Did we ever think?

I just want to know how all of you who attended college before the mid-90's were able to communicate with friends on campus? I mean...if I couldn't sit here in my room and IM my friend Alex across the hall....well, I don't think we would ever find a way to hang out!

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James Draeger
-Still amazed at what the internet has turned into for most people his age

When I started college in 1991, we had to go to the computer lab to use the Internet. Then, by 1994 the dorms were wired. It was awesome - I could use Gopher right from my own room! :)

If it wasn't for that high speed Ethernet connection, I doubt I'd be a web professional today. I'd probably be forecasting the weather in Idaho.

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Virtual Midway
http://www.virtualmidway.com
*** This post was edited by Gemini 10/23/2002 9:31:52 PM ***

I graduated from MSU the year before the first Dorm had experimental PC Jr's installed in every room. For computer lab I had an Atari 800 XL and a 300 bps modem.

I could enter the FORTRAN code, press batch run and hang up the phone and if I was lucky it would have run and be in the bin, by the time I walked across campus to the computer center to retrieve it.

We were so amazed the day we set up the new AT with 20MB hard disk in the Entomology lab I worked in.

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kneemeister

"If you look to the left side of the train you will see the Coasters of Cedar Point"
*** This post was edited by kneemeister 10/23/2002 10:51:49 PM ***

The only thing useful we could do with the Net when I gurgitated from Assland University in '95 was e-mail, and I didn't know anyone at other schools anyway, so it was kind of pointless.

The high point came when http://www.zima.com appeared on the back of a Zima label. There, friends, was the first commercial Web site. It had a graphic of a fridge and everything. It also took the old fashioned Winsock program to connect a PPP connection via a modem. A real pain.

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Jeff
Webmaster/GTTP
"There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, when it's all in your mind. You gotta let go." - Ghetto, Supreme Beings of Leisure

Well, I only have 5 TV channels ( PBS is 1), we still have a turn table with me Dad's records, and I don't have air conditioning...but I do have an electric can opener! Am I deprived? I say yes...it's a wonder we even get the Internet!

Back in the day, indeed! I think that anyone who remembers "bodyin_thelagoon" and "airtime205", can consider themselves a veteran. It's been over 3 years since I found this place, my how it's changed.

It would be pretty funny to check out the archived UBB's...when I first found the site, I read all the "pre-Millennium Force rumors." It was laughable what kind of things people came up with and it familiarized me with many of the members of the time. If only the newbies now would take the same time to try to fit in without just jumping right into the conversation.

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Launch: Tophat: Twistage: Brakes...

...Denial is an ugly thing.

I remember when color TV first appeared. The TV listings had a star next to each program that was in color, as very few were at first. It almost seemed magical to watch television in color. My family didn't get a color TV until about 3 or 4 years after color programming started. In the mean time, my dad, meaning well, purchased a goofy three color plastic sheet that was attached to the CRT of a B&W TV. The bottom was green, the middle brown and the top blue. Instant color TV. Of course, all it really did was screw up the B&W picture and gave us eye strain.

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Florida may have Disneyworld and Key West,
but Ohio has Cedar Point and Put-In-Bay.
It's great to live in Ohio!

In my first year of college (Data Processing), they taught us how to program (RPG II, I believe) using punch cards. Remember those?

MrScott

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"If we go any faster, she'll blow apart for sure!"

Actually, I do remember punch cards. In high school, we were ahead of the curve and learned BASIC. When I got to college in '88, the University was showing off it's first resident computer lab full of MAC's and a couple of IBM clones.

I typed my term papers for the first couple of years, with a typewriter. (If anyone needs an explanation of what a typewriter is, I'd be happy to indulge you.)

I went to college in the late 80's. Our solution to the communications problem was co-location. About 50 of us lived in a really big house, so we wandered down the hall when we were looking for people to create mischief with. It was called a "fraternity".

However, I was an EECS major, and email was part of my daily routine. All EECS students got accounts at cs.berkeley.edu, which made us s00per c00l. Until I got a 1200 baud modem, I did all of my work in the terminal room. Again, co-location solves the communications problem. At any time, day or night, a good fraction of the hundreds of people in your class would be in the terminal room, working on their projects alongside you. In fact, I think that high-speed dorm connections killed the (pedagogically useful) terminal room.

I also had an account on the Cray. The most popular application running on this high-powered, vector processor meant for scientific computation? emacs. Number 2? vi. I guess it makes the editing go faster when your computer runs ispell in parallel.

I was also a netnews junkie. Netnews is like GTTP for the entire world, covered all conceivable interests, was text-only, and really really ancient.

I realized that the geek domination of the Internet had ended at a party thrown by one of my wife's colleagues in '95 or so. A room full of psychiatrists, talking about how email and the web made it easier for them to take care of their patients and keep current on psycho-pharmacological research. Shrinks are pretty smart, but usually they are not geeks. :)

Ah...keypunch cards. When I first came to campus in 1974, that's what we had in our "computer lab". I recall two girls having a drag out cat fight because both were waiting for the same keypunch machine. We had to answering stupid questions such as "I put my keypunch cards into the card reader upside down. Does that mean my program is going to run backwards?"

Our department threw a party when we got our first LA36 hardcopy Decwriter Terminals.

U of Michigan was working along with Berkeley, therefore we were also one of the first universities connected to the Internet, and working in the computer department certainly had/has it's advantages.

I've seen a lot of changes, but I'm still happy to say I'm not as big an addict to the internet as many of the younger people are these days.

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I'd rather die living than live like I'm dead

OldCPer: were you one of the MTS users? Sadly, we don't seem to have anyone left in the UM EECS department who (claims to have) used it.

Yes, Brian, I was not only an MTS user, but I handled the MTS accounts for the entire Dearborn Campus. In fact, my MTS id was K21t. What memories!! I remember having to come in at 6 am every July 1 (beginning of the fiscal year) to run the program to add money back into everybody's MTS ID.

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I'd rather die living than live like I'm dead

And in another few years we'll be remembering about floppies...and then...dare I say it...CD ROM's.

MrScott

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"If we go any faster, she'll blow apart for sure!"

5.25" floppies baby!

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James Draeger
-Captain Sarcasm

5.25" floppies! Ha-ha-ha-ha. Do you remember the big storage containers for those things?

I was thinking about my first introduction to cable tv. I was out in California and we had the standard 2-13 tv channels. Pretty much though, it was NBC, CBS and ABC. Then, something came out called ON TV. It was 1 cable stations.

You got a box to put on you tv, when you turned "ON" on, you got the single cable channel. When you turned it off, you got your 11 channels back. It was on "ON" that I first saw Star Wars on tv versus in the theaters.