Ok Photographers, How old are you?

[YesDear]

I am feeling old, I was cleaning out some old photo stuff and found and old Kodak 18% neutural gray density card and wondered who here could tell our new photographers what that is and what it was used for.

This old card taught me a great deal about exposure and light in the good old days of manual film photography.

Just wondered who would know what it is?

[MassJester]

Not so old, I think I bought one just a couple years back--and not for use with film cameras either.

[MassJester]

here it is, still available:

http://www.pictureline.com/products/1877/Kodak_Color_Sep._&_Gray_Scale_Sm./

[dr_zero]

Well I just had a 25 year class reunion a couple years back if that tells you anything :thumbsup2 but I remember pascal, Dos, CPM and Hard Drives that had platters bigger than dinner plates :cool1:

I keep telling them at work though Im too young to be this old LOL

[KAT4DISNEY]

Well I just had a 25 year class reunion a couple years back if that tells you anything :thumbsup2 but I remember pascal, Dos, CPM and Hard Drives that had platters bigger than dinner plates :cool1:

I keep telling them at work though Im too young to be this old LOL

Oh my goodness - I hadn't even thought about pascal in years! And PET computers. COBOL, FORTRAN.....now I'm feeling old.

[YesDear]

I wish card was that sophisticated. It is only an 18% grey card, no color separation. AND, I think the card had a 25 yr reunion a few years back as well. I am at my 35th reunion myself, which means I graduated before the invention of the PC, if you take 1975 as that year!

[fortheluvofpooh]

Still 39

[pointandshoot]

18% grey cards and Pascal! Heck, I punched computer cards for RPG programmnig. I do not think they were 18% grey though...but I am.

Chuck

[DVC Jen]

I have a grey card as well - a few of them to be honest - and next year I will be ignoring ;) my 25th high school reunion. Not something I want to go back to and or think about all that much.

One thing for all of us to remember - we are not OLD - we are simply accuring acquiring experience and more knowledge.

[deletedpenguin]

29 here. Old enough to be blown away that my first computer had a 1.2 gig hard drive with one of those brand spankin' new "Pentium" processors! One of my first thoughts when getting that computer was:

"1.2 gig hard drive? I'll never fill that thing up."

:)

[Michele]

I made this an easy question, it's in my sig. Oops, I need to go change that, I had a birthday last week.

But speaking of computers, my Dad was a programmer back in the 70's and I remember visiting him at work, the cold computer room with the big machines with the reels and all the punch cards with holes in them that fed really quickly through the computer (sorry, I don't remember all the terminology).

Then there was the big (it was probably 2 1/2 ft long and a foot wide) portable computer he was able to bring home from work occasionally. It had a modem that we had to plug the phone into, not the phone line, but the actual old style phone reciever. We had to call into the office, wait to hear the modem sound then plug it in, (think 'War Games'). It didn't even have a monitor, just large paper with holes along the side that fed through it. Anything you did typed out on it.

I remember playing a 'computer game', some kind of moon landing simulator, you had to tell it how much thrust etc to give the engines to land your spacecraft on the moon without crashing.

Waaaay before 1.2 gig hard drives, I remember the Commodore 64. And my DH sold computers back in the late 80's when the newest thing was Prodigy, some 'new fangled' software that let you do things like banking over the phone lines through your computer. :laughing:

Boy....am I old!! :scared1:

[thomas998]

Oh my goodness - I hadn't even thought about pascal in years! And PET computers. COBOL, FORTRAN.....now I'm feeling old.

If it makes you feel better I still remember having to write computer codes on a key punch machine in college... nothing was worse than dropping a stack of cards 4 inches thick and then trying to sort them out again.

[KAT4DISNEY]

If it makes you feel better I still remember having to write computer codes on a key punch machine in college... nothing was worse than dropping a stack of cards 4 inches thick and then trying to sort them out again.

Thank you - I'm better now. I never would have survived those computer programming classes with cards - I drop too much! :rolleyes:

[MassJester]

If it makes you feel better I still remember having to write computer codes on a key punch machine in college... nothing was worse than dropping a stack of cards 4 inches thick and then trying to sort them out again.

Me too! Waterloo Fortran -- WATFOR and WATFIV :)

[jann1033]

18% grey cards and Pascal! Heck, I punched computer cards for RPG programmnig. I do not think they were 18% grey though...but I am.

Chuck
that's what hair dye is for:lmao:

holy crow i'm closer to my 40th high school reunion than my 25th..now that's old! I'd have to have graduated before i was even born to be considered "young" according to that. we used these antiques called slide rules and typewriters in high school, calculators were the size of George Costanza's wallet and a transistor radio was " AM " only and played the Beach Boys but the accessory to have, as were houndstooth checked pants( so Dave Clark Five ish) which none of you babies probably even ever heard of :rotfl:... so long before computers were more than a glimmer is someones' eye;)

[handicap18]

WOW talk about bringing up the past.... geezz. I took BASIC and PASCAL in high school and COBOL in college. Thats about the only place I used them though. I took a few other computer classes in college. We had to put everything on the original "floppy" floppy disk. Even with all that I still did all my term papers and stuff on an electric typewriter (though in high school we learned on manual typewriters. The electric one's still were expensive and they didn't have a lot of them, so that was only for the Typing IV class if you went that far).

I also remember in high school the photography teacher got a new computer in his classroom and it was the first time I saw spell check in use.

Our first "computer" consisted of a keyboard, our TV and a cassette player that hooked up between the keyboard and the TV. My mother tought herself to type with that "computer". That right around the time the Commodore 64 came out. But that was to expensive for us.

One of my first roommates out of college bought a new Gateway in early '96 and he upgraded the hard drive to 1GB. He has the exact same quote as DeletedPenquin: "I'll never fill that up". IIRC he payed $1500 for that computer.

As for age, well I'll be 39 for the first time,,,, next year. :)

[jann1033]

WOW talk about bringing up the past.... geezz. I took BASIC and PASCAL in high school and COBOL in college. Thats about the only place I used them though. I took a few other computer classes in college. We had to put everything on the original "floppy" floppy disk. Even with all that I still did all my term papers and stuff on an electric typewriter (though in high school we learned on manual typewriters. The electric one's still were expensive and they didn't have a lot of them, so that was only for the Typing IV class if you went that far).

I also remember in high school the photography teacher got a new computer in his classroom and it was the first time I saw spell check in use.

Our first "computer" consisted of a keyboard, our TV and a cassette player that hooked up between the keyboard and the TV. My mother tought herself to type with that "computer". That right around the time the Commodore 64 came out. But that was to expensive for us.

One of my first roommates out of college bought a new Gateway in early '96 and he upgraded the hard drive to 1GB. He has the exact same quote as DeletedPenquin: "I'll never fill that up". IIRC he payed $1500 for that computer.

As for age, well I'll be 39 for the first time,,,, next year. :)

that hasn't changed.. the computer sales guy told me the same thing...except about 1000 gb... i told him i'd heard that before:rotfl2:

[tinksdad]

29 here. Old enough to be blown away that my first computer had a 1.2 gig hard drive with one of those brand spankin' new "Pentium" processors! One of my first thoughts when getting that computer was:

"1.2 gig hard drive? I'll never fill that thing up."

:)

That's funny!! I thought the same thing about a 20MB hard drive on my first IBM computer (an upgrade from the CPM, double floppy type)

BTW, I'm only 39.95............. and holding!:rolleyes1

[YEKCIM]

Old enough to remember 8-Track tapes and only-three-channels-on-the-black-and-white-TV.

~YEKCIM-the-Ancient

[DawnM]

I have been 39 for 3 years now....every year it gets better!

Dawn

Still 39

[drcandon]

Geeezz...reading this I feel old...Commodore 64...what about the Vic20 and using a cassette drive to store programs that you had to use peek and poke to do..Of course I stayed with Commodore until they went stupid..how about the Amiga 500, then 3000, then 4000???? The first HDD I had was for the Amiga 500 was 40 meg I think and cost an arm and a leg...

Then switched over to IBM and the 386, then 486..then OMG!! the first Pentium proc...as far as memory goes you had to be very very rich to have anything approaching 500m..let alone a couple of G..

On the home entertainment from...8 track, then cassette, then my crowing achiement my first VCR...it weighed as much as a VW Beetle ( the real Beetle - not the fake one) was top loading and ate tapes at a rate of one per day..but I could record TV...

Oh yea and TV was TV - no-one ever heard of resolution

And since this is a photography board my first 35mm camera was a bulky manual focus Mamiya...( remember that brand???) but it had interchangeable lenses, that cost more then the camera itself....had a very prinitive internal light meter so, I had to learn how to use a hand held one...OMG..I think I still have it???

[DVC Jen]

.

That right around the time the Commodore 64 came out. But that was to expensive for us.



Oh wow - we had a Commodore 64 - it was one of the first major purchases Ian and I made together as a couple. There was some game we played for hours and hours on end on that thing - but for the life of me I can not remember what it was.

[Abby's Dad]

Old enough to remember 8-Track tapes and only-three-channels-on-the-black-and-white-TV.

~YEKCIM-the-Ancient

I remember buying 3 albums by Steve Miller Band on 8-track that had been dumped into the bargain bin, the ones that weren't going to make it (maybe it was the 8-track that wasn't going to make it, but I had just on the jumped on the 8-track band wagon and needed some tunes to play). Yet, they are still touring and still kicking it. And three channels of black-and-white - so many choices now, but you can still only watch one at a time (PIP doesn't count).

It is funny reading the various posts, I liked progamming in Pascal, and I liked the rocket ship game where you put in the different parameters - was that Lunar Lander? First computer, Radio Shack Model III, 16K RAM, two single-sided 160K floppies, low-resolution graphics (we're talking 1/4" pixels here, sort of black and white, or was it green and white?). A lot of the programs loaded from cassette tape and may take up to a half hour to load - if you didn't get a glitch, in which case you started over. And I loved Dancing Demon! (For those who missed this one, head on over to You Tube - there are a number of versions of this one). Paid $2500 up front, with delivery in 6 weeks. Once it came in, we got the memory upgraded to the max - 48K ! (for like $300 for that extra 32K). And hard drives - there were some available at the time - Winchester drives, $5000 for a 5 mgb drive. Next, you got to spend an arm and a leg for a 9-pin dot matrix printer. Fortunately that was soon surpassed by spending another couple of grand for a daisywheel printer - real honest-to-goodness letters! Ah, the good old days!

Fred

[YEKCIM]

I remember buying 3 albums by Steve Miller Band on 8-track that had been dumped into the bargain bin, the ones that weren't going to make it (maybe it was the 8-track that wasn't going to make it, but I had just on the jumped on the 8-track band wagon and needed some tunes to play). Yet, they are still touring and still kicking it.

Funny you should mention SMB - I was rockin' out to "Fly Like An Eagle" on CD on the way to work this morning. Ain't nothin' like 70's classic R&R, regardless of the recording medium! If anyone disagrees with that, I'll bonk you with my cane!

~YEKCIM-the-Ancient

[DawnM]

I had a Kaypro! That was my first computer!

My first laptop was a Tandy! It had about a 7" green screen and weighed about 14 pounds!

Dawn

Oh wow - we had a Commodore 64 - it was one of the first major purchases Ian and I made together as a couple. There was some game we played for hours and hours on end on that thing - but for the life of me I can not remember what it was.

[DueyDooDah]

Old enough to remember that color TV was a new thing - and we had the first one on the block. I was already in the Navy fo 10 years before I even heard of a personal computer (first one had 16K [not M or G] of RAM, 0 floppies, and a cassette tape for data storage).








[57 in September]

[Shutterbug]

29 here. Old enough to be blown away that my first computer had a 1.2 gig hard drive with one of those brand spankin' new "Pentium" processors! One of my first thoughts when getting that computer was:

"1.2 gig hard drive? I'll never fill that thing up."

:)



Oh thats nothing... I am 44, I had Commadore 64 with tape drive.
I remember my parents using a camera that you had to hold at your waist because the viewfinder was in the top of the camera. You then put a bulb in for each flash photo.

Also I had to learn photography the old way....taking photos and waiting until they were process and got the prints back to see if what I was doing was right.

[gometros]

I remember when the only way around the Internet was by using my friends Archie and Veronica. You could ftp and telnet, but you couldn't http :lmao:

[Abby's Dad]

Ain't nothin' like 70's classic R&R, regardless of the recording medium!
~YEKCIM-the-Ancient

AMEN! But I do like CDs better than 8-tracks!

[Anewman]

29 here. Old enough to be blown away that my first computer had a 1.2 gig hard drive

Your first computer had a Hard Drive....

LUCKY

I just turned 40

I remember Remote controls were called "clickers"
My first VCR had a WIRED remote
My first internet bill from prodigy was like $200

[polkadotladybug]

I recall my parents having a camera with a flash cube on the end? I guess it only could flash four times - LOL? Then it progressed to a longer flash thingie - maybe that had 10 flashes on it?

OMG - I found this on youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eGZX_4EIEU

I remember getting a plain old tape deck for Christmas - you know the flat black ones - no radio - just a tape deck. And then sitting in my bean bag taping songs off the radio - a separate radio! I thought I was very cool - that was in 1979 or 1980 -

I really am 39 - at least till September!

[NostalgicDad]

Well, 2 days until I'm a true "40-something". Right now I'm just a 40-nothing! ;)

Everything everyone has mentioned to this point, I remember. One thing comes to mind though..........walkathons? :scared:

[madge]

I am feeling old, I was cleaning out some old photo stuff and found and old Kodak 18% neutural gray density card and wondered who here could tell our new photographers what that is and what it was used for.

This old card taught me a great deal about exposure and light in the good old days of manual film photography.

Just wondered who would know what it is?

I bought a grey card last fall, my photography teacher recommended we have one.

[Mick00]

I'm too young to remember most of the thing you guys mentioned hehe :-p

[mabas9395]

And I thought I was old. Boy, some of you guys are ancient.

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000). But not just the regular 2K version, we had the optional 16K expansion pack!!!

And at school, we used a TRS-80 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80) to play Oregon Trail old-school style.

I would spend hours typing in

10 PRINT "DAVID IS COOL"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

And I got started in photography with a Pentax K1000.

[Tuffcookie]

I still have my first camera..a Kodak Brownie!

I'm 55 and going thru my 2nd childhood!;)

TC:cool1:

[jann1033]

I recall my parents having a camera with a flash cube on the end? I guess it only could flash four times - LOL? Then it progressed to a longer flash thingie - maybe that had 10 flashes on it?


yeah you could take 4 photos in a row without burning you hands taking out the used flash bulb:lmao:( and one of the girls in the video had on a houndstooth dress so guess that was when i was about in 5th grade )the flash cube was on my second camera, my first had the giant funnel shaped single bulb flash that was about as big as the camera but did have a button to eject the bulb, nothing but the best:rotfl:
tuff cookie mine was an ansco cadet ( knock of of the brownie i think)but do you remember what kind of film it took?

[Master Mason]

I still have my first camera..a Kodak Brownie!

I'm 55 and going thru my 2nd childhood!;)

TC:cool1:


I have my first camera as well, it was a "Mikey-Matic" 110 or 126 film can't remember at the moment and you pulled down Mickeys ear to take the picture. The first SLR I used was my dad's Practika, and my first was also a Pentax K1000, my older son has it somewhere.

[DawnM]

Oh, well....you will be there before you know it. It happens to the best of us.

Dawn

I'm too young to remember most of the thing you guys mentioned hehe :-p

[DawnM]

I remember that! They were soon called "trash 80s"

My first "real" camera was my dad's OM10 Olympus hand me down. I used it for YEARS and got great pics with it.

Dawn

And I thought I was old. Boy, some of you guys are ancient.

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000). But not just the regular 2K version, we had the optional 16K expansion pack!!!

And at school, we used a TRS-80 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80) to play Oregon Trail old-school style.

I would spend hours typing in

10 PRINT "DAVID IS COOL"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

And I got started in photography with a Pentax K1000.

[mabas9395]

I thought about keeping my old Pentax K1000, but I sold it for $75 which was enough to buy the nifty-fifty for my Canon dSLR.

Don't miss the K1000, it has been a long, long time since I've had to buy film. I remember telling my wife that switching to digital would save us money in film costs. And it has, but it has also cost us thousands more in lenses, flashes, tripods, bags, memory cards, filters, software, etc.

[YesDear]

This is really interesting. I had intended this to be a much different thread. I was hoping to get a conversation started about the Grey card and exposure. I figured younger photographers would not have a clue what it was.

As it turns out this thread is much more fun!

Several quick comments about several things mentioned here

Our first computer was an 8088 chip CGA dos computer that we paid over 2000 for in 1985. We paid extra for 640k in memory and the salesman said we would never fill up the 30mb hard drive!!! LOL

My next door neighbors dad invented the flip fash!

At age 53, I seem to be on the upper end of this group. I am sure most are more mature!!!

[dr_zero]

This was fun looking back at all the post and watching the times progress.

I remember the lunar lander game it was on a CPM Rainbow computer I used to play with.

Now I still have a timex sinclair in the box with the expansion pack a vic 20 a commodore 64 and a 128 with both tape drives and floppy drives a BETA vcr hooked to a commodore monitor no less LOL.

And if you want to talk video games I have 2600's all models even the sears version an original PONG and the coleco version. A coleco with the smurfs cart in the box! Atari 5200 Atari 7800 Atari Jaguar with CD. Nintendos up to the cube and Segas up to the Sega cd.
Joysticks did I mention joysticks oh lord I got cases of the the darn things LOL

I had intended to make a video game museum and have been collecting for years. I guess now with the digital camera I have excuse as to why I dont start cataloging all this stuff.

Oh and I still have blue army men!

Guess this should have gone under other hobbies I just forget sometimes all the stuff thats put away till you guys jog my memory LOL

[Tuffcookie]

Baby Brownie

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e364/Tuffcookie2/KodakBabyBrownie.jpg

Type: Solid body eyelevel rollfilm
Introduced: July 1934 (1948 in UK)
Discontinued: 1941 (1952 in UK)
Film size: 127
Picture size: 1 5/8 X 2 1/2"
Manufactured: US and UK
Lens: Meniscus
Shutter: Rotary
Numbers made: ?
Original Price: $1.00 UK Model: ?


It was discontinued in 1941, which means I inherited mine from my dad. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!:rolleyes1

TC:cool1:

[DawnM]

Very cool! It actually reminds me of the box camera I made in high school graphic arts.

Dawn

Baby Brownie

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e364/Tuffcookie2/KodakBabyBrownie.jpg

Type: Solid body eyelevel rollfilm
Introduced: July 1934 (1948 in UK)
Discontinued: 1941 (1952 in UK)
Film size: 127
Picture size: 1 5/8 X 2 1/2"
Manufactured: US and UK
Lens: Meniscus
Shutter: Rotary
Numbers made: ?
Original Price: $1.00 UK Model: ?


It was discontinued in 1941, which means I inherited mine from my dad. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!:rolleyes1

TC:cool1:

[gometros]

yeah you could take 4 photos in a row without burning you hands taking out the used flash bulb:lmao:( and one of the girls in the video had on a houndstooth dress so guess that was when i was about in 5th grade )the flash cube was on my second camera, my first had the giant funnel shaped single bulb flash that was about as big as the camera but did have a button to eject the bulb, nothing but the best:rotfl:
tuff cookie mine was an ansco cadet ( knock of of the brownie i think)but do you remember what kind of film it took?

later version of the instamatic had a flash strip that could do more than four flashes.

[Abby's Dad]

This is really interesting. I had intended this to be a much different thread. I was hoping to get a conversation started about the Grey card and exposure. I figured younger photographers would not have a clue what it was.

As it turns out this thread is much more fun!

Several quick comments about several things mentioned here

Our first computer was an 8088 chip CGA dos computer that we paid over 2000 for in 1985. We paid extra for 640k in memory and the salesman said we would never fill up the 30mb hard drive!!! LOL

My next door neighbors dad invented the flip fash!

At age 53, I seem to be on the upper end of this group. I am sure most are more mature!!!


Have had various versions of the 18% gray card, but my most recent one is in the form of a microfiber towel for lens cleaning - as advertised, it is 18% gray, and folds away very nicely. Used a gray card a lot to get exposures off before I got my Sekonic incident light meter.

Age - I'm getting up there, 59 last birthday. Time will tell about the big 6-0.

Fred

[MarkBarbieri]

I'm so old, I remember before color was invented. The whole world was black and white.

As for grey cards, here's the basic story. They are good for two things - exposure and white balance.

You camera's meter doesn't no the difference between white, black, and grey. It thinks that white is brightly lit grey and that black is poorly lit grey. If you are taking a picture of something with a lot of white (a bride standing in the snow), the camera will underexpose the picture so that the dress and snow come out grey. If you take picture of a man in a black suit standing in front of a wall of black stone, it will overexpose the picture so that the suit and stone look grey.

To deal with these situations, you can either guess and adjust the exposure yourself or you can tell the camera to meter off of your grey card. The grey card is almost exactly the shade of grey that your meter is expecting, so it will get the exposure correctly. This is typically done by having your subject hold the grey card (so it is in the same light they are in), using your spot meter to meter off of it, and adjust your exposure in manual exposure mode.

You can also use it for white balance. You can take a picture of the grey card in the light you will be shooting and then tell your camera to use that for custom white balance. Alternatively, you could just include it in one of your shots, use your software to white balance that one shot, and then copy those white balance settings to all of the other shots taken in the same light.

You white balance by adjusting the color channels so that something that is supposed to be neutral (the same amount of blue, red, and green) actually is neutral. If you have something neutral in the picture (white, black, or grey), your computer can determine how much red, blue, and green need to be added or subtracted to make it neutral and then it can apply that adjustment to the rest of the picture.

You can tell really, really hard core photographers because they have an 18% grey tattoo on one palm and a color chart tattoo on the other.

[boBQuincy]

As a follower of Ansel Adams Zone System I don't have much use for gray cards for exposure. Metering from a gray card will give perfect exposure for... gray cards! ;)

They are good for white balance as long as they are truly neutral gray, some are not from what I read. I suppose they didn't have to be in the film days.

As for the original subject, I am AARP+, spent much time with IBM punch cards and Fortran (yecch), and graduated high school while Corvairs (of which I had many) were still being produced. As for maturity, you can see from the thread on other hobbies that Peter Pan and I share philosophies! ;)

[Groucho]

18% isn't obsolete yet, my microfiber cloth that hangs from one loop of my Op/Tech strap is 18% gray. :)

Still 39
Jack Benny would be proud. :thumbsup2

Then there was the big (it was probably 2 1/2 ft long and a foot wide) portable computer he was able to bring home from work occasionally. It had a modem that we had to plug the phone into, not the phone line, but the actual old style phone reciever.
BTW, that's called an acoustic modem, if my memory serves. Probably 110 baud, maybe 300. (Today's models are 33,600 baud, or 56,000 baud if you could various trickery done to squeeze more speed out. And broadband is, oh, just a bit faster... out here, we get 10 meg which works out to about 300-400x faster than the fastest dial-up model! And yes, I do really get those speeds.)

And if you want to talk video games I have 2600's all models even the sears version an original PONG and the coleco version. A coleco with the smurfs cart in the box! Atari 5200 Atari 7800 Atari Jaguar with CD. Nintendos up to the cube and Segas up to the Sega cd.
Joysticks did I mention joysticks oh lord I got cases of the the darn things LOL
Sounds somewhat similar to me, though I have fewer duplicates... two Atari Lynxes, TurboGrafx/16 and TurboDuo (still my all-time favorite console), an NES somewhere, Atari 2600 (my wife's), and probably a couple others. I was really into the Atari computers mostly... modern stuff is a GBA, PSP, PS2, and 2.5 Xboxes (bought for dirt cheap recently, primarily for use with Xbox Media Center, and I will probably pick up another soon.)

Back in the late '70s, my father decided to bring home an Atari 400 instead of a VCS (later known as the 2600) and that's how it all began for me. It had a whopping 8k of memory and a cassette drive - but already, it has 128 colors and 4-channel sound, enough to completely shame pretty much anything else at the time. We later got an 800XL and a 130XE - these had 256 colors and were really amazing computers. My 130XE is actually still hooked up on a TV behind where I'm typing, bristling with toggles switches (it has 320k, three OSs, and various other hardware mods), and my PC runs a program that emulates a disk drive, so the 130XE thinks that it's actually connected to a real drive. Very slick.

We started with a 300 baud model, eventually going to a 2400 baud by the end. Local BBSs were all the rage and Atari vs Commodore battles were standard (I still say the Atari blew away the Commodore - 1.79 vs 1.0 mHz, 256 vs 16 colors, 4-channel vs 3-channel sound, vastly quicker "smart" disk drives, lots of neat accessories like MIDI... the Commodore couldn't even do full 2400 baud!) I did a bit of programming back then, too.

Later I went with an Atari 1040ST and it was quite good but never quite inspired the love that I have for the original Atari 8bits. I even spent a bit of time working with TOSEC (The Old School Emulation Center) on renaming Atari disk images for organization. Finally I went "serious" and got a custombuilt (from an ad in Computer Shopper) Pentium 90, 8 megs, 700 meg hard drive, 2 meg video card, 24.4 modem, etc... pretty high-end for the time, I had to take out a loan for $2,300 to pay for it!

And if you want to talk old online services... we were CompuServe (or Compu$erve as we called it) subscribers for many years, I still have their magazine that talks about the brand-new picture format they came up with called "gif" (graphics interchange format in case you didn't know, and it is pronounced with a soft "g", like "jif"). I actually still have tractor-feed dot-matrix printouts of WDW information that my Dad printed out years ago when researching it on a CompuServe SIG (special interest group - the "forum" of the day.) Later we went with GEnie for a while. The first real ISP I used was Netcom, as in username@ix.netcom.com.

I guess I never touched the original question... I'm 36 for a couple more months but people who meet me usually think I'm younger (ukcatfan's wife chopped a good 10 years off my age - I said that when I was that age, I still had all my hair!), people who talk to me on the computer often think I'm older. I spent most of the '90s listening to oldies stations, I love old-time comedy (Buster Keaton is a god to me, and obviously Groucho Marx too - I still think Groucho was the funniest guy ever to walk the planet), and still regularly listen to Jack Benny radio shows, listen to Cab Calloway and Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson, read biographies of WC Fields, George Burns, etc... and if I hit it rich suddenly, one of the first things I'd buy would be a Stanley Steamer or similar steam-powered 80+-year-old car.

Photography-wise, I do remember that my first camera had the 4-use flash bulb on it... I also had a Disc camera and Kodak's short-lived instant camera. (Being in Rochester, it was pretty much mandatory to go with Kodak whenever possible!) Like with other things, I have an appreciation for the older stuff, and just recently picked up a 47-year-old Pentax SLR with four lenses, which I still need to get some good photos of to post (and finish the roll of film that I put in it!) I do love that I can take these decades-old lenses and mount 'em right on my brand-new DSLR, marrying the old and the new. :teeth:

[matthew_hull]

OMG, this thread reminded me of an old game the geeks could play in a back room of the high school on an old unused Wang computer. This was back in the PET, Trash-80 and C64 days. Anyway, it was a text-based Star Trek game where you would flit about trying to find the klingons and "shooting" them with photon torpedos. There was no movement, no graphics, no sound -- just text commands typed at the command line, and "ASCII art" for the user-interface. Man, that was an age ago.

Anyway, these days we have the Internet, and Google, and brave souls who have kept the flame of these old computer games alive, and Google found it for me. I haven't seen this game since high school, but I was able to find it, download it, install it, and play it within a few minutes. Man, this brings back some memories! If interested, the golden link was: http://almy.us/sst.html

Thanks for jogging my "old" memory!


This was fun looking back at all the post and watching the times progress.

I remember the lunar lander game it was on a CPM Rainbow computer I used to play with.

Now I still have a timex sinclair in the box with the expansion pack a vic 20 a commodore 64 and a 128 with both tape drives and floppy drives a BETA vcr hooked to a commodore monitor no less LOL.

And if you want to talk video games I have 2600's all models even the sears version an original PONG and the coleco version. A coleco with the smurfs cart in the box! Atari 5200 Atari 7800 Atari Jaguar with CD. Nintendos up to the cube and Segas up to the Sega cd.
Joysticks did I mention joysticks oh lord I got cases of the the darn things LOL

I had intended to make a video game museum and have been collecting for years. I guess now with the digital camera I have excuse as to why I dont start cataloging all this stuff.

Oh and I still have blue army men!

Guess this should have gone under other hobbies I just forget sometimes all the stuff thats put away till you guys jog my memory LOL

[JR6ooo4]

Old enough to remember 8-Track tapes and only-three-channels-on-the-black-and-white-TV.

~YEKCIM-the-Ancient

We were in the chicago tv area so we had 2, 5, 7, 9 and 11. then UHF came a round and we bought a converter at the flea market for the two TVs. Put the TV on three and turn the dial on the converter.

Funny you should mention SMB - I was rockin' out to "Fly Like An Eagle" on CD on the way to work this morning. Ain't nothin' like 70's classic R&R, regardless of the recording medium! If anyone disagrees with that, I'll bonk you with my cane!

~YEKCIM-the-Ancient
tell me about it. I just ripped all my old CDs to my library. something like 30 hours of music. Now I have to do all the vynil!!! That will take a little longer.

Your first computer had a Hard Drive....

LUCKY

I just turned 40

I remember Remote controls were called "clickers"
My first VCR had a WIRED remote
My first internet bill from prodigy was like $200

Ya, My first dial up experience at work, we learned about something call "local long distance". I was dialing out to a number over 8 miles away to get a fast line. And leaving it on because I thought I was on my unlimited local plan... $430 for the first month! CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL!!!

Our first clicker had metal rods of different lengths and would produce different tones. When you pushed the button it snapped a spring loaded hammer striking the each rod. But the on off button was the same tone as the dogs tags, and when she would run through the living room or scratch, the TV woudl turn off!

I also remember wired remotes.

I remember a friend having a garage door opener with no batteries. It was the size of a rubicks cube and had a button that stuck up about an inch or two. then when you pushed the button is was geared to spin a generator enough to create its own electricity!

what else,
gas pumps that did not have enough digits to charge more than 99 cents a gallon. when it went higher than a buck they started charging by the half gallon.

my dad letting me spray the fruit trees with mathalathion(sp) insecticide.

not wearing seatbelts in the back seat

parents bought a brand new ford sedan for $3k

the first calculators that came out with extended functions, like square root and other basics...

lawn darts

wood burning kits - for kids

I am 44 this year and I bought my first grey card one year ago.

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and Donny & Marie



Mikeeee

[gometros]

OMG, this thread reminded me of an old game the geeks could play in a back room of the high school on an old unused Wang computer. This was back in the PET, Trash-80 and C64 days. Anyway, it was a text-based Star Trek game where you would flit about trying to find the klingons and "shooting" them with photon torpedos. There was no movement, no graphics, no sound -- just text commands typed at the command line, and "ASCII art" for the user-interface. Man, that was an age ago.

Anyway, these days we have the Internet, and Google, and brave souls who have kept the flame of these old computer games alive, and Google found it for me. I haven't seen this game since high school, but I was able to find it, download it, install it, and play it within a few minutes. Man, this brings back some memories! If interested, the golden link was: http://almy.us/sst.html

Thanks for jogging my "old" memory!

Talk about old text based games, anyone remember what game this was an answer to?: XYZZY

[matthew_hull]

Ain't Google a wonderful thing?! :) http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/c_xyzzy.html

Talk about old text based games, anyone remember what game this was an answer to?: XYZZY

[jann1033]

We were in the chicago tv area so we had 2, 5, 7, 9 and 11. then UHF came a round and we bought a converter at the flea market for the two TVs. Put the TV on three and turn the dial on the converter.


tell me about it. I just ripped all my old CDs to my library. something like 30 hours of music. Now I have to do all the vynil!!! That will take a little longer.



Ya, My first dial up experience at work, we learned about something call "local long distance". I was dialing out to a number over 8 miles away to get a fast line. And leaving it on because I thought I was on my unlimited local plan... $430 for the first month! CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL!!!

Our first clicker had metal rods of different lengths and would produce different tones. When you pushed the button it snapped a spring loaded hammer striking the each rod. But the on off button was the same tone as the dogs tags, and when she would run through the living room or scratch, the TV woudl turn off!

I also remember wired remotes.

I remember a friend having a garage door opener with no batteries. It was the size of a rubicks cube and had a button that stuck up about an inch or two. then when you pushed the button is was geared to spin a generator enough to create its own electricity!

what else,
gas pumps that did not have enough digits to charge more than 99 cents a gallon. when it went higher than a buck they started charging by the half gallon.

my dad letting me spray the fruit trees with mathalathion(sp) insecticide.

not wearing seatbelts in the back seat

parents bought a brand new ford sedan for $3k

the first calculators that came out with extended functions, like square root and other basics...

lawn darts

wood burning kits - for kids

I am 44 this year and I bought my first grey card one year ago.

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and Donny & Marie



Mikeeee
these 3 are all still around, you just might not recognize them due to the yrs of "surgical enhancements" ie Donny somehow developed an unmovable face :rolleyes1

[figment52]

Well I just had a 25 year class reunion a couple years back if that tells you anything :thumbsup2 but I remember pascal, Dos, CPM and Hard Drives that had platters bigger than dinner plates :cool1:

I keep telling them at work though Im too young to be this old LOL


I remember Fortran, punch cards and mainframes that needed a sub floor to keep the air circulating all around the unit so it would not overheat.

My 40th class reunion will be in less than two years, if we have one.

[tinkbutt]

I am definitely not that old but have I think three 18% grey cards and know thats what they are for! but I did get these cards from my textbooks while earning my BFA so I should hopefully know what they are!!!I some times believe for my age I am old though I was the only one of my friends who knew that get smart was a tv show first! I also know Girls my age who don't know who Audrey Hepburn is:scared1: ???(come on girls thank her for the little black dress!!) And I love older tv shows I love lucy, ZORRO ...on and on!!!! when did TV become so crude? now for a disclamer I am 23 and I think that TV is allowing way too much!

I love all the old time ways I bought a Nikon EM (manufactured in 1979) just for the film crank feature!!! but I must say I also bought my Nikon D 70 that same day so I now have two film cameras and one very nice Digital(all Nikon!!!):cool1:

[whitepearl]

Too Old.. LOL

[dr_zero]

I love all the old time ways I bought a Nikon EM (manufactured in 1979) just for the film crank feature!!! but I must say I also bought my Nikon D 70 that same day so I now have two film cameras and one very nice Digital(all Nikon!!!):cool1:

Rock on a film girl! and Nikon to boot! :thumbsup2

This one sounds like a keeper for you young whipper snappers out there.:)

Seriously you dont see many younger people shooting film they go straight to digital, when you shoot film you have to get creative and think more about the shots cause you dont want to waste the film LOL.

Congrats on getting some good kit now show us some pics :goodvibes

[jbart610]

29 here... atleast for the next two weeks. I remember my first camera was one of those little kodak APS (?) cameras with the flash strip. Nice. A bit different from my D200 and 70-200. But I still have some pictures off of that thing.

Oh, and my first computer... I think it was a Franklin, then an Apple II, then a IIgs with 256K of memory... huge add-in card so we could use Paint, then a no-name Wintel with a Pentium 60 and a 400MB hard drive and a whopping 16MB of RAM. Wow that was huge.

[DisneySuiteFreak]

I'm old enough to know that I need to start lying about my age! ;) I'm going to be like Jack Benny and be 39 for life...:laughing:

[MassJester]

I'm old enough to know that I need to start lying about my age! ;) I'm going to be like Jack Benny and be 39 for life...:laughing:

Oh, Rochester...

[DisneySuiteFreak]

Oh, Rochester...

Yes, Boss?;) :laughing:

[YEKCIM]

...graduated high school while Corvairs (of which I had many) were still being produced.

http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j11/fasteddiew/Blue%20Ridge%20Parkway%20June%202008/Miscellaneous/DSC_5208copy.jpg

~Y

[tinkbutt]

Rock on a film girl! and Nikon to boot! :thumbsup2

This one sounds like a keeper for you young whipper snappers out there.:)

Seriously you dont see many younger people shooting film they go straight to digital, when you shoot film you have to get creative and think more about the shots cause you dont want to waste the film LOL.

Congrats on getting some good kit now show us some pics :goodvibes

I was originally a Drawing major and took Photo one and fell in love with the dark room and switched my major to Photo!!! my teachers had to pry me out of there every class!!! I would much rather be in the darkroom than sittin in front of a computer any day!!!;)

[jann1033]

http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j11/fasteddiew/Blue%20Ridge%20Parkway%20June%202008/Miscellaneous/DSC_5208copy.jpg

~Y
weren't those the original "death traps"? i mean even before neons? my friend had one and my mother "had a cow"( hehe ) every time he picked me up in it , sure i was going to meet a fiery death when the engine went up in flames, ahhhh, those were the days..
meanwhilemy first car was a real VW Bug with a sunroof :love: , so fun to drive except in the winter when i had to chip the ice off the inside of the windshield even after the defroster had been on for 30 mins or so;:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

[Groucho]

weren't those the original "death traps"? i mean even before neons? my friend had one and my mother "had a cow"( hehe ) every time he picked me up in it , sure i was going to meet a fiery death when the engine went up in flames, ahhhh, those were the days..
meanwhilemy first car was a real VW Bug with a sunroof :love: , so fun to drive except in the winter when i had to chip the ice off the inside of the windshield even after the defroster had been on for 30 mins or so;:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
The Corvair was the car that Ralph Nadar's "Unsafe at Any Speed" was written about. IIRC, the early ones had swing axle rear suspensions, which means they pivoted from a point closer to the center of the car. That meant that instead of the rear tires moving straight up and down as it went over bumps, they would angle in and out. Do it right (or wrong) over a nasty bump around a turn, and one tire would tuck in under the car, sending it into a roll. I think it was also more likely to catch on fire than similar cars.

This is off the top of my head and I never really paid too much attention (I'm not a GM guy) so I'm sure the details are a little funky, but you get the point. VWs also had swing-axle rear suspensions, up until the late '60s or so, but I don't think they had this issue quite as much - maybe because they weren't sporty like the Corvair so they were rarely driven aggressively. :) The way I understand it, later Corvairs fixed most of these issues but the nameplate was poisoned by then and the car was axed - and it was the last time America tried to do a rear-engined air-cooled car.

[Pea-n-Me]

Let's see, I was about a year old when JFK was assassinated. I remember a lot of the things mentioned here, like cable-less TV, 8 track tapes, The Partidge Family (my preference over Donnie and Marie ;) ), and muscle cars (my older brother had a Boss 302 Mustang and he had lots of friends with others).

In high school and college there were no computers, just typewriters. Though I did learn to type, I wasn't great at it, and using a typewriter I always made a lot of mistakes and it took me forever which, after the drudgery of writing the papers themselves, I didn't have time for. So despite being a broke college student working two part time jobs, I actually paid a professional typist $3 a page to type my papers for me. One paper was 50 pages long and cost me $150! :scared1: In the early 90's, my husband went back to college and I couldn't believe how cool it was to have a Brother Word Processor, thinking, Man, this would have made my life a lot easier when I was in college! LOL

Our first computer was a used Apple, the square kind. I believe we bought our first new computer around 96, an Apple Performa. We were in awe of the technology. Another thing I remember getting for the first time in the 90's was a cell phone, the type that's installed in the car. That happened after a road rage incident in which I was followed by a maniac and I was fortunately able to drive to a police station and run in. Have not been without one ever since.

I think it's interesting seeing today's kids, like my own, not realize any of this stuff wasn't always around. I've done some seminars on inter-generational and inter-cultural workplace harmony and they've looked back on things like work ethic, technology, role models, world leaders, music of the times, etc, to help understand where everyone's coming from. It's been very helpful to me on the job understanding that an older person who grew up with little technology had a work ethic of, when you're done with one task, you find another and keep busy; as opposed to a younger person, who has grown up with technology, to finish a task, and see nothing wrong with then making a call on a cell phone or surfing the net, for instance. Then you have people my age, who are in between. Different cultures are a whole different story, even more so when you figure in the generational stuff. It's interesting to think about and observe. I work in an inner city hospital in a supervisory role so this stuff comes into play for me every working shift.

OT but re: music, something many of you might already have but I never knew about. I just bought a new car (well, ok, a used new car) and it has Sirius radio which is pretty cool for a music junkie. I can listen to literally any type of music I want, or if I want a change, can hear comedy, news, entertainment, weather or local traffic reports. I'm not going to like paying the bill when the previous owner's subscription runs out, :laughing: but I am enjoying it a lot right now. The only problem is that the kids like the Disney channel the best. :rolleyes1

[Quicklabs]

Well, let's see.... I was in second grade when JFK was assassinated (I still remember the day well). My first car was a Chevy Vega with a racing stripe across the hood (Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!) I went to Disney World for the first time and traded E tickets to ride the Haunted Mansion and POTC. My dissertation was typed on a typewriter (at least it was electric, though I learned on a high school manual typewritee) I have Meet the Beatles and Beatles 65 in my record collection. I went to a Chicago concert when they were still called Chicago Transit Authority. I have BLood Sweat and Tears on 8 track. I remember taking B&W pictures using photo flash cubes. How's that? Old enough for ya? LOL