computers in the 80's and 90's
Hey guys I am in my mid 20's so I grew up with windows 2000 and windows xp,However I did get a taste of how fun and painful it was to use dial up,but I kind of envy the people who grew up in the era of the movie war games,although obviously primitive in contrast to the machines today,they looked pretty cool.
So I was wondering is there anyone on the forum who had experience with these amazing machines such as the commodore 64,apple II or the famous imsai 8080 from the movie war games?
and I have heard people using the phrase dialling into systems,such as if you needed to get access to a server on a machine at your school you would dial into that machine,how was that done did you physically dial numbers into your phone to connect into that server some how via your computer?
So I was wondering is there anyone on the forum who had experience with these amazing machines such as the commodore 64,apple II or the famous imsai 8080 from the movie war games?
and I have heard people using the phrase dialling into systems,such as if you needed to get access to a server on a machine at your school you would dial into that machine,how was that done did you physically dial numbers into your phone to connect into that server some how via your computer?
| adam2016 wrote: |
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| how was that done did you physically dial numbers into your phone to connect |
We had programs to remember the phone numbers for us - general-purpose terminals and BBS clients and later SLIP clients - but in most of them you could simply type in the number as ATDT followed by the number. I suppose there was a brief period of time when acoustic modems existed, and there you'd literally dial the number on the phone, but my networking life began with real 2400MNP and quickly 9600 v.42 modems.
I still have a C64-II and one of the first models in the attic somewhere. :)
I grew up in the time and seen the revolution happen, from the first consoles on, great times. It is fascinating to look back how far it all has come, from when we could only dream of actual 3D - back then with red-green or red-blue glasses, to the advent of the Internet as medium. Or the 'Google revolution', which I still remember, when it found almost nothing at all, and see where they are now! My first contact with the Internet were 28k modem and BBS, and unless now, this was really the wild west all over. Everything was allowed, there was no censorship, but that had its downside of course, ... but what has not?
To get to connect to a BBS when it was with the C64, and I think the wargames movie showed it, was to use an acoustic coupler, this: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/41824/Anderson-Jacobson-A211-Acoustic-Coupler/ where you place the phones headpiece on there, then dial a number and it connects. There were other systems like that as well, terminals, that used BTX or the french version Minitel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u-Q0kJqEVg Until the first modems came about, that you plug-in your phone line and then connect with numerous sets of commands.
In the sector of private computers and consoles, this was fascinating, with the first real handheld gameboy, or the C64, to the numerous systems not from Apple that were PC's. You could even build your own, meaning building it all, as the many computer magazines offered blueprints and manuals how to do that if you were technically savvy.
Oh sweet nostalgia! If you wish to dive into the retro-world, you will find https:://archive.org very interesting. And also their wayback machine, to see what Internet was back in the day. ;-)
I grew up in the time and seen the revolution happen, from the first consoles on, great times. It is fascinating to look back how far it all has come, from when we could only dream of actual 3D - back then with red-green or red-blue glasses, to the advent of the Internet as medium. Or the 'Google revolution', which I still remember, when it found almost nothing at all, and see where they are now! My first contact with the Internet were 28k modem and BBS, and unless now, this was really the wild west all over. Everything was allowed, there was no censorship, but that had its downside of course, ... but what has not?
To get to connect to a BBS when it was with the C64, and I think the wargames movie showed it, was to use an acoustic coupler, this: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/41824/Anderson-Jacobson-A211-Acoustic-Coupler/ where you place the phones headpiece on there, then dial a number and it connects. There were other systems like that as well, terminals, that used BTX or the french version Minitel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u-Q0kJqEVg Until the first modems came about, that you plug-in your phone line and then connect with numerous sets of commands.
In the sector of private computers and consoles, this was fascinating, with the first real handheld gameboy, or the C64, to the numerous systems not from Apple that were PC's. You could even build your own, meaning building it all, as the many computer magazines offered blueprints and manuals how to do that if you were technically savvy.
Oh sweet nostalgia! If you wish to dive into the retro-world, you will find https:://archive.org very interesting. And also their wayback machine, to see what Internet was back in the day. ;-)
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| https:://archive.org very interesting. And also their wayback machine, to see what Internet was back in the day. ;-) |
archive.org can take only so far: if we're talking Internet in the really early days, it was Archie, Veronica and WAIS. There was a whole world wide web of hyperlinked Gopher sites, before HTTP took over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
The first computing I did was when my Dad showed me how to use his HP 33 calculator when I was 7 years old. We programmed volumes of rectangular boxes, then cylinders, then heights of trees on a slope using trig. I think my school teacher was quite blown away that I had even heard of pi, sin cos etc.
The first computer I used was at high school in circa 1981, it had a B/W TV, a keyboard, a bare motherboard, no secondary storage, with a BASIC interpreter. I don't know how much RAM or what processor it had. Some of the other students actually owned little Z81 computers, some even Commodore 64 with excruciatingly slow cassette storage.
Next was an Apple II, I use the word an, because the school had one of them ! Then an Apple IIe with LOGO, it was fun what one could do with the Turtle graphics :+) Now we had 3 computers :+D
Then a huge step up, at work a network of 3 Sun Sparc Stations - with UNIX !!!!! Also Eagle CAD software, 25" colour screens, a mouse we called Rat, an A1 8 colour pen plotter, tape drive, 5 1/4" floppy disk drive. Many semi-illicit late nights at work with that ! Taught myself C from K&R, Eagle scripts, and a bit of awk and fooled around with shell scripts. Although it was 1988, we had no internet, and didn't know anyone who did.
In 1992 I had one of the first versions of Linux called Yggdrasil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
Not sure, might have had a fancy 80286 PC then, IIRC I felt flash - it wasn't an AT or XT computer, but it was still pretty crap compared to the 386 Sparc Station and the 8MB RAM they had. I do remember saving up for 8 by 256K RAM simms, so I could have 2 MB of RAM, I couldn't afford to fill all 16 memory slots.
Yes the nostalgia of it all, unfortunately the main thing I remember is the often sheer ignorance of the management, how much could we have achieved if they had embraced it properly?
The first computer I used was at high school in circa 1981, it had a B/W TV, a keyboard, a bare motherboard, no secondary storage, with a BASIC interpreter. I don't know how much RAM or what processor it had. Some of the other students actually owned little Z81 computers, some even Commodore 64 with excruciatingly slow cassette storage.
Next was an Apple II, I use the word an, because the school had one of them ! Then an Apple IIe with LOGO, it was fun what one could do with the Turtle graphics :+) Now we had 3 computers :+D
Then a huge step up, at work a network of 3 Sun Sparc Stations - with UNIX !!!!! Also Eagle CAD software, 25" colour screens, a mouse we called Rat, an A1 8 colour pen plotter, tape drive, 5 1/4" floppy disk drive. Many semi-illicit late nights at work with that ! Taught myself C from K&R, Eagle scripts, and a bit of awk and fooled around with shell scripts. Although it was 1988, we had no internet, and didn't know anyone who did.
In 1992 I had one of the first versions of Linux called Yggdrasil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
Not sure, might have had a fancy 80286 PC then, IIRC I felt flash - it wasn't an AT or XT computer, but it was still pretty crap compared to the 386 Sparc Station and the 8MB RAM they had. I do remember saving up for 8 by 256K RAM simms, so I could have 2 MB of RAM, I couldn't afford to fill all 16 memory slots.
Yes the nostalgia of it all, unfortunately the main thing I remember is the often sheer ignorance of the management, how much could we have achieved if they had embraced it properly?
The Apple II and imsai 8080 had their heyday in the 1970s.
I first got interested in home computing just 3 years after the it all started with the HP-35 calculator. I'm saying that's the beginning because it's probably the first "computer" that a person could reasonably afford. I had a TI-30 calculator (still have it actually) that's a single chip. I quickly moved on to an HP-29C programmable scientific: $195, 98 program steps and I think about 500 bytes of ROM. Yes, you could really pack a lot of functionality in a small space when you try.
Around 1979 I got an HP-41C. This added alpha-numeric display and expandability. Cost was about $400.
The best thing about those days was that Moore's law was in full force: every 18 months or so, you could get twice the speed and twice the memory for the same price. The pace has slowed to a trickle now.
My step-father bought an IBM PC-XT with two single-sided 360 kbyte floppy drives. It probably had 256k of RAM and cost him around $5,000. That would have been about 1980 or 1981.
In the fall of 1983 I bought a heathkit terminal kit and a 9600 baud modem. With these I could dial into the computers at school and do my assignments from my dorm room rather than waiting forever at the computer center for a 2 hour time slot on a terminal. We're talking about direct text-based dialup, no GUI, no internet, just a serial connection right to a serial port on a mainframe.
I got my first real computer through work at Bell Labs in 1986. It was a PC-6300 with 20MB hard drive. I upgraded the RAM to 640k myself. A couple of years later I bought a 25MHZ 386DX system. I recall a 67MB hard drive that seemed like all the space in the world.
Since then I've been buying bare-bones systems and doing upgrades, so I don't remember many specs. There was a 600MB drive that I salvaged from work and for a long time I ran with 4-6 hard drives in my system, all salvaged from work.
It may seem like those drive capacities are impossibly small, but programs and data files are actually pretty small. What takes up all the space on hard drives today is media. Back in those days all of our music and photos and videos were stored on analog media (records, film, tape). The move to larger and larger disks space is driven largely by the move to digital music, then pictures, and finally movies.
I first got interested in home computing just 3 years after the it all started with the HP-35 calculator. I'm saying that's the beginning because it's probably the first "computer" that a person could reasonably afford. I had a TI-30 calculator (still have it actually) that's a single chip. I quickly moved on to an HP-29C programmable scientific: $195, 98 program steps and I think about 500 bytes of ROM. Yes, you could really pack a lot of functionality in a small space when you try.
Around 1979 I got an HP-41C. This added alpha-numeric display and expandability. Cost was about $400.
The best thing about those days was that Moore's law was in full force: every 18 months or so, you could get twice the speed and twice the memory for the same price. The pace has slowed to a trickle now.
My step-father bought an IBM PC-XT with two single-sided 360 kbyte floppy drives. It probably had 256k of RAM and cost him around $5,000. That would have been about 1980 or 1981.
In the fall of 1983 I bought a heathkit terminal kit and a 9600 baud modem. With these I could dial into the computers at school and do my assignments from my dorm room rather than waiting forever at the computer center for a 2 hour time slot on a terminal. We're talking about direct text-based dialup, no GUI, no internet, just a serial connection right to a serial port on a mainframe.
I got my first real computer through work at Bell Labs in 1986. It was a PC-6300 with 20MB hard drive. I upgraded the RAM to 640k myself. A couple of years later I bought a 25MHZ 386DX system. I recall a 67MB hard drive that seemed like all the space in the world.
Since then I've been buying bare-bones systems and doing upgrades, so I don't remember many specs. There was a 600MB drive that I salvaged from work and for a long time I ran with 4-6 hard drives in my system, all salvaged from work.
It may seem like those drive capacities are impossibly small, but programs and data files are actually pretty small. What takes up all the space on hard drives today is media. Back in those days all of our music and photos and videos were stored on analog media (records, film, tape). The move to larger and larger disks space is driven largely by the move to digital music, then pictures, and finally movies.
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