What do you miss about the old days of computing?
Let’s wax nostalgic for a minute. What do you miss about the old days of computing? For me that question yields several responses. In no particular order, they are:
- Logging into GEnie and downloading shareware games for my Apple IIGS. A 189KB file took me almost an hour on my Datalink 2400 internal modem. Incidentally, my first game download ever was a Breakout clone for the Apple IIGS.
- Not having a dedicated line and having a family member pick up the phone during a critical download.
- Local BBS’s. My favorite board back in the day was Volunteer BBS. I remember actively playing Tradewars and Millway’s Casino, vying in competition with other BBS users. Alas, the names for the other BBS sites I used to dial (there were several) now escape me.
- The new computer smell.
- The independent computer shop where you could find both PCs and Apple computers on display.
- Getting software updates via said computer shops. On the IIGS, I would bring in my own floppies and the sales person would copy over the updates (they were free back then.)
- Actively waiting for the latest computer magazine to show up in my mailbox. My favorites were Home Computing and A+ Magazine (an Apple II publication).
- Playing Apple // games via the 5.25 drive and hearing the “disk load” sound. Also, flipping over floppies.
- The floppy shuffle (i.e. Insert Disk 1, then insert Disk 2, then insert Disk 1).
- Users’ Groups Meetings. Before the Internet, my parents would drive me to the local computer store where I would congregate with other computer geeks and talk about tech.
- Discovering newsgroups – the REAL Internet back in the days of yore, before web browsers.
There’s more I could rattle off, but I’d like to hear what YOU miss the most about the old days of computing. Share your memories and let’s wax nostalgic together!
-Krishna
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
Gordon McAlpin
July 12, 2013 at 9:55 pmI remember in high school, one of my friends got a new hard drive, and we were talking about how he would never be able to fill it up. It could hold (I think) a whopping 100 megabytes.
qka
July 12, 2013 at 11:20 pmNewbie! (joke) I remember 14 inch 5 and 10 MB drives. 9 track tapes. with the big reels of tape like in the movies. 8″ floppies. Punch cards, and waiting for your submitted job to run. 110 bps modems. The first TRS-80 home computer. The Timex-Sinclair. Daisy wheel printers. Hendryx (made distortion heavy “music”) on the original Mac, as well as that program, if you looked at it hard enough, could almost generate a couple of dark colors on that black & white screen.
stellatrenta
July 13, 2013 at 9:51 ambeing “picked up” from the kindergarden ( I was5 y.o). from my older brother(12y.o.), thake all my Vic 20 pices (cables, tapes …) and loading the game then…my brother take me to kindergarden again!! Just because he was not able to do it !! LOL
David Adams
July 13, 2013 at 10:07 amRunning a Floppy-based bbs on my college desk on my Amiga 1000! Playing Rampage on the IIgs at the local Egghead in the mall… Typing pages of code from EGM into my Commodore 64 to play the latest game only to find the many, many typos… Mail Order Monsters and Crush, Crumble and Chomp… The basic sense that everything was new and changing right before our eyes…
What I don’t miss? Waiting for that tape drive to load a program!
kaitou
July 13, 2013 at 11:03 pmLight panels.
Things I don’t miss include:
Unjamming keypunches, replacing ribbons in teletypes, splicing paper tapes and pulling 300MB disk packs out of the drives when the “cake pan” didn’t latch in properly.
(Apparently, my computing days are older than yours.)
capesnbabes
July 15, 2013 at 9:41 amBack in the mid-80’s, going over to my friend’s house and hanging out with his computer buddies while they played Jumpman I and Jumpman II on my friend’s Commodore64 while I buried through my friend’s pretty awesome comic book collection.
He was really responsible for turning me back on to comics in the late 80’s… George Perez, John Byrne, Chris Claremont, Marv Wolfman, Cammelot 3000, the large format graphic novels that were all the rage back then, Matt Wagner and Mage…
Yeah, I know that ain’t all about old computers but hey, when you start getting nostalgic for one thing, you tend to also get nostalgic for something else during that same time period… and to me, 1980’s comics will always go hand-in-hand with Commodore64’s due to that high school friend of mine. :-)
Thomas
August 13, 2013 at 5:42 amHey capesnbabes,
do we know each other. You could have been ghostwriting my reply. Exactly the same artists, the C64, with one exeption. I did both collecting comics AND play and even use my C64. Wrote the first homework assignments for my University on a C64. No footnote automation is HELL.
Long live these old days of wonder. But I’d never want to go back to 5 1/4 disquettes with 664 blocks free.
Thomas
Berlin, Germany
Coyoty
July 15, 2013 at 3:08 pmProgramming a PDP with punch tape to play Mad Libs.
Writing a one-line BASIC program to guess your number between 1 and 100 in less than 9 guesses. After 9 (or is it 8?), it would tell you the number. I think I was the only one to do that.
Programming a Timex-Sinclair to play Mad Libs and Word Search.
Wiggly plug-in memory expansion.
Cassette tape storage.
CP/M and Commodore user group meetings.
Typing programs from magazines into the computer. A word processor or database manager or spreadsheet program would take a lot of typing. But then before the Internet, there was enough time to do it.
Playing Dungeon on college computers.
Moderating forums on GEnie and QuantumLink.
Jack Slade
July 18, 2013 at 11:57 pmGetting Computer Gaming World in the mail as a kid. Also, all the pirated and indie games I had for the C64.