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Slashdot Asks: Did You Have a Shared Family Computer Growing Up? (theverge.com)
theodp writes: "Long before phone addiction panic gripped the masses and before screen time became a facet of our wellness and digital detoxes," begins Katie Reid's article, How the Shared Family Computer Protected Us from Our Worst Selves, "there was one good and wise piece of technology that served our families. Maybe it was in the family room or in the kitchen. It could have been a Mac or PC. Chances are it had a totally mesmerizing screensaver. It was the shared family desktop." She continues: "I can still see the Dell I grew up using as clear as day, like I just connected to NetZero yesterday. It sat in my eldest sister's room, which was just off the kitchen. Depending on when you peeked into the room, you might have found my dad playing Solitaire, my sister downloading songs from Napster, or me playing Wheel of Fortune or writing my name in Microsoft Paint. The rules for using the family desktop were pretty simple: homework trumped games; Dad trumped all. Like the other shared equipment in our house, its usefulness was focused and direct: it was a tool that the whole family used, and it was our portal to the wild, weird, wonderful internet. As such, we adored it." Did you have a shared family computer growing up? Can you relate to any of the experiences Katie mentioned in her article? Please share your thoughts in a comment below.
By not having an internet connection.
Sorry, I come from the time of the shared family phone. Hardwired to the wall, without even a connector. Sometimes shared with neibors as well... 8-)
When I got a computer, no one else saw any reason to use it. Years later, yes, but not then.
We didn't have a shared family computer, but we had a rock and some sticks. After hauling water 50 miles from the nearest creek, eating our small meal of dandelion roots, and sweeping the dirt floor to clean up, we would then sit cross-legged in a circle and roll our family rock back and forth with the sticks for a few hours on end. Such fond memories. Those were the good ol' days.
No one, and I mean NO ONE touches my floppies! They could have the computer, though.
I'm from before that time of shared family computers.
I bought and hacked and built my own computer equipment. My electronics hobby was considered odd and too expensive. So I worked, saved, scrimped and scrounged. The first 'real' computer I bought was one of the very early Exidy Sorcerer computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exidy_Sorcerer). I had used a KIM-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1) and a Apple I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I) at school. I went to college during high school where I used punch card computers and PDP-11. In some ways when I bought my first one, the Sorcerer, it was a step down, except I got the whole thing to myself and I could open it up and hack it, which I did, adding memory, more I/O, tape data storage (my own version, not the bought one). It was great fun.
Later after I left the house my parents started buying family computers and then still later computers for each of my seven siblings as they went off to college. Prices came down and the computers became more mainstreamed.
I assume you mean nethack, and why dont you still play it? ;) ;)
https://www.nethack.org/
3.6.1 is out these days
Remembered the shared family TV? I barely can.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I had a shared family computer, way back in the 90s (not old enough to have cool hacking stories about 80s era tech). But what was protected? Everything that is nasty about the internet was true then, just in lesser form. It's just the case that everyone is online now, rather than a smaller subset of people who were more aware of technology. The irony is that the more anonymous the internet was, the nicer and safer it was. My thought is 90% of what is nasty online is because everything is less anonymous. Back in the 90s, when you were cooldude69 and talking to a guy pretending to be coolchick98, what harm could come of it? It's only when it becomes real life and you start giving real addresses that problems start creeping in. Doxxing and harassment isn't relevant when you could disappear and start again. Like on slashdot, my UID is 9 billion, but I could have been UID 42, get in trouble, delete the account, and disappear. Of course, a fully anonymous net will let a lot of fringe views, conspiracies, and nasty stuff fester, but that stuff will always be present.
It was an Apple IIc. There wasn't much concern of things being snooped on since we each had our own floppy disks and we could take those from the computer and hide them. There was no "online" with that computer. At the time it was technically possible to get connected to the early internet but phone charges and the cost of a modem made that not feasible.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Feels old while thinking about the clone-286 he used running DOS and then desqview/286 after having upgraded his apple-II.. :)
Then feels a bit sorry for the kids these days who missed out on such a golden age
The reason we weren't so obsessed before was that the internet was slow, and Windows was garbage and crashed all the time. If we had fast internet back then, I would have waited until late at night when everyone was asleep before using the computer.
Did You Have a Shared Family Computer Growing Up?
Yup, tucked away in a special room on a special computer desk like a statue of the Buddha in one of those little temples in the Japanese countryside. Who didn't? Most gamers I know still have a little shrine in their domicile where they keep their 'gaming rig'.
In junior high, we had Teletypes and Decwriters with acoustic coupler modems (300 Baud) for access to the DEC TSS-8 system shared by my whole school system. The TSS-8 had sixteen dial-in ports. We had to reserve time on a terminal a week in advance. Even then, all of the phone lines to the system's computer might be busy and we might never connect during our sign-up time. We had to store our assembler, Fortran, and Basic programs on paper tape. The 128kB of disk space was reserved for teachers.
Home computers? I was almost out of college by then.
We had a shared television, one of the first color models on the block. When the parents wanted the channel changed or the volume adjusted they called out "Hey boy! Channel Two!", usually followed by "You make a better door than a window. Move your ass!"
On the up side, I learned to work the tube tester at the drug store and went on to have a career in electronics before it got moved to Taiwan.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
I was a teenager when the MIT Altair 8800 came out, so no shared computer.
I still remember our first computer. Core Duo with DSL. Only 2GB of RAM. Didn't even have a SSD. Pathetic.
Farm kid, did not have a shared family phone LINE until '68 Before that we were the 6 ring pattern. My neighbor was 5.
Shared computer? No. Mine. Built by wire wrapping IC together and $400 Z-80A 4Mhz. Switches and LED. Buuld my own hex display panel and keypad. Later added burned out HP keyboard - the system key was stuck... drilled it out. And using "TV Video Cookbok" added a 24x80 screen. All code was hand entered. You learn ASM to Hex conversion in your head. That was REAL programming. Later IBM XT, then got wife 486dx33 4MB and the network started.
My SWTP 6800 was for myself alone. Ditto the Capital E 286 that came after it. And the NeXTStation after that....
You try telling the kids that these days, and they'll never believe you.
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Leaving work systems out of it,
First home computer was my PDP-11/73 running BSD Unix 2.8/2.9. Dialup on a 1200 Baud modem and could connect through the TAC to the arpanet for FTP and telnet access. Never did configure email. This was shared between my wife and me. Then came usenet with UUCP. Now I had email and bunches of newsgroups on netnews and easy connection to the university's Vax. Finally, TCP/IP came along and the 11/73 gave way to a sequence of Intel PCs running Windows initially and then Linux as it became available. By then we had multiple PCs, one for each family member sharing the now-56Kbaud modem through my machine. There were a few moves into Windows for example as the youngster seemed to need something special for school. But Linux/Unix has always done what I need better than the offerings from microsoft. So now I am posting from a Fedora-based system running on Intel. A low-power system does gatewaying, local DNS, firewalling, etc through the DSL line for a variety of desktops, laptops, Ipads, Rasberry Pi's for playing...
I wonder what I will be running tomorrow?
We had a shared computer, initially a Commodore 64, then an IBM clone. I also had an IBM PS/2 and Tandy 1000 to myself (salvage/hand-me-down from my grandfather who worked for Digital). Started at 4, with the BASIC reference manual (PET BASIC), and went from there (library books at first).
The best parts were the phone line battles with my parents. We had two phone lines, so I'd secretly wire an extension from one, down in the basement, and run it aaaaall the way upstairs. Then, it'd be discovered by phone or ISP logs or physical search... and we'd do it all over again. I'd use any sort of free ISP when I couldn't use Q-link (later AOHell).
Wow I feel old. I had two Televideo 910 terminals given to me when I was a kid. I had a Tandy 6000 M68K based machine running Xenix (yes, Xenix, on an M68K) and I used short-haul modems to get the terminals in the house to work on my Tandy 6000. You could log in to the Xenix box from the console or either of the terminals.
A screensaver you say? I guess I could have hacked up something when cat'ed to the tty produced some ASCII art. Just get off my lawn.
I have 3 brothers. Our dad got a little timex that we all messed around with - stored everything on audio cassettes (which he likely found funny because he had a bunch of old computer tape reels from work that we used the cases to store hot wheels and such in). Not too long after we had a commodore 64 which was incredibly awesome. We programmed (really) basic BASIC stuff on that (and played a lot of games). Then we finally got a PC - the first of which was "dad's" but we could use it. I clearly recall installing doom2 on it - and having to uninstall it each time - because 15 MB was too much space to take up. That was followed by the specifically "family" pc that sat in the most public spot possible and was to be shared by all with "homework" always having priority.
Copy con program.exe
Enter the bytes with Alt-keypad.
Klingon coding.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Too soon. You were supposed to top it with a story of sitting in Mom's puddles and returning her massive and diverse toys to their storage boxes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Good grief no..
I bought my first computer when I had just barely graduated from college. (TRS-80 model I) No one else in my family even knew how to turn it on or what to do with it. My nephew came over and wrote a "game" - i.e. a random number generator that determined whether you survived a WWII bombing mission. Now he is a System Admin for a hospital and still can't program his way out of a paper bag - er - wet paper bag with a sharp knife.
My son had his own computer since we decided to use my bonus money to buy a off brand 486 box, he inherited my 286. Once he got enough money he bought all the components and has built out several fire breathing monsters that leave my boxes, seven of them, in the dust. (He is a artist/trouble shooter for a game company).
I still have the TRS-80 model I with its monitor, expansion box and a "flippy" drive out in the garage.
My TRS-80 model I was in my room. I spent hours learning to program on it and playing games before the Apple II came out. That had a modem and I was able to connect to BBSs and Compuserve. Then I went downhill.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
We started with a shared computer, but when I discovered BBSes and became a total addict, I got my own so the rest of the family could play Where in the World is Carmen San Diego unmolested.
When I had the 4th phone line installed my parents started to worry...
WTF is this Cosmo magazine? Is it a homework assignment?
This place is going to shit....
I ran a large BBS in upstate New York with tons of door games, file areas, message boards, and FIDOnet. It all started with our Tandy 1000 PC that had two floppy drives and no hard drive. In 1988 I managed to trade some stuff I had for an ENORMOUS hard drive - 40 MEGAbytes, that miraculously worked in the Tandy. IIRC it was a Miniscribe 8450. The actuator made the coolest sounds.
g=c800:5 and a few keystrokes later, I had space for my first BBS. I ran a piece of software called Phoenix RCS at first, but transitioned to WWIV later as the BBS grew. I ended up on Wildcat, because all the BBSes in that time ended up on Wildcat. I had 4 incoming lines at the height of it all in 1989, but pared it back to two as the 90s rolled around and BBSes started falling off in popularity. I finally pulled the plug in 1994 when I was only getting a few calls per day and there was clearly no more interest in BBSing in the area.
I often think about setting up a terminal BBS again, but it's just not the same without... that sounds.... screeeeeeeeeeeee .. beeeeeee .ksshhhhhhhhhh... CONNECT 2400
Those were an incredibly fun and enriching 6 years though, and I met some of the coolest people. I will always have fond memories of growing up in the BBS age. You young whipper snappers are really missing out on the earliest dawn of the age of communication and data. I would encourage you to see the BBS documentary. It's a great watch.
I hope this has been a fun, reminiscent story for a lot of you slashdotters. Take care.
NO CARRIER
I spent many a late night hour playing Moria and Trade Wars 2002.
That was right before Windows 95 came out. Windows 3.1 was king of the affordable desktop. Then Windows 95 came out.
Shared computer pif, my mum has a saying "first up, best dressed"
Yep. First family computer was a Packard Bell, it came with the Packard Bell Navigator GUI. I remember playing Chex Quest on it. A few years later I got my own personal computer, a used IBM of some sort, running Windows 95 if I remember correctly. Some time after that I got my first Macintosh. At one point I had a PC running Linux, a PC running Windows, and a Macintosh running side by side. I think that was around the time I got a Diamond Monster 3D II branded, 3DFX Voodoo 2 graphics card.
When I was growing, up?
I was grown up and going to college before the first PC saw the light of day.
I did share a comp with my wife after college, for a few years.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
my family pc is at the living room, right beside the tv so that everyone knows what everybody is doing with it. helps to keep some filth off the net, but great too when you see my son doing stupid things in fortnite.
When I was growing up, a useful 'home computer' was not something that existed. But my father worked for IBM. I was in high school in the late 70's and on a number of occasions dad brought home an IBM 5100 for us to play with. The 5100 was a portable computer that had BASIC and APL built into it. There was a toggle switch on the front and you could switch it from BASIC to APL before powering it on to have it be a machine running either language. It had tape cartrige mass storage.
We played 'Star Trek' on it among other things. It was definitely a family experience.
Incidentally (or not) the first IBM PC was designated the Model 5150.
With a message from the UK, one word at a time slowly displaying on a CRT.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What a relatively recent first-world "problem".
I had a shared slide-rule. Literally. Till I got my own. https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Then I advanced to programmable calculators and punch cards.
Seriously, where do these pundits come from?
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I can remember the shared family tv, its the one in the living room, where the family still watch tv together at times.
For some it's still not completely gone, but nearly. Lifestyle changes, everybody has their own schedule, technology changed, network TV is fading fast. The living room itself is fading out as real estate continues to outpace wages. Today the biggest screen in the house (for those fortunate enough to have one) is in the family room, not the living room, and most probably spends more time running console games than network TV. Couples watch TV together, sometimes, maybe. Everybody else splits up and does their own thing.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That's one of the reasons I wanted a TRS-80 when it came out. The was only $500. Still a small fortune but at least it was in sight.
Does Pong count?!?
No, but a Family Computer does. (In the west, it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short.)
Hash tags on Slashdot is a war crime.
You get to spend life in prison with Trump. But since you're obviously in love with him it is a happy ending.
I was the only one in my family who ever used the computer. It was mine.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
There was a very small window of time where computers were so expensive that a family could only afford one and where there was the internet.
Remember, however, that "could only afford one" and "doesn't see it as important enough to justify owning more than one" are both factors at play here. This is especially true when none of the adults are really computer literate, and sometimes brag about this.
When I look at what people gladly pay for certain consumer electronics devices today (especially smartphones), I think back to when I was growing up... Back then, the same prices would have *never* been considered a justifiable expense in the same way.
Seriously? The IBM 360/50 mainframe was introduced when I was 10. A computer that a family might own wasn't a thing until I was out of college, or almost out.
I remember my uncle and his Altair. Apparently it was fairly common with the computer students (at the time considered a stream within the maths program) to build their own. Later he got an Apple II and a year or two later my folks got an Amstrad (English competitor to the Apple II and C64)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
One of these perhaps?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
The first family computer I can recall was a TI 99-4a, but I was perhaps five years old and I really only knew about the cartridge games. TI Invaders, Early Learning Fun, a racecar game, and maybe one or two others. My older brother using the ROM BASIC to prompt me to type in my name, and then to print my name over and over again was something I still remember feeling astonished about. Ahh, the days of 40 GOTO 20 loops...
My elementary school had TRS-80s, and I don't remember much except we played boring math games on them, and we were warned to never ever press the orange button.
Later on we upgraded to the Apple IIgs (after the school got a set of Apple IIe systems, no coincidence there), which was a beautiful little system for its time. We even had the color dot-matrix Imagewriter II printer, and we printed our own birthday and holiday cards, and even some family newsletters. I had a pretty decent set of software, and it got a lot of use. We were all very disappointed that the hardware line was discontinued not even a year after our investment, but it meant we were soon able to get a lot of discounted software that was pretty decent. Space Quest I & II, The Print Shop, The Newsroom, Silpheed, Kings Quest 3, Wings of Fury, Pinball/Adventure/Music Construction Set, Final Assault (there's an easter egg in there for a unique sound track I've never found on Youtube), so many others I'm forgetting....
The next family PC was a Packard Bell 386SX in the early 90s, my entry into the MS-DOS world and away from Apple. That's the time when I first used BBSes, then Prodigy, and eventually Internet access between that and the Pentium 133 we got several years later. They were always situated in the shared room, though once we got the Pentium system I was allowed to have the 386 in my bedroom. Not that I could really get up to much mischief; a 130MB hard drive 1MB of RAM, a hand-me-down 9600-baud modem, and its inability to even play MP3s severely curtailed what I could do on it. I remember the sales guy saying we'd never fill up 130MB. Took me about a year. That OS got trashed and rebuilt more times than I can count, but the original HD never failed until I was done with the desktop for good.
But its limited capabilities in no way prevented me from long nights spent MUCKing into my high school years, after I bought and paid for my own second phone line.... I wish we had kept the Apple IIgs in the family, though. Even now there are songs and sounds from games and such that I miss, and emulators don't do it justice to my memory.
When I look at what people gladly pay for certain consumer electronics devices today (especially smartphones), I think back to when I was growing up... Back then, the same prices would have *never* been considered a justifiable expense in the same way.
Maybe you got that backwards. True, back then the expense of getting your kid a computer was hard to justify... because computers were extremely expensive. The original IBM PC, at its most barebones and useless configuration, launched for well over $4000 (adjusted for inflation). You can get a perfectly satisfactory PC or smartphone right now, for one tenth of that.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Starting with an Amstrad CPC 464 and later a PC, I always had my own. The family however bought one long after I had the PC. For the my PC, I organized to get s modem to connect to mailboxes. Yes, no internet then. It was in the mid to late 1980s.
Oh jikes grandpa is talking about the war.
Ha, not only did we not have a computer we didn't have a phone!
Hmm. My first computer cost £70, including the tape drive, a physical musical keyboard overlay for the computer keyboard, a stencil for creating flowcharts, a book teaching programming and various bits of software.
Sure, that was a lot of money back then, you could rent a caravan in Wales for the week for about that much, but if owning a computer made sense to my parents we'd have skipped a family holiday and they'd have bought themselves one.
As it was, I moved out long before my parents had a computer of their own.
The living room itself is fading out as real estate continues to outpace wages. Today the biggest screen in the house (for those fortunate enough to have one) is in the family room, not the living room
What the fuck? Growing up we had the living room and bedrooms, unless you wanted to gather around the kitchen table. Which wasn't big enough for four people.
Even now I have one room downstairs and bedrooms/bathroom upstairs.
Yeah, fucking terrible the living conditions today.
I am living in Poland. Back in the 80s there was a constant economical crisis in entire Soviet block Poland included. In shortage economy people needed to manage somehow and we shared everything. I remember people tend to borrow from each other everything from sporting goods (like skis, camping equipment). This lasted some time after the system changed to capitalism. The first capitalist decade was really hard on people and the habits lasted.
Computers like anything else were also shared.
I remember briefly having an ZX Spectrum borrowed for fun in mid-80s. Then having Amstrad computer with green mono monitor and 70KB (??) floppy drive (!!!) borrowed from neighbor in exchange for my fathers car trailer (IIRC). Then Commodore 64 which we owned and played after school with school friends. Then we got an PC AT clone which I borrowed for few weeks to a relative who was writing a thesis and needed to use decent computer with word processor. I recall we used TAG editor country wide then mainly because it supported Polish punctation correctly. Then in mid 90s I remember that we use to gather all the RAM dices from friends in the neighborhood in order to put together a skateboarding zine (lizg) to pring. We needed the RAM to be able to load the DTP projects and standard single computer didn't ever have enough ram. IIRC 32MB was a standard then and some projects required 128MB or more.
Ah, that were the times...
Coming back to topic I think the real sharing (like multi generation) started when Polish market got flooded with cheap Famicon/NES clones and carts...
You're old now and out of touch with post millennial reality. That livingroom/diningroom/familyroom/yard with lawn and a dog thing belongs to baby boomers.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That's my point. My parents were baby boomers and didn't have the vast acreage in the house either.
Right. It's been like that in Europe since forever, America is just catching up.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If you don't mind me asking as a non-native English speaker, what the hell is the difference between a living room and a family room?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Living room - adjoins kitchen and/or dining room, usually on upper floor of a two floor home, formal furniture, where guests are entertained. Family room (or rec room) - opposite end of house from living room/dining room/kitchen, lower floor of a two floor home, informal furniture, where the kids play. Suburban life.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I had my own computer. I lived with my grandparents, who had no interest, and I bought the computer with money I saved up from working an after school job.
Um, we still have one now.
Well, OK, my wife has her own laptop. But we have a shared family computer, and the kids don't have phones.
I shared a family computer starting with an old Zenith eZ-PC. At tax time we were never allowed to use the PC since the computer room was dad's domain and you did not want to breath on anything in that room at that time. Thats right the computer had its own room. I didn't but the computer did. Once we had gone through a few upgrades and I still couldn't afford my own computer I went our and bought a set of removable hard drive chassis and my own hard drive. Still had to share the rest of the hardware but the data was mine.
I didn't even have an abacus when I was growing up!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
""I can still see the Dell I grew up using as clear as day, like I just connected to NetZero yesterday. It sat in my eldest sister's room, which was just off the kitchen. "
What a terrible place for a computer. How is anyone supposed to get any masturbation done with it when it is so close to the kitchen and in a siblings room?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
My family had a shared radio and a shared phone and at one place where we lived the phone was shared by a neighbor. I built a crystal radio when I was 11 but didn't use it much. I think I was 14 when we bought a television which of course, was shared. IIRC we were able to receive 3 stations. When I 19 I bought a new-fangled transistor radio so no longer had to share the family radio but by then I was in University and not home. a few decades later, around 1996 when I was married, we bought a family computer and by 2005 or so each of us had our own computer.
Nate
Not trying to pull an Al Gore here, but if it were not for my 7th grade computer literacy teacher, and our brief introduction to BASIC on a trs-80, I am not sure what my life would be like today. I came from a food insecure household, and rarely owned more than 3 pairs of pants and 3 shirts at a time. A family computer was just out of the question. Even back then, in the mid 80s, I was keenly interested in video games, and decided I wanted to learn how to program them, so I took that first class.
I was instantly hooked. I owe a lifelong debt to my teacher, who let me stay after school messing around writing programs while I waited on the bus (city, not school, we were using a fake residence to keep me out of the school in the bad part of town.) I decided right then and there that I needed to have one. So I scrimped and saved every penny I could get my hands on, hid them from my mom, and after 2 years I had 150 dollars, which I used to buy a used commodore 64 from a college kid without my mom's knowledge. Except for the few times it got pawned by my mom, I was on it constantly, taught myself the hardware and ml, and eventually started a career as a programmer.
I know it's not sharing a family computer, but when I look back on it, that Jr. high class was the most important thing I ever did in my life, and I still think of that c64, which I still own, as probably my fondest possession.
Anyway, obligatory shout out to Code.org , which hopefully is reaching kids like me every day.
Atari. Of course it was shared. I had two controllers.
As a teen in 1998, I paid for it myself, my parents had no interest in computers. Everyone else I knew had a family computer in a shared room.
It was a TI 99/4A. Long before the internet.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
When I was growing up my father worked with programmers on computers the size of large rooms. I built my own H-89 (remember Heathkit?) so I guess my kids were the first generation to have a family computer.
I can understand pining for a particular device but pining for the general crapness of not having a device each??!!! I was hoping there might at least be some 'sharing' in the sense of a shared experience, but no, each family member used it in isolation. At least families 'shared' a Nintendo - write about that ffs!
When I hit junior high I had a Model 33 teletype with a 75 bps acoustic coupler modem. The upgrade to 300 bps was nirvana. I had dial-up to the local high school and to a local Navy installation I talked my way into an account with so I could get to what eventually became Arpanet.
Shared? No.
Bill Gates is a communist -- he's just more equal than the rest of us.
1. our town had about 5 telephones in red boxes for the total town in my childhood.
No phones in houses (some posh shops had one).
Postal mail or a person carrying a message was communications.
Regards Eion MacDonald
My Yorkshire Mana had not yet recharged significantly when I had to burn it all in a recent FaceBook discussion where one spoke of having to walk barefoot in the snow to school.
He was lucky to have feet. We had to walk on our stumps.
One like that requires a longer recharge before firing off another. :D
At least, that's my excuse. At least so far, no one from The Yard has come barging in to force an ending.
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We ended up with IBM computers that were hand me downs from friends of the family who were IBM'rs and got them when IBM was throwing them out. We went through several PS/2 models and had an IBM dot matrix printer to go with them. Eventually the family started buying PCs from various brands. I didn't have a computer to myself until I was in high school and it was one I had rebuilt from spare parts we had from previous family computers. It didn't last very long though. The monitor blew and stunk up my bedroom for over a week. The family computer was always outdated, but it was a great teaching tool for keeping it running for the family. It was thanks to that and learning what it means to have others depend on me keeping it running that I learned a bit about the joy and frustrations of IT work when I was younger.
Buying a house now, and this outdated paradigm is driving me nuts. Found a house in a great neighborhood, no back neighbors. Square footage seemed about right, until I saw it in person. Separate formal "parlor" living room, "family" room, and a "tv" room. ARGH! Just put that all together!