bygones
Sunday, June 2nd, 2002The technology is advancing too quickly. I can say this because I constantly experience a sadness at how ancient the beginnings of personal computing are, and those beginnings were in my lifetime.
My family's first computer was a Commodore VIC 20, which you might refer to as the Commodore P.O.S. (as any self-respecting Amiga user would have called it, or those pompous Apple-loving bastards). This was an admirable machine, with 19.5K in RAM, a cassette recorder and a disk drive (sort of a disk drive — the "disks" were really cassette-things that plugged into a port, kind of like the Atari 2600). The VIC 20 was, of course, a toy — no monitor (it plugged into a television), no graphics, no real sound, nothing practical per se — but I loved it, being a child. I learned BASIC on that machine, a couple of buffer tricks, and a lot of what not to do. This was the age of the 300 baud modem, and understanding little about modems at all, I remember planning to build one from the remains of a ruined phone.
Even into the mid/late eighties, when we got our first "modern" PC (an IBM clone, with a 5 1/4″ disk drive and support for four colors), the internet was a very different place. Everyone interacted through BBS and d-dial. What was truly remarkable was the phenomenal busy signal — most BBS machines only had one phone line, so only one person could be on the board at a time. A lot of this was changing by the mid-eighties, but there was still that sense of time standing still when you finally got through — you dominated the board for your small period of time.
I'm ahead of myself, though — my experience with networks back then was very limited, and I didn't really get into all this online nonsense until the early nineties. Back then, friends would say to me, "When you discover usenet, your life will be over." Usenet is a dinosaur now. At the time, though, it was how we all knew each other — we existed in text, rarely in binary sound or image files, and your worth was judged by your words. Now it's all multimedia and who can type the fastest. We have descended into a kind of corrupt economizing of language, fettered constantly with phrases like, "hi how r u?"
For the historically-minded, here is the oldest known usenet post. Ironically, it's about usenet itself — the poster is discussing config files for newsgroups. Notice the pun, "Rusty is Wright," alluding to the Wright brothers. These kids knew what they were into. It seems like a million years ago.
