New Forum Questions and Discussion

Bessie

mr_blown_dry thank you!! It's amazing that there can be so many pieces out of place, just to get back to what used to work. I'm looking forward to the new improved experience 😁, your efforts are very much appreciated.

SteveM

@mr_blown_dry Thank you for all of your efforts! I admire anyone who is crazy enough to troubleshoot a server problem.🙂

Teddahlia

My "preferred communication site" . Not too many people and all are nice people. I am much more likely to share dahlia stuff here than on that 'mega site' called Facebook. Trivia: in about 1990 when computers were expensive and we bought one, we used a dial up modem(yes, you used your land line like a telephone call) and Margaret was an addict. Her go to "site" was called "Rain" and mostly it was pictures and free computer programs but there were some "user groups" and one was on dahlias that I frequented. If a picture was posted it had to be postage stamp size due to a lack of storage on the server. The pictures were in the low KBs . We had heard of the term MB but never even dreamed of pictures that big. Google was not yet invented and paper directories of computer sites were used. We had a dot a matrix printer.

mr_blown_dry

Teddahlia I got started back in the late 80s before the internet was public, so it was all BBSs on a Commodore 128 with a dial up 300 baud modem. Which was pretty uptown since it had a modular line in and didn't need an acoustic coupler. 🎩 We had 2 or 3 local BBSs, so no long distance phone bills either.

I currently have a 1 Gigabit per second internet connection. For reference, 300 baud is .0000006 Gbps. (More or less, they're kind of different ways of measuring the same thing but the exact conversion depends on the size of the symbols being sent. This assumes 2 bits.)

You could see individual letters appear. It was exactly like this: The 300 Baud BBS Experience

It does lose something without the sounds of the modem handshake, though.

👴 <creaky voice>Back in my day....</creaky voice> Pictures didn't display inline, they had to be downloaded and run. They were full screen but, on IBM compatibles, only had four colors. On the C64/C128 we had 16 colors but on all of them the resolution was so low it was more like a blurry impressionist painting with a lot of dithering. I think it was uphill both ways, too.

MissyWeitzel

In the fall of 1996 I was a freshman in college and up until then the only internet experience I had was at my friend's house. She always had the latest and greatest everything along with a jukebox in the living room, arcade games, pinball machines, and a pool table in the basement. She was the first person I knew with internet access and that dial up modem sound seemed so damn futuristic.
Back to the fall of 1996 - my parents dropped 17 year old me off at Central Michigan University and I soon discovered there was a huge 24 hour computer lab students could use and the computers all connected to the internet and there were zero time limits. I spent a lot of time there not doing homework. I still fit in my fair share of jungle juice parties and keggers, but the allure of the internet and chat rooms was very strong!

SteveM

The first programming class i took at a community college (1972) was in BASIC language and we had to punch our data and instructions into 80-column punchcards. To run the program the college rented time from the main computer across the state and dialed in with a phone modem. Seems like yesterday.🙂

Teddahlia

An occupation in those days was Keypunch operator and rooms of people would be operating machines that punched holes in cards that were fed into the computer.

calico20hill

I remember those cards from when my college roomies were working in computer labs...as for myself I have always been slow to adapt to new technology (old Swiss Mennonite, German and English farmer genes...). MY kids finally got me on the internet when they were in Jr HIgh and High School...It was terrifying at first, LOL. I still depend on them when I run into problems. I started on Mac's but my husband was working on mircrosoft programs at work so I had to depend on my young kids for help. I still do though the kids are not that young anymore or as available...

mr_blown_dry

I never got to experience punch cards but in the machine shop in college we did have a mill retrofitted with an old CNC controller that used paper tape. That was pretty much my only experience with a mainframe and teletype terminal.

At one point I did "discover" that I could dial into the college mainframe from home and access my account to work on homework without having to do it during lab time.

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