Computer Storage
I was cleaning out an old email account this morning.
Seeing that email address, and some of the emails associated with it, got me thinking about the Olden Days of personal computers and the Internet.
Now granted, my relationship with computers goes back to batch programming. But where PCs are concerned, our family got a Tandy computer that required a large floppy to boot. Later, I used the first Apple MacIntosh, and learned mousing skills.
In the late 80s, I was doing a lot of computer editing, so in 1990, we bought a Video Toaster, which was hosted on an Amiga platform. That machine was rather remarkable, given that it performed live video transitions and effects, something that neither the Apple nor the PC could do for many years afterwards. Still, compared to modern nonlinear editing on an Avid, for example, using the Toaster for effects and character generation was clunky. Just getting characters to line up properly on a page demanded that you hit the space key literally tens if not hundreds of times.
I was using the shared Mac at work, and a shared IBM PC running MS-DOS. Remember the days of writing DOS commands to do something simple like save a file, or print it? And One day at my doctor's office, I saw a PC loaded with Windows 3.1. What was this? How did it work? Remember - back in those days, it was a great deal harder to be a geek than it is today!
About this time, a friend's son started at college. He and his new friends not only had computers (Macs), but were also getting started on a new idea - the Internet.
So it was about time for me to shop around for a PC. Again, geeking being a challenge, I called another friend who worked with computers, and picked his brains. What is RAM? What's the difference between a 486SX and a 486DX? (Although the DX was sold as an "upgraded processor, the 486DX had a working built-in floating point unit, whereas the SX was sold with this unit disabled.) How much was I going to have to spend? Believe it or not, my first computer, complete with monitor, was about $1700 - a seemingly enormous sum. The average point of entry for the latest and greatest - which mine was - has remained fairly steady, though these days you can get a perfectly serviceable computer for a great deal less - not a possibility back in the early 90s.
I remember carrying my computer back and forth to the office - computers were not standard office machinery at the time - and plugging it into an outside line so that I could access the "word wide web," and surf it. Chat rooms were all the rage, and AOL was the only way anybody who was anybody logged on.
Of course, that didn't last too long - AOL had a nasty habit of downloading updates on your dime what seemed like every single time you logged on, and soon the thing to do in Central New York was to have a Dreamscape account.
Of course, things weren't as easy to set up then as they are now. Even setting up an email account and logon process required a few false tries, and more than a little knowledge of tips and tricks. For example, you might have to instruct your system to dial a 9 and pause before dialing your ISP access number. And remember that wonderful sound - a kind of underwater dial tone - that you'd hear as your computer performed its handshake?
I didn't have Windows 3.1 all that long - Windows 95 was released in, what else, August, 1995.
Windows 95 ushered in a new era of home/personal computing, and marked the timeframe when people entered into computing in a big way. Oh, you still had to reinstall your OS occasionally - though not with the frequency with which I'd had to install 3.1. I can remember sitting and copying 15 or 20 floppies not once, not twice, but three or even four times in a single day due to some problem with a program or a corrupt dll. I can recall waiting several minutes for a website to download. I can remember when you actually thought you might have a chance to visit all the "home pages" on the Internet - some silly folks actually published directories of all the known internet addresses! (Now I wish I can hung on to one of those relics!)
Along about this time I discovered computer games. Oh, sure, there was solitaire - which I still maintain is a great way to get someone started learning to handle a mouse, and understanding "select, then act" with computer objects and files. But now I found adventure games. The first one I played was a text adventure called Curses, by the polymath Graham Nelson. I was hooked, and when I later discovered Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Father, my kids found it extremely amusing that I could disappear for literally 10 hours at a stretch while playing "my" game.
If you think back to your days before email, can you imagine how you organized your life without it? But it was not even 20 years ago when many people didn't have it, and certainly most companies did not. Would it surprise you to recall that AOL and Delphi really got going only as recently as 1993? I can still recall how thrilling it was to hear that AOL fellow announcing, 'You've got mail." And in those days, it was rarely spam.
Between 1994 and today, I have had 4 home computers as well as 1 laptop, an uncounted number of computers at work, and one computer devoted to video editing. I can still recall my excitement when I looked forward to an enormous 4 gigabyte hard drive! Interestingly, I feel as ignorant of how to evaluate a "good buy" as I did before purchasing that first $1700 486SX. All the old benchmarks have changed, and keeping up with the latest technologies is practically a full time job.
It seems hard to believe that so many memories can come out of what only amounts to about 20 years of computers in the home. But if so much can have happened in that short time frame - imagine what lies ahead!
I'd love to hear some of your favorite technological recollections. Email me at nancyc.roberts@gmail.com, or leave a post.
Seeing that email address, and some of the emails associated with it, got me thinking about the Olden Days of personal computers and the Internet.
Now granted, my relationship with computers goes back to batch programming. But where PCs are concerned, our family got a Tandy computer that required a large floppy to boot. Later, I used the first Apple MacIntosh, and learned mousing skills.
In the late 80s, I was doing a lot of computer editing, so in 1990, we bought a Video Toaster, which was hosted on an Amiga platform. That machine was rather remarkable, given that it performed live video transitions and effects, something that neither the Apple nor the PC could do for many years afterwards. Still, compared to modern nonlinear editing on an Avid, for example, using the Toaster for effects and character generation was clunky. Just getting characters to line up properly on a page demanded that you hit the space key literally tens if not hundreds of times.
I was using the shared Mac at work, and a shared IBM PC running MS-DOS. Remember the days of writing DOS commands to do something simple like save a file, or print it? And One day at my doctor's office, I saw a PC loaded with Windows 3.1. What was this? How did it work? Remember - back in those days, it was a great deal harder to be a geek than it is today!
About this time, a friend's son started at college. He and his new friends not only had computers (Macs), but were also getting started on a new idea - the Internet.
So it was about time for me to shop around for a PC. Again, geeking being a challenge, I called another friend who worked with computers, and picked his brains. What is RAM? What's the difference between a 486SX and a 486DX? (Although the DX was sold as an "upgraded processor, the 486DX had a working built-in floating point unit, whereas the SX was sold with this unit disabled.) How much was I going to have to spend? Believe it or not, my first computer, complete with monitor, was about $1700 - a seemingly enormous sum. The average point of entry for the latest and greatest - which mine was - has remained fairly steady, though these days you can get a perfectly serviceable computer for a great deal less - not a possibility back in the early 90s.
I remember carrying my computer back and forth to the office - computers were not standard office machinery at the time - and plugging it into an outside line so that I could access the "word wide web," and surf it. Chat rooms were all the rage, and AOL was the only way anybody who was anybody logged on.
Of course, that didn't last too long - AOL had a nasty habit of downloading updates on your dime what seemed like every single time you logged on, and soon the thing to do in Central New York was to have a Dreamscape account.
Of course, things weren't as easy to set up then as they are now. Even setting up an email account and logon process required a few false tries, and more than a little knowledge of tips and tricks. For example, you might have to instruct your system to dial a 9 and pause before dialing your ISP access number. And remember that wonderful sound - a kind of underwater dial tone - that you'd hear as your computer performed its handshake?
I didn't have Windows 3.1 all that long - Windows 95 was released in, what else, August, 1995.
Windows 95 ushered in a new era of home/personal computing, and marked the timeframe when people entered into computing in a big way. Oh, you still had to reinstall your OS occasionally - though not with the frequency with which I'd had to install 3.1. I can remember sitting and copying 15 or 20 floppies not once, not twice, but three or even four times in a single day due to some problem with a program or a corrupt dll. I can recall waiting several minutes for a website to download. I can remember when you actually thought you might have a chance to visit all the "home pages" on the Internet - some silly folks actually published directories of all the known internet addresses! (Now I wish I can hung on to one of those relics!)
Along about this time I discovered computer games. Oh, sure, there was solitaire - which I still maintain is a great way to get someone started learning to handle a mouse, and understanding "select, then act" with computer objects and files. But now I found adventure games. The first one I played was a text adventure called Curses, by the polymath Graham Nelson. I was hooked, and when I later discovered Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Father, my kids found it extremely amusing that I could disappear for literally 10 hours at a stretch while playing "my" game.
If you think back to your days before email, can you imagine how you organized your life without it? But it was not even 20 years ago when many people didn't have it, and certainly most companies did not. Would it surprise you to recall that AOL and Delphi really got going only as recently as 1993? I can still recall how thrilling it was to hear that AOL fellow announcing, 'You've got mail." And in those days, it was rarely spam.
Between 1994 and today, I have had 4 home computers as well as 1 laptop, an uncounted number of computers at work, and one computer devoted to video editing. I can still recall my excitement when I looked forward to an enormous 4 gigabyte hard drive! Interestingly, I feel as ignorant of how to evaluate a "good buy" as I did before purchasing that first $1700 486SX. All the old benchmarks have changed, and keeping up with the latest technologies is practically a full time job.
It seems hard to believe that so many memories can come out of what only amounts to about 20 years of computers in the home. But if so much can have happened in that short time frame - imagine what lies ahead!
I'd love to hear some of your favorite technological recollections. Email me at nancyc.roberts@gmail.com, or leave a post.
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