Even further back in the day

This is kind of a follow up from Todd’s post, back in the day.  I love the way Todd writes and am always happy to have him on the weenie, he says that I have a sense of humor, maybe but his quick wit gets me every time.

Todd got me thinking about what back in the day means to me.

The first time I touched a computer keyboard was in 1982.  I was a mainframe that my college shared with another school.  The thing looked like a giant typewriter, and had no screen.  We would dial a number on an analogue phone and put the phone in a special cradle to connect to the computer.  The user would type commands and the results would be printed on green bar paper.

The first time I used a PC was also in 1982.  They were given to the school by IBM, through a grant from 3M.  No one really knew what to do with them, they were toys in our computer lab that we would play with.  Did you know that the personal computer was an invention that no one had any use for? They were novel because they had screens, and were so small, compared to the huge mainframe computers.  I think it was visicalc or lotus123 that made the PC useful for businesses, they were early spreadsheet programs. The only class I ever took to learn a software application was a class on Lotus123, when MS Excel came out, I immediately switched to it and have been using it ever since.

I had a computer in my home in 1989, it was an Apple 2E clone.  It had a screen, black with amber writing, no graphics of course.   No hard drive, the programs were on floppy disks and I saved my work on the same disk.  A couple of years later, 1991, or maybe 92, I bought an Apple Perfoma.  It had a 40 megabyte hard drive,  and a color screen and a 1200 baud modem. I went on the internet and have been there ever since.  I kind of got lost in it and started a whole new life for myself. 🙂  I had an email account but no one to send email too.  I was one of the early member of this new on-line community called AOL.  We used to get updates every week about new web sites on the internet.

One day in 1992 my six year old son brought home a floppy disk that hat a new beta program on it called Netscape navigator, 1.0, I loaded it on my performa and never used AOL again.  I discovered I could use a local ISP and just go anywhere on the internet that I wanted to without having to download a ton of graphics.  AOL made me "update" every time I signed on and with a 1200 Baud modem that was very time consuming as the update included numerous icons and graphics.  I think Netscape mail may have been the first or second on-line, use anywhere kind of email, I was invited to do some beta testing of the product and was most impressed.

I developed my first web site in 1995 for a non-profit.  I used a new program called Netscape navigator gold 3.0 and free programs I found on the internet.  The project took me almost two weeks, The site consisted on four pages.

When I think about back in the day, I remember that first PC without a hard drive and how long it took on my Macintosh Performa to "dial up" and get on the internet. It was so slow, and there were few websites.  Email was fairly useless but seemed pretty cool.  Most people were not too sure that the internet was worth the trouble, but we played on it just the same.

I like to say that in internet years I am 300 years old.  I have seen the progression and advancement almost since day one.  I remember using "Gopher" through the university of Minnesota and using an email program called "pine". When the spell checker came out it changed my life. I know it is hard to tell from my posts but it is true. The spell checker and the keyboard made it possible for me to write, and opened up a whole new world that I never imagined I would be a part of.

There wasn’t any new technology to learn when I started my blog in 2005.  Instead I had to learn how to write and take pictures, and am still working on perfecting both.