This Reddit Thread About The Things Only Internet Veterans Remember Will Make You Feel Ancient

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I dunno. but i recall dialing into compuserve to check the "internet" logging off and going back to the various BBS around town for games. Then we got an actual local ISP. Then that ISP supported ISDN. Then they supported multi ISDN. i recall jumping from 1200 baud to 7200, then 14.4, then 28.8, then 33.6, then 56k. jumpers and dip switches. god damn hardware used to take effort sometimes to make it work. I had a 5 digit icq#

I dont feel ancient. I just realize I got to live through a interesting time from some perspectives.

The internet will never be like that again.

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The 14.4 baud speed was amazing, but when 28.8 came along, we all thought we were flying in a jet plane. We could actually download a piece of software in under two hours, sometimes.

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I was fortunate enough to get to cheat the system in those days.

I met the guy who started the ISP, he was friends with one of my friends. He gave me a job going in and changing the backup tapes out on all the computers in the office every night.

I had 2 hours a night to sit right at the head of the t1, and download anything i could find.

The bitch was transport. then that writable CD hit... solved. I still have some of those old written CDs from those days.

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I dont feel ancient. I just realize I got to live through a interesting time from some perspectives.

The internet will never be like that again.

Same here, although my first modem was a 300 BUAD Hayes, and I remember I was stoked to get my hands on a copy of AOHell.

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They left out one. I remember buying computer magazines that were the size and thickness of a phone book (for those old enough to know what a phone book looked like). They were massive, over an inch thick, and 90% advertisements.

They were great! I'd buy one and have my recreational reading for a week. I would sit and look at those pictures of high-tech PCs in the ads and imagine that I was wealthy enough to buy one. The one I remember best was a PC that was called a portable. It has a 5 inch B&W CRT screen (green, actually), and two -- not one, two -- bays for floppy drives.

Those floppies, boy they were fun. They would fail suddenly and refuse to read for no obvious reason -- just one day they would work, and the next day they wouldn't. The 3 1/2 inch floppies, which were not actually floppy, were a little more reliable.

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Never had problems with my 5.25" disks. Data on cassette tapes were a pain in the ass on the other hand.

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Depends, you had to keep them stored properly. I still have my Kaypro 2X sitting here, the last time I made boot disks for it (other than the few I just recently made for a computer archivist) have 1992 on the label. Booted just fine.

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Whomever wrote this is trying to pull onto the information superhighway with a typewriter.

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[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

Dialing into a BBS and trying to chat with the sysop, being too young to go to the BBS picnics with my older brother, trying to think up the coolest handle for the boards...