Extinction

[champshire]

Wait... you had to stay ON THE PHONE to maintain internet connection??? That sounds terrible

Dude....how old are you Jake? I am 40 and I went thru dial up internet, and 14.4k Modems. It was a god send when we updated to a 56k modem with AOL dial up. Oh and I used both 3.5 and 7.25 floppy drives. Maybe I was just way behind technology at the time? We used to have a rotary phone as well. Got a cell phone my senior year of high school in 2003.

It's interesting to me to see the technology changes each generation went through. Pretty neat to think back and see how far things have come.

[jstell]

It's interesting to me to see the technology changes each generation went through. Pretty neat to think back and see how far things have come.

And pretty interesting what gets taken for granted by the next gen.  My kids have never lived in a house with a landline.  They've seen rotary phones, and had the little toy Fisher-Price phone.  https://www.lehmans.com/product/fisher-price-chatter-telephone?srsltid=AfmBOop0BPL3qTotwAvjKbdw3r7xlZ3UHM-0n-WdzySMMB8pkkcQAuVHaqA   (It also is on the shelf in back of the same closet as the Apple IIc.)

About fifteen years ago, was out running errands with my oldest, knee-high.  Came home to one of the last sets of phone books to get dropped on my porch.  Kid says, "Daddy, somebody brought us something."  I tell him it's just the phone book.  He says "How can a book be a phone?"  I pull it out (but don't open it) and explain it's not a phone, it's a book where you can look up somebody's number if you need to call them.  He looks at one side, then twists his head around to the other, asks me: "Where do you click?"

[CNCAppsJames]

...
It's interesting to me to see the technology changes each generation went through. Pretty neat to think back and see how far things have come.

BITD... dialing in to and hacking Cal Poly Pomona's BBS, then using GOPHER to navigate. Man we have it good today. We used to actually have to WORK to get information. Now everything is at our fingertips no further away than our pockets.

[Newbeeee™]

Dude....how old are you Jake? I am 40

Jakey thinking "40, that's old as dirt"....

Edit - talking auld....
I've told this before, but In my DO days, one morning we finally had the first seat of Autocad delivered (right at the start of R11).
386 with 2 meg of RAM and a 14" monitor (the MD secretary had a 17" for Lotus Notes)....
I walked back in after dinner and the MD and Software manager were just putting the cover back on, and then on pressing the power button, nothing happened.
My statement was "it was working when I went for lunch" and one of the brainiacs replied "we're just seeing if it will run okay with 1meg".
Yep, they'd robbed a chip and I then showed the the AD box where it said MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS 2 MEG RAM.
Muppets.

[Jeff]

Cell phones were almost non-existent until the late 90's / early 2000's. Unless you had $$$$$$ 

I had a Cellular One bag phone in my car in the 90's. I was ballin!
It cost over $1 per minute to use.

[gcode]

I had a Cellular One bag phone in my car in the 90's. I was ballin!
It cost over $1 per minute to use.

I had a drop dead gorgeous young woman stop by my shop selling those in the late 90's
She implied that a purchase/subscription of the phone came with a bonus weekend in Vegas with her.
I declined. I figured I couldn't afford the phone or the weekend in Vegas and I was pretty sure Mrs gcode
would have objections.   

[JakeL]

Dude....how old are you Jake? I am 40 and I went thru dial up internet, and 14.4k Modems. It was a god send when we updated to a 56k modem with AOL dial up. Oh and I used both 3.5 and 7.25 floppy drives. Maybe I was just way behind technology at the time? We used to have a rotary phone as well. Got a cell phone my senior year of high school in 2003.

It's interesting to me to see the technology changes each generation went through. Pretty neat to think back and see how far things have come.

I'm 25. My first piece of technology was an ipod touch, 2010ish. Slide cell phone and macbook Pro in 7th grade (2012), first smartphone junior year. Everyone had a smartphone by then, I didn't really want one but the varsity baseball team used a group messaging app for communication, my slide phone couldn't get the app.

[rdshear]

It's funny how we take for granted that we can call anyone in the US without any extra fees.  Back in the day, you had to be careful who you called or you could get some pretty nasty long-distance charges on your bill.  I remember living in a town about 30 miles from my parents in the eighties and it being "Long Distance" on the landline even though we both were in the same area code.  Remember roaming charges on Cell phones?  Back in the early days if you drove out of your home area, you could get some pricy roaming charges if you didn't pay close attention. In the early days of texting, the cellular carriers limited message length to something like 165 characters and charged by the message once you hit a limit based on your plan.  I remember my grandparents who lived in a rural area being on a party line where multiple households shared a common phone line and only a distinctive ring would let you know if the call was for you or one of your neighbors.  Of course, you could pick up your phone and eavesdrop on anyone's calls on the line. 
Technology has changed so much in my lifetime, I can't imagine what my granddaughter will see in hers when she gets to me my age and reflects.

[SuperHoneyBadger]

Though the floppy drive may have been with the Commodore 64 (dark gray IIRC) we got in '83/'84. Long, long, long time ago. 

I still have my dad's 1701 Commodore CRT monitor, best colour, brightness and uniformity of any TV in the house - AND zero input lag. Even beats the big plasma for retro games (if you sit close enough). It was the kid's TV when we were growing up, we had the GameCube hooked up to it all the time. Now it lives in my son's room, and we'll hook up the SNES and his VCR when he's a little older so he can have a little physical media area in his room. And does he ever love loading tapes in that VCR!

That screen is still amazing, and impresses me whenever I turn it on.

Did you ever have an Amiga? Going from C64 seems natural at that time. I heard those monitors are the holy grail of CRT.

[MIL-TFP-41]

My first exposure to a home computer was a TRS80 Color Computer that the old man bought my mom for Christmas, early 80's. Something like 16k of memory. There was a magazine devoted to the color computer, named The Rainbow. That was before rainbows were associated with being gay as fuck. Then the computer did have a nickname of CoCo, which was pretty fucking gay.

The magazine would publish programs in BASIC that you had to type in by hand. Make a mistake? Go through the code, line by line, and find whatever character you fat fingered. After several hours of that, you wound up with a block smiley face that blinked (ok the eye just flashed on and off). you would save the program to a cassette, and hope that it read the tape next time you wanted to see a block smiley face that "blinked"

[CNCAppsJames]

Never had an Amiga. Went from the Commodore to my grandpa's Epson. Then I think I got my first "IBM Compatible". A 286. No math co-processor so I couldn't run AutoCAD.

[SuperHoneyBadger]

The closest I'll ever get to the era is my project PC on the shelf at home, looks like the RAM debacle is going to push the build (again). It's an IBM XT (5160) case that I want to put a modern board into. I just love the look and feel of the case, has the original power supply with the big switch on the side. There is an aura of regal importance, a kind of palpable history that I cannot deny when I see it. Makes me grin every time.

[gcode]

The magazine would publish programs in BASIC that you had to type in by hand. Make a mistake? Go through the code, line by line, and find whatever character you fat fingered.

My first experience with computers was a main frame at Colorado School of Mines in 1975.
The computer class assignment was to write a program to calculate the amount and placement of explosives necessary
to bring down a hill. I think the language was COBAL
 
You wrote the program out long hand, then typed it onto cards about twice the size of a playing card.
If you are old enough, you'll remember that the power, water, phone and gas companies used these cards for billing back then.

The machine printed text across the top of the card and punched holes for the card reader to read.
Then you took them to the computer room, a hermetically sealed room where nerds in booties, hairnets and surgical
gowns took your cards. You had to pass your cards through an airlock sort of like an old time bank drive thru drawer.

Come back in a few days and they'd give you the resulting printout from your program.
My program would not run.
I had to go though several hundred cards, comparing the text to the punched holes.
After several weeks of failure I was down to counting holes in the cards,
I finally found the problem

On one card there was supposed to be a comma  ( , )
I had typed a semicolon ( ; ) but the period was barely visible and the printed text had passed
my visual inspection a dozen times.
I only found it when I stated reading the holes in the cards.

That experience was enough to put me off computers from quite a while.

[JakeL]

and punched holes for the card reader to read

Was it similar to punch cards (er, what was it called? Tape?) for programming old CNC machines? How long ago was that being used? and did it jump from punched paper to floppy disks, or was there something else in between?

[CNCAppsJames]

Was it similar to punch cards (er, what was it called? Tape?) for programming old CNC machines? How long ago was that being used? and did it jump from punched paper to floppy disks, or was there something else in between?

Tape... paper was for one offs and prove outs. Mylar was for production. I keep a small roll of mylar on my desk... for perspective. When I feel like bitching about something stupid... I take a look at that mylar and take stock in just how good we have it today on CNC machines.