f13.net

Two weeks ago, my three and a half year old grandson shocked me when he picked up my brand new two day old Droid Incredible and knew more about how to use it than I did.  His daddy had an iPhone for awhile so he knew all about swiping and zooming and such through the photo album.  :awesome_for_real:

Now this weekend we were shocked when he saw one of those old-style desktop rotary dial telephones in an older cartoon and we had to explain what it was.  :oh_i_see:

And now he's switched from calling me Pawpaw which was just a cute and meaningless nickname to me, to Gran'pa, which makes me feel older than dirt.  :ye_gods:

Well, you can either embrace the fact that time doesn't actually stand still... or you can kill the kid and feed him to your family this November.  Your choice.

My 3 yr. old nephew kills people in CoD. He can also very nearly recreate every move in God of War, physically.   :ye_gods:
Methinks he has superpowers.

But yah, you're old.   :grin:    Fight it by staying on the cutting edge and never stop learning.

I don't think I've spoken on a rotary phone in more than 20 years.  I saw one at an antique store a while ago with my (college-age) sister and had to show her how the dial worked.

It's not even possible to use those anymore, is it? Like, do the phone lines still accept the pulse method at all?

I'll have to look closely at my phone bill next time it comes. Doesn't Bell Canada still have that obnoxious 50 cent monthly charge for touch tone dialing?

I still used a rotary phone in California up until last year when I moved and got rid of the land line.  Pulse dialing is still around and they don't charge anything extra in the US that I know of.

I have no problems with getting older. It sure beats the alternative!

Yep! :)

And as for the advice to keep on learning, I'm a software engineer moving into database design and analysis so that's pretty much a necessity for continued employment!

As far as I know, the exchange systems still support it.  I'd try the old trick of manually flashing the line to check, but I don't have a land line any more.

--Dave

In the house where I grew up, we still had a two-piece phone. My step-father had implanted the guts of a rotary phone into it, but you still had the ear piece and spoke into the horn. Meanwhile, I ran a BBS through my 1200 baud modem on my C64. Low tech meets (what was then) high tech!

We had also wired the house for distributed sound and video with changers and speakers in most rooms. I was so much geekier back then.

We had one of those, too.  I could dial by flashing the line like Mahrin said, and I sometimes used it to talk with the grandparents when my parents were on the other lines.  I'd have used it more, but I needed to pull a chair up to it to reach the horn.

My parents are in the middle of nowhere Michigan, and still had a pulse dialing rotary phone up until like two years ago.  They only replaced it when they took my grandma in, because she's so old she couldn't see the numbers on it, much less dial it.

I have a rotary phone in my home den.

I'm tired.  All the time.

I kinda get depressed when I remember that my very first computer and gaming system was a Commodore 64.

That's no cause for depression. We lived geek history. We're museum pieces, each and every one of us! Erm, wait.

I'm not surprised, the spectrum was much better.

I get depressed when I think my first gaming system was a pong knock-off. The atari was ok, but getting my c64 was like putting on big-boy pants. I still remember working through Ultima 5 while the drummer sat in the next room playing that godawful mario game with the shit sound effects that made me want to stab and stab and stab and...erm, yeah.

I love the reaction I get from colleagues when I say I've been using computers since 1975. The newest Masters-level hire was born in 76, heh. In 75 I was using the mainframe at my grandfather's office to play colossal cave adventure and some star trek ascii graphic game, others I forget. But hey, had to navigate the file system. God, to think of the havoc I could've caused (dumping the entire buffer of one zork game to the print queue was bad enough). I was pretty obsessed with zork when I was a kid, only being able to play it once a month or so for a couple hours.

Holy shit Zork was addictive.  And Wizardry as well.

I loved that Star Trek game and played it on a teletype.  I still remember printing out loads of maps made of "x" and "." while nervously waiting for klingons.  I also loved me some Oregon Trail.  You can relate to being excited when CGA monitors started to be affordable. 

Getting older is a mixed bag for me.  I like how it has calmed me down.  I like that it has helped me be more objective.  What I hate is that my body can no longer do the things that it used to.  I play a lot of basketball with college students and the game I see in my head is no longer able to come out of my legs.  It's frustrating. 

 We used to play with this guy that was so blind that his glasses were as thick as the bottom of Coke bottles.  The dude didn't even play with his glasses and hit 80% of his shots.  Have faith Nebu.  Just think, you can eventually be that guy  :grin:

Tiltowait 4tehwin.

A good family friend of ours had a Tandy I always used to play Sopwith on. I kinda miss that game.

We had an Atari computer (the 1984 olympics special edition with 48k of RAM!). Didn't get it until it was a few years old used. But that was our first computer.

In an odd twist of fate, a buddy of mine and his brother own a used record/game store downtown. I went there to help him fix their server one night before we went out drinking. On the wall is my old Atari computer in the box and the Letter Quality printer we had. I guess he picked it up off some guy cheap for a cool in store prop. Thing still has the pieces of brown packing tape my dad used to fix the broken corner of the box.

I had an Atari 800, though it wasn't my first computer.  I have fond memories of all-nighters playing Star Raider.

My first "real computer" was a PC Jr.  What a steaming pile of shit that was. 

ZX81. With a 16k RAM-pack stuck in the back that you had to wedge in place with blu-tac or else the contacts would wobble when you typed on the membrane "keyboard" and it'd crash.

There have been so many major changes in my life over the last few years that I can't really separate out the effects of simple ageing. One obvious thing though is that I seem to heal more slowly. If I get a cut or a scrape it can takes weeks to fully heal, which never used to be the case. Plus I find myself deciding I've had enough to drink quite a lot earlier than I used to.

I think that the ageing process is strongly affected by whether or not you've had kids. I'm in my early 40s and almost all of my friends that in the same age group have children, while I don't. They all look 10 years older than me and my GF do....  :uhrr:

friend had a Vic20, then a C64.  Then another mutual friend's dad had an AppleII then an AppleIIe, then a Lisa... that family even had a TRX80.  I also played on the university's DEC's, Adventure.... go left. no right.

TRS-80

We had an Atari 800XL and then a C64 later on followed by IBM PC with an 8088 cpu (and a Bernoulli drive!).  Kid across the streets family had a Coleco ADAM!  :why_so_serious:  I remember the first computer in our neighborhood that I knew about was a TRS-80.  I used to ride my bike several blocks to go hang out at that kids house and we'd try and do BASIC programming.  Another friend ran the gamut of Apple boxes ending up with an Apple IIgs when I was in high school.

Definitely. But my first computer, the Tandy 1000 (in many ways a clone of the PCjr) was way way better.

Integrated 3 voice sound, 16 color ... pretty much remained its own standard for quite some time.

Still have a 1000 TX up and running at a whopping 8 mHz with a gigantic 40 MB hard drive. It plays Round 42, Sentinel Worlds 1, various Sierra games, and Pirates! like a champ. Good times.

My first computer was something called King Size that my father built together from a tutorial in a computer magazine. It had blocks the size of my fist as graphic (mind you, it was a tiny kid fist, but still) and was a wonder to behold.

My first real one was a Sinclair ZX81, the first one I used for anything but typing out game listings and playing games was the Atari 1040stfm (the one you could use tvs and monitors for)

(http://www.atari-museum.de/atari/1040stf.jpg)

It even had a hardware Macintosh emulator (Aladin) and a PC emulator (Beta System supercharger) , which was able to play games.

Yes, my father gave me a computer that cost more that 1000 dollars, a high class Grundig color monitor (which couldn't have been cheap either), and a hardware emulation that cost around 300 dollars (Mac) and around 350 dollars (PC).

What did I do? I bought Deja Vu (Mac) and Pool of Radiance (PC) and played those. Yes, almost 2000 dollars to play a game in glorious CGA.

I'm really lucky my father let me survive my childhood.

(http://www.s-line.de/homepages/horber-privat/bilder/apple2a.jpg)

My first computer was an Apple II that I used in school at age 7 to learn how to type. Mavis Beacon, biotch!

We had an Apple II that one of our accountants was using when I got hired here 10 years ago. I believe we retired it in 2002.

First computer that I used was an Altair 8800.  Look that one up for a good laugh.

First computer I owned was either a TRS-80 or an Apple II.  To be honest, I forget which one came out first. 

I had a Vic 20 which was pretty much useless. Replaced it with a Radio Shack Color Computer II when I went to college

This. Cause, well, he's my brother.

Between this and Intellivision we were living large!

TRS-80 model 1 level 2. And then we got a modem. Then we got a second phone line.

Your friends family was extremely rich to have a Lisa.

Yeah, what did those go for, like $10 grand?

I remember as a young lad back in the 70's, one of my friends up the street, had one of the early Pong games — his dad had it encased in a wooden cabinet and all the kids on the street would gather in his living to ooh and aah over what was revolutionary (of course, any 60s era D/ARPA hacker already experienced videogaming on a much higher level) for the times — blips and dashes on a screen.

(http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/dedicated/sears-ad-wm.jpg)

Mine was more brown than this one, maybe the European model or something? I think it was from Atari, though.

Yeah, the OS required 1024k of Ram which was supa spendy.

(http://imgur.com/SdlqT.png)

My first owned console, I later bought something that slotted into the port to give 2k memory or something, allowed you to hook it up to a tape recorder, christ, maybe I'm dreaming all that, I can't even remember what I did with the console.

Anyway, I had access to zx81's, 380Z's (typed missile command in by hand, twice) and BBC micros (elite goodness) through school.

Edit to add, found it, the Starpath Supercharger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger) interface multiplied the Atari 2600's RAM 49-fold, from its meager built-in 128 bytes to 6,272 bytes, i.e. giving it an extra 6 KB.

Dragonstomper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonstomper) on that was awesome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ6uHOhf2AA).

Trash80 yes, typo

The primary gaming system of my childhood was an Atari 1040ST.  1MB of RAM and 16 colors, baby.   :drill:

(http://www.ludd.luth.se/~joshua/colonial/pix/atari1040st.jpg)

Wow, I had the joystick in that picture.

Me too. 

I'm really enjoying this thread.  It is nice to know that I'm not alone in my senility here. 

Ricochet?  We had that, and followed it up with a Colecovision Adam computer.. There was a time when my family was bleeding edge, albeit the knockoff way.  That ended in the 80's and now the parents don't even have a CD player..

(http://www.computercloset.org/Atari_800XL_Boxed.jpg)

Is the one we had. 64K of RAM even. I guess the default was 48K which is why I was confused.

I rocked it TI style as a kid.  Had the voice synthesizer and tape recorder and all that jazz.  All those awesome Scott Adams text adventures, hunt the wumpus.  Awesome stuffs.  Scott Adams games are here, btw.  http://www.msadams.com/index.htm

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/201105/ti-reclame.jpg)

Man, I can't even remember the name of our first computer.  It had dual 5 1/4" drives so you didn't have to swap out the boot disk so you could run the word processor in the other drive.  That was awesome.  2 glorious colors.. green and black.

We had the Atari 2600 right up through 1993 when my mom sold it in a garage sale.  I was pissed when I came home from college to find that out. "They gave me $20 for it and all the games! Besides you and your brother just bout that Super Nintendo"   (About 25 carts including Night Rider, Air/Sea Battle, Tank, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.. and all the controllers) :ye_gods: :ye_gods:

My first computer was an IBM 8088 that dad used for work.  He upgraded machines fairly regularly and I spent many hours playing shareware games that were ca. 1983-1985.  I found a disk that contained the copies of them all a few years back and surprisingly they all still play quite well using the right tweaking on the processor speeds.  I still remember him staying up late when new upgrades would arrive putting them in the computer (and cursing when the jumper settings were conflicting and requiring multiple reboots, etc to fix it).  I got my first job doing exactly what he did some years later and realized why he stopped doing it after about 10 years.

My childhood was largely devoid of computers, except for a couple of visits to the Marshal Space Flight Center where we got to see a room full of spinning tape drives and big cabinets with flashing lights and were given copies of awesome (not really) ASCII graphics pictures of the Saturn V and Lunar Lander printed on fan-fold paper.  My first computer game was a very early version of the Lunar Lander game there.  My first computer was a $500 TI calculator I got as my high school graduation gift.  In college, Adventure on the mainframe was fun, but Universe (an ASCII Star Trek with a zillion bells and whistles) on the VAX was awesome.  The first music I listened to on a computer was the college fight song played on a line printer.  :uhrr:  The first program I wrote was on punched cards, although a later lab had me entering a program using toggle switches with LEDs for display.

On the ageing front though, I'm happy to announce that this grandpa just laid the smack down on some young whippersnappers in volleyball league play this evening so I'm feeling good about that.  Not bad considering the last time I played at this level was last century, when I was 20 lbs lighter, 12 years younger, and missing fewer body parts.  They've even gone and changed half the rules on me since then!  I know I'm gonna hurt in the morning though.   :ye_gods:

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12021422/Photos/wierdscience.jpg)


fakeedit: I started with an Atari 800XL which was quickly replaced by a Comodore C128D

My first computer was an Apple ][e+.

I'm turning 30 in a week.

I hate all of you.  I never got this experience.  Too expensive.  AND LOOK HOW I TURNED OUT!!!

I still have fond memories of going to my buddies house and playing mail order monsters.  What a blast!

The first computer I ever got to fiddle with was a VT100 terminal linked to a Honeywell 6030 (my mom's work system).  First computer I ever had to myself was a TRS-80 with a 300 baud Hayes acoustic modem (the kind you set the handset into the rubber cups), which I linked to the same 6030.  I eventually found a back door from that 6030 to a DOE Cray and from that to places I probably could have gotten shot (or an NSA job offer) for getting caught in.  Yeah, I'm old.

--Dave

Did you turn your brother Chet into a giant green toad-blob?

I've never been w/o a rig since the age of 6... which started with an Apple IIe, then a Tandy 1000, DX2, and on and on.
Ahhhh yes, my baby.  My DX2. 

To me the DX2 marks kind of a paradigm shift in computing.  The "www" had just come out, AoL 1.0, and BBS's, MUDs and so on were really gaining steam.... for the most part the real birth-moment for consumer multiplayer gaming probably.  By then every household had a rig with a US Robotics 14.4 modem.  Gawd, those chatrooms were the shiznit back then eh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XZPflpw-ys (Ben's remake)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaxJK2c9Onk (the original)

I've probably just sat and listened more to this song than most new music made today.

Damn, that takes me back.

I can sit here and play sid tunes all day, baby. :drill:

Dragon 32.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7902689/dragon32.jpg)

My favourite was the Amstrad 1640 though. A proper computer!

My very first computer was actually a dragon 32. I used to play pacman until it crashed.

Cousin of mine had the c64 though, and the music in the games on the c64 was just in a completely different league. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time at his place.

1978ish we got the Bally Astrocade, complete with a cartridge to program in BASIC.  4k of ram and programming entire words in that keypad was painful.


(http://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/images/1970s/77_Bally_Home_Library_Computer/78_Bally_Professional_Arcade.jpg)

What the hell would that thing actually do? It looks like an old ATM.

heh.  Not much beyond print "my sister smells" in an endless loop and play cartridge video games.

Wow. A Lisa. My inner child is jealous.

I grew up on Atari 1040 ST and Amiga machines. I had earlier computers but those two platforms transformed me and my friends.

Yeah looked it up - the Lisa retailed for $9,995.00. Equivalent in todays dollars to approx. $21,900.00.

This is totaly my thread. In collage I studied the 8080 as a course. The first intel 8 bit prosessor. (difference from 8082 is mostly irq...remember irq?). Was a Atari ST kinda guy untill work forced me to buy a laptop 386 in order to program Allen Bradley SLC 500. That impressed me as a usable computer. and I have been a PC guy ever sence. Want to talk about cleaning silver contacts on a tellatype i am your guy. Paper tape been there done that. Memory paging oh ya babe. How about dropping your handfull of punchcards while standing in line at school to input your fortran program. Ya I did that a few times

I remember using an eraser to clean the gold contacts on cable connectors when they were not working well.

I turn 30 today.

You're in the wrong thread, kid  :why_so_serious:

It's all relative grandpa!

Want a squeaky walking chair with that, gramps?

Happy birthday young-un.  Grab a cane and join us on the porch as we shoo away the kiddos.

The damn kids realy need to stay off my lawn. Did you have a neighbor like that? I did and would tightrope the curb and just generaly try to tick her off. And if a stickball went in her yard, well its just over.

I find swinging an axe in the yard all weekend deters the kids just fine.