The things we take for granted

[IanMc]

For example, i constructed a modem for my commodore 64 many moons ago.

I would access Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) over the phone and download games and stuff.... The CBM64 had 64kilobytes of memory but a typical game would be maybe 50k ....

It would take about 3 times longer than it now takes me to download a 700mb movie

 

[TomA]

More things

I remember the thrill of my first modem - used an acoustic coupler (you placed the phone on it) and ran at 300 BAUD (that's about 30 characters per second). My daughter was thrilled to get that when I upgraded to a fast 1200 BAUD modem (about 120 characters per second) and my first internet access was via dial-up at 9600 BAUD. It seemed fast at the time (although even a 1 or 2 megabyte file took forever at that speed), but now I complain to my provider if my speed is anything less that 15 MBPS (that is something in the order of 1.5 million characters per second) and if I wanted to pay more I could have 50 MBPS. And sometimes it still seems like a file is taking forever to download - shows how fast we can forget how things used to be.

How many remember when a 640 pixel by 480 pixel 13" monitor that displayed an amazing 16 colors - or maybe 256 colors if you could afford it - was the best there was?

Or when a 25 MHZ computer was consider top of the line and really fast - or if you were really flush you might even spring for a 33 MHZ system at considerable extra cost?

Tom Aman

 

[IanMc]

I did hear a story, although I think it might be an urban myth, so it must be true then

About a young girl who went to her grandma's and at some point she asked to use the phone, grandma told her where it was then after a while she came back asking how to use it.

She couldn't figure it out because it had a rotary dial on it

 

[allinonesolution]

Hi all, new boy here so you're all excused for not knowing better, that is don't get me started on the 'good old days'

My first computer was an Amstrad 464, that was the posh colour one. I think it was something like £300 which in today's money is getting on for £1000.

I seem to remember that around the same time, maybe a bit earlier there was the Ferguson Video Star VHS video cassette player/recorder I think that was about £1000 to buy, whereas the last VHS player/recorder I bought cost £29 in a Supermarket!

First Internet access (couldn't quote the date but I'd guess it was 15 or 20 years ago) was with AOL, I had to pay a monthly subscription, it was dial-up but the nearest access was a National phone call which I also had to pay top rate for. I was limited to a few hours connection per month. Worse still, there wasn't much content to look at... just as well really in view of the cost!

By that time desktop PC's were really flying with the likes of the 286 and the 486, or a 486 with math co-processor WOW but a set up like that would cost £1500 and now I have a hell of a lot more computing power in my pocket with my Galaxy S4 that's a quarter of the price, in real terms considering inflation probably a tenth of the price!

Quite lot of the people at my workplace are in their 20's to 30's, they haven't known life without computers and mobile phones. They have no concept of how inexpensive they are in real terms. Equally they have little concept of the fact that the so-called techno geeks are in fact the pioneers of the devices they all take for granted nowadays. When I get started on 'the good old days' I'm pretty sure they think I'm 156 years old not 56.

While the Industrial Revolution had its big leaps, I'm not sure if there has ever before been so much advancement in technology as there has been in the last 30 years and I wonder if it will ever happen again?

Dave (all of a sudden feeling old)

 

[IanMc]

I remember looking at the Amstrads, the keys on the keyboard had little plastic tabs on them, that was the springs

So imagine one keyboard sized sheet of plastic, formed and cut under pressure and heat to form the keys, then each key was held to the main 'plane' of the keyboard by a little plastic tab so that when you depressed a key it didn't go straight down but bent down from the plastic tab.

At one point RAM was the most expensive part of a home computer, at another point it was the keyboard that was most expensive... don't think they'd even invented hard drives at that point

At least not for people who didn't wear lab coats.

 

[Jim Brown]

Game / Program loading times. Back in them days it was all cassette based. Which meant you could go on holiday and come back just in time for the game /program to finish loading.
Now the same thing can load in under 2 seconds (via emulation).

Not to mention too the fun and games of 'tuning' the cassettes azimuth head to an optimal position. Especially so with turbo-loading C64 games.

 

[moster67]

Especially so with turbo-loading C64 games.

LOL

Good old times. I am getting old.....

 

[Tom Christman]

How about the Sinclair computer, The Commodore VIC 20 or the RCA Cosmac (which had 16 (16 bit registers) for on the fly storage and computation......and clocking down static operation?

 

[EduardoElias]

I remember my first spectrun zx80 with 2kb of RAM!

I had no tape recorder when got it. I had to write the program and use it, when turned off gone the program!

But that was not much, i could only enter no more than 20 lines of basic program that mostly consisted on a simple game: a letter 'A' on the botton that fires dots '.' against a bunch of letters V.

 

[Jim Brown]

I had the Zx81 fitted with the notoriously unstable 16K ram pack. You only had to look at it and the computer would freeze or crash. Even knowing that, my brother and I thought it would be a great idea to attempt the mammoth task of typing in a 16K game from a magazine listing. Needless to say a butterfly flapping its wings the other side of the globe caused the ram pack to wobble and we lost everything. Woopeee (!)

 

[EduardoElias]

That is fun, I had that experiences also. I got a 64k module and connected to the spectrum, wow that was a huge amount of memory, in my case it worked nice.

But I remember the nights we spent entering hexa codes from magazines for this games!!! then we played all we could before turning off the "computer".

When I got a tape recorded it was so wonderful...

Now I don't see computers with that much fun anymore, these new technologies and languages are so boring stuff.

I shown to my children the Rex game from spectrum, a 3d game :sign0060: they said that was awful and very bad. That time was the top stuff.

 

[andymc]

I started on an Amstrad CPC 464, green screen, We quicly upgrade to the colour screen 6128 with the disk drive when that came out.

Then later, after seeing the Amiga 500 at a friends house, we upgraded to a 500+, the difference was huge! And using a mouse was an amazing thing at the time. Our house was robbed a few months on, causing us to replace the 500+ with the 1200, again, another amazing machine.

I think the things missing these days is the feeling of advancement from older machines to newer ones, the same with mobile phones, a newer device will have a better screen, or a faster procesor, but nothing these days ever feels like the wow factor that happened from moving from something like an Amstrad CPC to the Amiga, or seeing a full 3D game for the first time. Computing advancements these days have become boring. I can only hope that products like the oculus rift will bring back some excitement.