Those were the days!
Some of you probably are to young to remember some of the stuff that I’ve seen and others probably know more than what they let on. In this article, we are going to go back in time and discuss some of this that you probably don’t remember or remember vividly. Depending on old you are, this could be a walk down memory lane or you could learn something that you never knew. Either way, you will want to share this with your friends and maybe they can learn something too.
What is or was a BBS?
Before we had the internet, we’d have to call a BBS [Bulletin Board System] and connect to the Intranet. It was a way to find out information or play ASCII Games. They had their own newsgroups through a network such as FidoNet. Anyone who is old enough to understand this will tell you this was cutting edge stuff in those days. I used to watch Star Trek and dream of some of the stuff they’d create in the future. Well it happened and I am really glad I saw the first data pad.
That used to be the ASCII Art for Fidonet, but it has changed it still looks really cool!
Speeds!
Before we had Cable Companies and DSL modems we had 300, 1200, 2400, 28.8, 56k baud modems. What we have now is light years faster than what we had in those days. That was why we used ASCII Art all the time, it was way faster and we really didn’t know how to do some of the stuff with HTML then like we do now. Although loading images and downloading programs or files was a really LONG process could take up to an hour for a 10 meg file. You’d also have to have a dedicated line to dial out on or by chance someone would pick up the land line and kill your connection.
My Old System!
When I first began using a computer, I had a TI-994a system man was that an old system for some. It was in competition with the Commodore 64. Each one had their uses and could be very picky with loading programs. Some of them you used a TAPE to load the programs onto the system. Again you’d have to be old enough to remember those days but it was nothing like we had with Hard Drives and available space we have today.
I did this post because I was feeling a little nostalgic and thought it was a good time to remember some of the things we did then to get to where we are now. I do hope you learned a little bit about old technology and hope you will share it for others to learn just what it was like in the early 1990’s to 2000’s.
