fondest memory of BBS was the upgrade from 2400 to 14.4 for me that made surfing 20-30k porn images of scanned magazines (this is before porn sites) 'real time' which meant I could view one Jpeg while downloading the other and switch between them without losing my er concentration.

Cutting class and getting credit...

[TopShelf]

It all started for me in 2nd grade, when our teacher (good ole Mr. Cunningham) would bring in his TRS-80 and let kids play with the computer, based on their in-class performance. If you did well on a test or quiz, you got a sticker which could be turned in for computer time, which was a real novelty at the time (1979).

One day, he had us type in a BASIC program out of a magazine (BYTE? Softside? can't recall) to display a digital clock on the screen - each kid would do a couple lines, then the next would take his turn as class continued on. When it came to my turn, I just kept on trucking, and the teacher didn't say anything. We broke for recess, and after coming back in, I went straight to the computer and kept chugging away, as the teacher resumed class. Once I finished the program, I tried to RUN it, but there were typo's which then proceeded to fix using the line editor (I had seen Mr. C do this before), until I got the thing working. It was probably one of the best school days I ever had, and it was all thanks to his "letting the line out" and giving me the room to explore.

At the next parent/teacher conference he told my parents about the experience, and that he hadn't seen a kid that age with that level of focus to finish and debug the program for such a long time (boy, has that changed over the years). My grandmother got me a computer for Xmas that year (Atari 400), and things pretty much changed forever from that point forward. It was a pivotal moment for me, and I'll always have to give credit to a great teacher (public school, btw) for providing that opportunity.

Re:Good old high school.

[ReverendLoki]

Joystick ports, bang paths and gender changers. Ah, the fading of youth :).

Fear not, for there are still many bars in most major cities where you can relive all of this again.

Er, or are we talking about two different things?

Re:ah, memories...

[Chemical Serenity]

Heh, okay, okay...

I used to hang out in this IRC channel. There was some girl I was trying to get with was and she was interested in it, so I will honestly say I was just in there to kill some time and see if I could get some play. THAT one turned out to be a spoiled little bratchild that needed to be kicked to the curb, but it just so happened my future wife was in the same channel. This was about the same time that netscape first came on the scene... gopher was still the search tool of choice, and Twinsock over windows 3.1 was the standard way of getting online for most peeps. She was plagued by a bad connection and surly tech support from her university, so I would help her out with problems.

We became friends. Nothing more though, as she lived in Nova Scotia and I was in Vancouver... and that's the way it stayed for a couple years. We talked regularly in between her studying for her masters in English.

Now, a small cadre of us became regulars in this channel, but 95% of us were from the west coast. My future wife was about the only one who was out east... so she got on a plane and came out to Vancouver (ostensibly to check out schools to finish her post-graduate studies, but mostly just to come party with some online friends). I had the use of a car and was relatively near by the airport, so I was tasked with a collection of 'virtual hugs' I was supposed to give her from a bunch of the other channel denizens when I met her. I had a list written down with "hugs from: xxxxx yyyyyy zzzzzz" ... and by the time we got through that list of hugs, we both knew that something more was going to happen, and pretty quick. ;)

So, she just came out west and sorta... stayed. We've lived happily ever after, our 10th 'anniversary' is this labour day (although we only got married 2 years ago). A few years back I moved with her and the kids back out to Nova Scotia, as all her family is out here.

The End. Romantic in a highly geeky way, huh? ;)

ARPANet

[GCP]

Those aren't old memories. [stroking my imaginary gray beard...] I forget how young Slashdotters tend to be.

I fondly remember using the ARPANet as a young defense contractor before they let all you riff-raff in and renamed it the "Internet". In those days, it wasn't all about porn, science fiction, and demanding rights to download hip hop for free. It was about particle physics, science fiction, and demanding the right to use MACSYMA for free. Well, okay, there was ASCII porn.

Ah, those were the days....