I miss classic computing

[Praying Colonel]

When I first started working in my current career, the word processor of choice was WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS. We had all these keyboard commands we had to learn to bold/italicize/etc. (e.g., Ctrl-Shift-F6 to underline). And we had this template to lay over the function keys as kind of a cheat sheet:

 

[Praying Colonel]

Oh, and remember Computer Shopper? It was so much fun to look through those and shop for things like 20 MB external hard drives for $2000, or VGA monitors for $1000.

 

[Mysterian]

Did you ever try typing in one of those games from the back of Compute! Magazine?

Yes! I remember typing up pages of code just to create a stupid screen animation on a commodore. It was a lot of work for a fleeting thrill.

One Halloween, '84 or '85, someone had a CRT monitor propped up in the window displaying an animated jack o'lantern from one of these magazines.

Fast forward to ~10 years later and I'm buying PC Gamer magazines that included CD-Roms with game demos. Thank goodness for cheap storage media, because I would never type out pages of code just to play the Duke Nukem 3D demo.

 

[Mysterian]

Yup, I remember my mainframe days. Storing reports on mag tape. Writing programs and punching them out on cards to be read in. And who can forget those 1200 and 2400 baud modems!

My earliest computer experience was at a school that used Fortran cards.

The only tape media I've tried was borrowing someone's tape drive for the C64.

I still see floppy disks from time to time at work, used for old systems. You know what I never see anymore? Zip disks. Zip drives used to be a wonder back in the late 90's!

 

[BlueStarryHat]

I didn't come to computers until I got my first one, a refurbished Win98 Hewlett Packard that sounded like a sick elephant when booting up. I wanted AOL for my email and browser, so I remember I went to the supermarket and picked up a free disk from the end of the checkout aisle.

 

[Mysterian]

I didn't come to computers until I got my first one, a refurbished Win98 Hewlett Packard that sounded like a sick elephant when booting up. I wanted AOL for my email and browser, so I remember I went to the supermarket and picked up a free disk from the end of the checkout aisle.

My browser of choice at the time was Netscape!

OoooO the animated Netscape logo every time you waited for a website to load! The anticipation!

 

[GoingSince1990]

Anyone ever program in Assembler? Good times....

Yep. I wrote subroutines in 6502 assembly language for my Commodore PET to speed up the BASIC programs they were called from. The second cassette buffer (starting at 033A in memory) was always a handy place to put them.

It still blows my mind that we had the largest size memory PET (32K of RAM), and now the iPhone I am holding in my hand has 16 million times that storage.

 

[bobbiwoz]

My first computer course was Fortran. I think it was in 1966?

 

[Neapolitan Ice Cream]

My browser of choice at the time was Netscape!

OoooO the animated Netscape logo every time you waited for a website to load! The anticipation!

I was a Netscape Communicator fan - everything in one package and for some reason it seemed faster than IE? Dunno why. But that was after Mosaic of course.