...If only I could go back in time
 

damn that's cool

Couple thousand shares of Microsoft / Apple / Google at IPO - the end

"We probably aren't gonna loose a lot of money" SF Examiner Editor David Cole on taking the newspaper digital- 1981

All the foresight and planning and they still couldn't manage to figure it out.

What a fucking shame.

http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress...e-computer.jpg

WTF. This guy OWNS A HOME COMPUTER!!!!

"estimated 2000 home computer owners in the Bay area." Wow... those are some rich folks.

2 hours to download the newspaper she said (@ 5 dollars an hour in 1981) .... thats cool :)

And as she said that was with no ads, no pictures and no comics:error
The 2 things that made me grin the biggest was her talking about what we now take for granted as "not far-fetched" and they dialed up with a rotory phone and put the handset in the cradle:upsidedow

It was around the time of this clip (maybe a year or so after) that a friend brought his very expensive computer over and blew my mind by hooking it up to my phone, dialing a local hobbiest BBS and downloaded a simple game. It had better sound effects than the Atari 2600 games I had at the time, but the graphics were not significantly better and we both concurred that the Atari was the better "gaming machine":arcadefre It inspired me to buy my first computer, a Timex Sinclair:1orglaugh and I thought I was really styling with my later "upgrade" to a Radio Shack CoCo (color computer). Neither had a modem but I could get free games by spending half the day typing in codes from computer magazines (and go blurry-eyed troubleshooting looking for that ONE typo) and save them on a cassette tape.:thumbsup

Back in 1989 during my computer courses at Seneca College in Toronto, a fellow student (who worked for Bell Canada) brought a few hundred yards of phone cable in to the computer lab after hours one night. No instructors or faculty were around.

We were running new 386sx PC's at the time. We opened a ceiling panel in the lab and had another student climb through the ceiling joists...make his way about 50-60 yards to the Dean's office with the phone cable...and wired it in to her phone jack. He somehow hid the cable so it went undetected.

Back in the lab, we hooked the cable to a 2400baud Zoltrix modem and started dialing adult BBSes throughout the U.S. - one in particular I recall in Simi Valley, CA. The guys amused themselves downloading a ton of adult GIF files at 2400baud for a month or two, before we decided to pull the plug.

We found out much later the Dean's phone bill was over $2,600. :1orglaugh

And they never found out why.

Love it.

and I actually own a TRS-80 Model 1 like he's using. I think I'll dig it out of storage and fire it up.

Man I remember downloading a 320x240 pixel movie and going to bed, hoping it would be downloaded when I woke up. Ya, figured you all would enjoy that.

the thing is you can...
plastics, computers, tech, internet....the next is robots.
thats the future:2 cents:

how were BBS's different than the Internet? The Internet is basically computer networks able to communicate with each other, with a BBS I could use a modem and connect with a computer network. Seems pretty similar, Internet was just easier - you didn't have to log off one network and then dial up another network.

Before the Internet I would use my dad's computer, I tried calling in to local BBS's and they were horribly boring, after downloading and printing out a Penthouse magazine scan on a thermal color printer which took many many hours I was done, the rest of the crap files and text based games didn't interest me. The only other thing interesting to me were something like newsgroups, I remember using Fidonet to read discussions about topics that interested me.

How were networks like Fidonet different technically than the Internet?

I gave up on BBS's, not long before the Internet I found some really nice BBS software, very graphical, think it was called Wildcat. Pretty much looked like a slick website does today.

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems (BBSs). It uses a store and forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSs in the network, as well as other files and protocols in some cases.

The FidoNet system was based on a number of small interacting programs. Only one of these interacted with the BBS system directly, and was the only portion that had to be ported to support other BBS software. FidoNet was one of the few networks that was widely supported by almost all BBS software, as well as a number of systems for talking to non-BBS online services. Additionally, this modular construction allowed FidoNet to easily replace data compression systems, which was very important in an era of high long distance calling charges.

The rapid improvement in modem speeds during the early 1990s, combined with the rapid decrease in price of computer systems and storage, made BBSes increasingly popular, and FidoNet along with it. By the mid-1990s it was possible to communicate with millions of users on tens of thousands of FidoNet systems around the world. Only UUCP came close in terms of breadth or numbers, FidoNet's user base far surpassed other networks like BITNET.

The broad availability of low-cost Internet connections starting in the mid-1990s lessened the need for FidoNet's store-and-forward system, as any system in the world could be reached for equal cost. Direct dialling into local BBS systems rapidly declined. This availability is by no means universal, and although it has shrunk considerably since the early 1990s, FidoNet remains in use around the world.