Terminalcoffee discussion

All of these items will one day be housed in the Smithsonian for future generations to obverse and be bewildered by our primitive ways.

I don't recognize these:
22. Using Jumpers to set IRQs
36. NCSA Mosaic

Also, roller skates are making a comeback. Derby girls don't use blades.

Sarah, on the old cards there were usually three pins in rows, and you used jumpers(little plastic covers) to cover(set) two of the three so that they didn't conflict with another device that might be trying to use that IRQ. Geezus its been years since I've had to use them.

Setting IRQs was a royal pain.

Re: #57 Typewriters - I had to take typing in about '85 or '86 in order to get into our brand new high school computer class. And the instructor made us spend half the semester learning on a manual typewriter and half on an electric because "You might get a job in an office where all they have is manual typewriters." Oh, if only he could have seen just a few short years into the future.....

Wow, I love this list! I had forgotten about a lot of these things. Its amazing how far technology has come.

I still see pools with diving boards, however, they are all older homes, I'd say circa 1970's or 80's. Most individuals with modern pools have platforms, and I doubt you can purchase spring boards any longer.

Even though there is thesaurus.com, I still use this old falling-apart thesaurus I have from the early '60s b/c it's got some really cool words that no one uses anymore in it

I hadn't thought about how not knowing who's calling used to feel. Remember when it was a surprise everytime? But I definitely wouldn't want to give up caller id. I LIKE being able to selectively answer my phone.

I still don't have caller ID, so that old feeling hasn't gone away yet for me.

EDit: Except for my cell phone.

You know land lines are going away, too, Jim! I haven't had one in five years.

We have seriously thought about getting rid of the land line, it gets used so seldom.

I never use a land line. I use my cell for just about everything, including internet more often than not.

Many residential pools these days are too shallow for diving -- broken necks and all that.

I was just talking to someone about the dearth of diving boards. I think it has more to do with insurance liabilities than anything else. All the neighborhood pools and even water world in my area has removed the low dives (and of course the high dives) and replaced them with feet first only slides.

I remember the first e-mail I ever sent. It was sometime in middle school... maybe 1996? and I had asked our computer lab teacher if I could use her e-mail account to e-mail my pen-pal in Athens, Greece, because there had been a horrible earthquake there. I was so excited when I got a response a few days later. It was amazing.

I also remember the first laptop I ever saw. To this day, I swear the screen was really wonky and if you looked at it the "wrong" way, you couldn't see anything.

And the big floppy disks. In fact, when I bought my laptop in 2003, I was still using the ... crap, I forget what they're called. I guess they're still called floppy disk but they're hard and smaller. My computer didn't come with one and my dad started yelling at my mom for buying a stupid computer and we had to go back to the store and ask what was wrong with my computer... and I ended up getting a USB device to read them. (It was important at the time because all of my writing was stored on the disks.)

My parents still have a landline because our cell phones don't really work where we live. I have connection, just no bars.

I am dying to get a proper typewriter. My mom has one, but it's an electric from the 80's.

Did anyone mention pagers? Do doctors still use those?

I wish I could still make mixtapes on audio cassettes. They're quaint and cute and still seem more personal than burning a CD for someone.

I had a Compaq docking station laptop in the early '90s for work. It was like carrying a boat anchor around.

I did a lot of DOS CBT set-ups in the late '80s on an IBM PS-2 386 machine. The IBM bundled word processor and database programs were really sucky, as I look back on them. I recall that our company paid IBM about $16,000 for one of those PCs back then. Unbelievable now, right?

I'll never forget how underwhelming Windows 3.0 was when it came along.

Sherri wrote: "I'm having flashbacks now to junior high and sitting next to my combination stereo (turntable, AM/FM radio, cassette) waiting for a song I liked to play on the radio so I could hit the "Record/Play..."
I still have all of mine...whole taped-off-the-radio tapes with the first three to ten seconds of each song missing. I remember tag-teaming with a friend so that I'd listen to Z100 and she'd listen to 95.5 and whoever heard the song we were waiting for first would quickly call the other to say to switch the radio to that channel so we could hear it. I refuse to admit what songs we were waiting to hear.


Re #35: we did my first album on reel-to-reel, to keep that sexy tape warmth. Second one ADAT (still tape, but digital), third one direct to hard drive. Recording to computer opens a world of possibilities, but sometimes that world is a little overwhelming. First album took a month to record, a month to mix. Second one several months, but part of that was that I was touring in between recording. Third one took four years. Too many tracks to wade through, takes to decide between, etc...

My dad kept his Apple II Plus from college. Ha.

Doctor's do still use pagers...

Someone mentioned DOS and remembered Windows being underwhelming, I just had the opposite experience. I'm a bit of a techie, and I had never been exposed to a DOS system. I had no idea what to do, it didn't even have a mouse. I had to research function keys for the system, and even google had a tough time explaining it, lol.

My sister has a shrine to our Apple IIGS in her room at my mother's house. To its credit, the computer still functions fine. She boots it up every once in a while and plays the first Bard's Tale game. She has never tried to beat the game. Her roving band of heroes, established 1987, has something like a million points each, so that any monster they encounter in a dark alley is smote by a mere glance from her low-res avatar.


Hey, can I add "Text-based computer games" to the list? I can still recite the first moves of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game.
Stand up.
Don clothing.
Take analgesic.
Then you step outside, and you encounter a bulldozer waiting to demolish your home...

This thread made me think of Louis CK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3N...

I found a small stack a floppy disks buried in my desk drawers a couple years ago. According to the labels, they're full of the writings (stories, letters, poetry) of my late elementary and middle school years. I've been wanting to open them, but I haven't been able to find a floppy disk drive!

Nools, I'm sure goodwill or someplace that will sell discounted pc's would have a floppy disk drive. If you have a mac, you can go onto ebay or amazon and skip buying an ancient pc and simply by a floppy disk drive.

Sherri wrote: "Sarah, do you know anyone who can convert a reel-to-reel or DAT to digital? "

DAT to digital shouldn't be too hard to find. Reel to reel might be a little harder but there should be gearhead studios in your area. I have a friend down in your neck of the woods who would know where to do the former -- I'll ask her and get back to ya.

"Give it a second. It's going to Space!" LMAO! I love Louis CK.

Nools, were those floppy disks the old ones that really were floppy? Because then the smaller hard cased ones came out and they called those floppy too.

Yep. I feel old.

Mimeograph machines, people, mimeograph machines!

The hard ones that were just called floppy. ^^; The 3.5"? Yes, those.

I didn't want to buy a separate drive just for a handful of disks, but I'll look into the local hardware store idea, Sherri. Thanks for the advice, everyone. : )

I've been meaning to see about finding a library with outdated computer models, but the ones on/near campus have all be upgraded past those or modified so that the disks no longer read. (Isn't it a little sad/telling that you can expect to find outdated technology at libraries?)

Nools, floppy disks, the originals, were completely floppu - you could fold them in half practically. They were something like 4 x 6.

You might also try freecycle or craigslist for old computer stuff for you to read your floppies. Also GoodWill if there's one around you.

I LOVED the smell of mimeographed paper and ink. Mmmm.

Were mimeographed the machines with the purple ink?

My kids assume that any show they watch on television can be rewound (uh, digitally, I guess) because they usually watch shows on the DVR. Sometimes I just roll my eyes...

Remember black and white tv? Black and white tv could be kind of cool.

Also, this was a Marathon bar to me, and Marathon bars kicked ass. My wife and I were just talking about them.

http://todayslessons.blogspot.com/mar...

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping with my sis & niece in an antique/thrift store and we came across a Rotary dial telephone. Kendall, who is 10, looked at it and showed us this "cool old phone", and then asked us how it worked. She didn't even have a concept of turning the dial.

And, I used an old word processor in college for writing papers & all of my creative writing, and smartly stored all of it on the proprietary floppies it came with. When the stupid thing broke I went around to several computer places but no one could figure out how to get the data off from them and convert it into a recognized software format. At least I had some of the printed papers still, but I lost so much work on that thing. Now I'm always paranoid about saving stuff solely on disk (I'm still a paper copy fanatic), because if I store it too long it may not be retrievable in the future.

"The drive was indeed, quite inoperable. They'd taken a 5.75 disc, folded it neatly in half, and crammed it into the 3.5 drive."

Oh HAHAHA!

Mindy wrote: ""Give it a second. It's going to Space!" LMAO! I love Louis CK."

"How quickly he feels entitled to something that 10 seconds ago he didn't know existed" is my favorite. That and "You had to write yourself a check LIKE AN IDIOT." The guy is so good.

Wang Labs was WAY ahead of its time. Too far ahead of time, actually.

Larry wrote: "Wang Labs was WAY ahead of its time. Too far ahead of time, actually."

It is funny how people need to progress down a line to further progress, that a lot of times if something comes out that is too far down the road we don't adjust.

The old paradigm blindness syndrome, Jim.

I took a typing class on an old typewriter. We'd make pictures out of letters typed. 32 Xs, space, space, three Xs, etc.

*sniffles* I remember when I got my first Walkman at a yard sale. I felt so special!! No one else in my family had one!!!

I yearn for paradigm shifts regularly.

Speaking of Walkman's, here's one that made me feel old and made walk around for a day muttering about punk teenagers under my breath....

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...

Do you know I actually saw a Walkman for sale (new!) in a store the other day. Well, it wasn't a Sony, but you know just a handheld cassette player w/headphones. It was in a Maxway, though.

I sometimes wish that the ipod had a radio with it, so I could listen to sports games too, but if I'm near wi-fi I can go on the internet and listen.

Just about everything I listen to is podcast.

Even when he discovered the cassette had more music on the other side (it took him three days), Campbell was still disappointed it could only hold a small fraction of what an iPod can.

Ahahahaha. Great link Kemper! It took the teen THREE WHOLE DAYS!!! Teens these days are too spoonfed! Bet they cannot do calculations in their head.

Just for some oldies, when I was young I *SO* wanted to get onto this game show b/c they DID have a walkman!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_...!

My Niece found my old mix tapes from High School the other day and asked me what they were. AT that moment I felt old.

I still have mine, too, Bonnie. And a tape deck. I wonder how they sound after all these years?

Mindy wrote: "I LOVED the smell of mimeographed paper and ink. Mmmm."

and don't forget leaded gas. i would go from station to station getting a gallon each and pumping it slowly if i could now

I used to love that smell too, Kevin. Now I can't stand the smell of gas - was it the lead? Never thought of that.

Oh good gravy, people. Really? The smell of leaded gasoline?

That's like sticking your head in a gas oven full of white-out and breathing deeply.

And your point Sally? ;-D.