I'm not complaining about it, just pointing it out in case there is something to worry about
Site performance is quite poor today
- Thread starter TwistedKestrel
- Start date
ah, to be the generation that experienced the beginning of internet and puberty at the same time
Gaoler
Well-known member
Puberty..??
I was 27 when I gots my first 'pooter and dial up connection. 1993-94.(?)
Some weird flexing going on in this thread... might as well join in.
In school, we worked on PDP-11s running a variant of Unix. I was a few years too late and missed the hole (pun intended) punch-card era but my teacher had a big box of them sitting on his desk.
Got my first computer around 1982. It was an Apple ][ clone. A couple of years later, I had it hooked up to a 300 baud modem and was running a BBS, trying to remember the name of the SW... GBBS, I think? Acoustic coupler FTW. I could whistle the proper frequency to connect to another 300 baud modem.
By ~1988, I was running Opus BBS on a 386 PC connected to FidoNET, getting batch mail and messages from inter-BBS forums overnight. F-n state of the art at the time. Started working at IBM in 1990, and they had *all* the toys there, I had unlimited access to luggables and then later on Thinkpads. All running OS/2 ugh. Started messing around with multi-user telnet BBSes, hooking up Opus to the Internet. This was the direct precursor to the Internet forums of the late 90s (of which we are all talking on right now).
I had ran the gamut of 1200, 2400, 9600, 57.6K baud modems, from Hayes to US Robotics, acoustic couplers to PCMCIA. You name it, I had it in the back of a drawer somewheres.
In school, we worked on PDP-11s running a variant of Unix. I was a few years too late and missed the hole (pun intended) punch-card era but my teacher had a big box of them sitting on his desk.
Got my first computer around 1982. It was an Apple ][ clone. A couple of years later, I had it hooked up to a 300 baud modem and was running a BBS, trying to remember the name of the SW... GBBS, I think? Acoustic coupler FTW. I could whistle the proper frequency to connect to another 300 baud modem.
By ~1988, I was running Opus BBS on a 386 PC connected to FidoNET, getting batch mail and messages from inter-BBS forums overnight. F-n state of the art at the time. Started working at IBM in 1990, and they had *all* the toys there, I had unlimited access to luggables and then later on Thinkpads. All running OS/2 ugh. Started messing around with multi-user telnet BBSes, hooking up Opus to the Internet. This was the direct precursor to the Internet forums of the late 90s (of which we are all talking on right now).
I had ran the gamut of 1200, 2400, 9600, 57.6K baud modems, from Hayes to US Robotics, acoustic couplers to PCMCIA. You name it, I had it in the back of a drawer somewheres.
Mad Mike
Well-known member
I started
I worked in small tech lab that developed Z80 based stuff, I remember getting our first 5mb hard disk (Corvus). It was the size of a beer fridge, got delivered in a special air ride transport. 10 of us shared that disk over an Arcnet. A big upgrade over 64k floppies.
We made 212a modems for Bell, and did a lot of homologation work for Hayes, we always had the fastest modems ( beta nickname for their first 19.2 was porn-modem).
Having one of these on your desk (beside your ashtray) was cool.
I started on a PDP 11 running RSTS. PIP was my friend, was glad it got adopted by CP/M.
I worked in small tech lab that developed Z80 based stuff, I remember getting our first 5mb hard disk (Corvus). It was the size of a beer fridge, got delivered in a special air ride transport. 10 of us shared that disk over an Arcnet. A big upgrade over 64k floppies.
We made 212a modems for Bell, and did a lot of homologation work for Hayes, we always had the fastest modems ( beta nickname for their first 19.2 was porn-modem).
Having one of these on your desk (beside your ashtray) was cool.
Relax
Well-known member
Yup, expensive. I remember my parents buying an original IBM PC with 2 floppies, the ATI memory board, CGA colour monitor, and Epson FX80 printer and the bill being just under $10,000! Which was 1/3 the price of my dad's brand new Mercedes 450 SL he bought a few years earlier.
ATI!
They made graphics cards as well. I started off with a green-screen CRT monitor and quickly bought the very newest CGA card: 640x200 and 16 colours! Luxury!
Later on, I climbed the upgrade ladder of ATI adapters, CGA->EGA->VGA->SVGA etc. They were a very big name in the industry.
ATI was later bought by AMD, which took its flagship Radeon line and continued developing it into the very popular current GPU lineup, rivalled only by NVIDIA and their competing GeForce products.
How did I turn into the Cliff Clavin of this board?!?!
You used to be able to buy engineering samples of ATI video cards at Above All Electronics Surplus on Bloor St. Some of them even worked
Xhumeka
Well-known member
lmao, what another weird tangent of a thread! And also very fitting that I got the following message the first time I tried to reply:
Before ATI was bought out by AMD, they threw a couple LAN parties that I attended at their main headquarters in Markham that were quite fun... Counter Strike was the main tournament at the time. Even though it was at their main office they had to bring in huge portable generators to power all the PCs (and they only had about 150-200 attendees, quite small compared to some major LANs). They called them "ExtravaLANza" and the last one was 2012 I think.
I also ran BBSes as a kid, and dropped out of University to help run one when we turned it from a hobby into a business providing the first Internet access to the Goderich/Wingham/Owen Sound areas. We had 128 lines at one time, running MBBS (MajorBBS / Worldgroup) - talk about flaky software for an ISP! We eventually turned to Linux for stability so that we didn't have to run to the office to restart the BBS in the middle of the night when it crashed.
I still run a BBS (telnet only) to this day for nostalgia, running SBBS (Synchronet) although it's been offline the last couple of weeks as I try to migrate from Win 10 to something newer... bit of a challenge since Win 10 handled 32-bit door games fine, and the new OSes don't :/
Before ATI was bought out by AMD, they threw a couple LAN parties that I attended at their main headquarters in Markham that were quite fun... Counter Strike was the main tournament at the time. Even though it was at their main office they had to bring in huge portable generators to power all the PCs (and they only had about 150-200 attendees, quite small compared to some major LANs). They called them "ExtravaLANza" and the last one was 2012 I think.
I also ran BBSes as a kid, and dropped out of University to help run one when we turned it from a hobby into a business providing the first Internet access to the Goderich/Wingham/Owen Sound areas. We had 128 lines at one time, running MBBS (MajorBBS / Worldgroup) - talk about flaky software for an ISP! We eventually turned to Linux for stability so that we didn't have to run to the office to restart the BBS in the middle of the night when it crashed.
I still run a BBS (telnet only) to this day for nostalgia, running SBBS (Synchronet) although it's been offline the last couple of weeks as I try to migrate from Win 10 to something newer... bit of a challenge since Win 10 handled 32-bit door games fine, and the new OSes don't :/
Mad Mike
Well-known member
there was a lot of cool PC technology in Markham in the Z80s and 90s.
Sadly, few of the startups ever made it big on their own, and a lot of world class products were cast aside when bigger companies bought out smaller ones.
Gaoler
Well-known member
You used to go on vacation and come back two weeks later to find out your best friend had died. No you know what he had for lunch.
I don't know if this is a factor but when I tried logging in there were 9 members and 3951 guests.
