KIDS REACT TO OLD COMPUTERS

[jakeXT]

[baldguy]

1. Having the "ON" switch in the back never made sense to me either.

[csziggy]

18. On our used Apple ][ the main switch was broken

The people we bought it from (in 1982) had added a side fan that the computer and monitor plugged into so the switch for the fan turned the whole thing on. It was very handy!

[Yavin4]

2. Back then, computers were tedious and uninteresting. That's why only certain personalities were

drawn to writing code. There were no real graphics, no color, no video, no audio, no nothing. Today, computers have surpassed television, radio, movies, etc. to become the dominant art form.

[hunter]

4. I first logged onto the internet in 1979.

It was fascinating and I've been here since.

I have every computer I've ever used one or two clicks away on my Debian desktop.

Well, except for the first telephone relay computers I built, but those would be trivial to emulate, and not terribly interesting.

[csziggy]

20. But they could be very useful

My first computer was an Apple ][ very like the one in the video. As I mentioned above, we had a work around for the power switch, and had two floppy drives. The drives did two things - raised the monitor to a decent height when you put both drives on top of the CPU box and allowed you to put a floppy with a program and another to save your data in at the same time.

I did all my business and personal bookkeeping on that thing, had a word processing program, and even had a very basic graphics program to create flyers - Fontrix, which used various specialty fonts to make designs for printing. I later added a database program to catalog our Betamax video tapes adn all our books.

We got Adventure, an all text game, with it, and bought Wizardry which was really hot at some point. I think we still have the fabric map for Wizardry stuck away somewhere.

[DebJ]

3. That was fun, thanks. n/t

[krispos42]

5. So what's wrong here?

[div class=excerpt style=background:#000000] [font color=#00FF00 face="FixedSys"] KRISPOS42> THIS IS THE TECHNOLOGY THAT SEND NEIL ARMSTRONG AND BUZZ ALDRIN TO THE MOON. IF IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR NASA, IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. ONLY CRIMINALS AND PERVERTS NEED MORE THAN 300 BAUD OR 2 COLORS!

THOSE NEWFANGLED ELITISTS WITH THEIR CGA CARDS AND DOUBLE-DENSITY FLOPPY DRIVES! A FULL SIXTEEN COLORS? OUTRAGEOUS! AND WHAT KIND OF PERSON NEEDS MORE THAN 360 KILOBYTES ON A FLOPPY DISC?

WHERE'S MY QUILL? I'M GOING TO PEN A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OVER THIS CHILD-CORRUPTING DECADENCE!

C:\> [/font]

[Rob H.]

6. I'm that little blond kid toward the end

"Would you want one of these today?" "Sorta. It's--it's pretty cool."

(Full disclosure: I started on a Mac SE and still have more than a little nostalgia for that little beige box.)

[valerief]

27. I'm a lot older than you but I still have my first "owned" computer, a Mac Plus.

You were a cutie, BTW!

[Rob H.]

28. D'oh!

I meant I'm like that little blond kid. I even almost bought an Apple IIe back in 1993 as they were about to phase them out just to have one to mess with. Yes, I am a huge nerd.

[valerief]

29. Ah, Apple II. I used to bring one home from the office (I worked for a s/w company)

on weekends and write music with it.

And I'm embarrassed for taking you literally.

[ohnoyoudidnt]

7. I remember when Oregon Trail was awesome.

Although, I am looking forward to some really cool VR games within the next decade or two.

[Dpm12]

10. I fucking LOVED that game. n/t

[Jenoch]

8. I remember typing college papers on Apple IIc computers.

The computer lab was just an old gymnasium with tables full of Apple computers. I made the mistake of not saving my work to the floppy disk one time and somebody tripped on the power cord and I lost ten pages.

After I got out of college the company I went to work for had three Apple Lisa computers at $10,000 apiece.

[Skittles]

9. "the agony of delete"

it would only take one instance like that, right Jenoch? After that we were backup fiends.

[Jenoch]

12. I have sever dozen college papers backed up.

Unfortunately, they're backed up to 800k Apple floppy disks.

[lastlib]

22. Holy S--t, I typed my senior thesis on a manual TYPEWRITER!

[Jenoch]

24. When I transfered from a two year college

to a university, I was assigned three papers the first week. The first thing I did was to go to Sears and buy a portable electric typewriter. (I still have the stupid thing, why, I don't know.) I already knew how to type because of my part time job as a news writer (and a high school typewriting class) so I actually sometimes typed my papers as a first draft, and later, first and final draft. My roommates were aghast that I would attempt such a thing. I was a procrastinator but had good organizational skills to pull that off. It was a while later before I discovered the computer lab. (My roommates could not write four sentences in a row that made any sense. They were computer/engineer types.)

[kentauros]

11. Next time, they should give them a stack of punch cards.

[Jenoch]

13. I had one computer course in college that still used punch cards.

I tell my kids that and all it does is confirm that I'm ancient. (This was still the 80s.)

[kentauros]

14. Was it COBOL?

I had a COBOL class in 1980, I think, and we had to use punch cards. They also taught us how to change the magnetic tape reels in the main computer room. We didn't ever use them, that I recall, but I guess they wanted us to know a little bit about maintaining larger computers

Now, what's truly weird, is that the 2-year college where I learned that, and got my drafting degree, continued to use punch cards for their enrollment process until the late '80s! (I knew that due to taking a CAD class in '87 and they were still using the punch cards.) I had already gone through university by then for a BA, where they were modern with printouts and everything. The college was state-funded, so I guess that's why they held onto ancient technology until they could pay for an upgrade.

[Jenoch]

15. It might have been COBOL.

I was a business major, not computer science or engineering. It too was a state school and the computer was 100 miles away at another university. We put the bundles of cards into a box and somebody else fed them into the reader. I think the data was sent at about 300 baud.

[kentauros]

16. Yeah, business majors had to take COBOL at our college, too.

I wasn't in that field, but had to take a business class, so I picked the one that was an intro to business computing, I think.

All I really remember about the cards was how tedious it was to type out the programming on them, trying not to make mistakes in typing, and to never drop your stack!

[LiberalElite]

17. I ended up in a Fortan class -

I felt like I HAD to take something computer related (this was in the mid '80s). By the time I realized I was in way over my head it was too late to withdraw. I ended up typing on a punch card "this class sucks" and using it for a bookmark. I joked to a classmate who was equally at a loss, that at least we were learning a marketable skill (the keypunching).

[csziggy]

19. My college ID was a punch card

Seriously, while it was regular ID size it was punched to be used with certain campus computers. To check books out of the library, the library staff would take a punch card out of the pocket in the front of the book, put your ID in a slot, run the punch card through a slot, then stamp the return date on a glued in page in the book. The punch card went back into the book until the next time it was checked out - it was only used to keep track of who had what books.

Of course, I graduated from college in 1977. I still have that ID around here somewhere. At one point in the 1990s I thought about going to graduate school. When I went in to talk to the registrar's office about the details, they fell over laughing that anyone still had one of those IDs.

[progressoid]

21. The kid at 6:50 seems to actually like it!

Cool for him!

[Taitertots]

23. I remember being younger than them trying to figure out how to use those damn things

Back when most adults still had no idea how to use them.

These youngsters need to get off my grass.

[lastlib]

25. ...and trig on one of these:

(lessee one o' them snooty kids try that! )

[valerief]

26. What a hoot. I love the little bookie in the wiseguy hat!

[LeftyMom]

30. kid: Wow, was your first computer like that? me: No, that's newer. kid: Wow.

[Reter]

31. What game were they playing at around 6:00?

I'd love to look it up.

[jakeXT]

32. D-Day by Keypunch Software? I think there was also Shark Bait and Bee Crunch

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Arcade-Games-D-Day-Shark-Bait-Bee-Crunch-for-Apple-II-Plus-IIe-IIc-IIGS-/380893434200