FoxTrot by Bill Amend for January 19, 2014

I was so excited when I upgraded to a 36.6 once!

Anyone else suddenly feel old?

300 baud. Woo hoo!

Yup. I remember the early 60’s: we had a black-and-white TV like everyone else (except a few rich people), and no A/C in the car (that was only in Cadillacs). Email and computer networking were pipe dreams, as were computers smaller than a car.

Freshman year in college, Apple II (and III?)s and IBM PC XT’s were on the market, and 300 baud was the best available modem. I remember the upgrade to 1200 baud, when suddenly it could paint the screen (with text) faster than you could read it, and we all thought “Finally! A modem as fast as we need.” (That’s still, BTW, 45x slower than the US Robotics modem pictured above.)

In college 1973-77, we did our computer programs on punch tapes!

Oh so old, I remember when only the very rich had a TV!

Bing sjkfsj iiiiiiik…Anyone remember that :)

When I was a kid the sun was only about half as bright and there wasn’t a moon yet.

I’m so old I remember when the stuff on TV was good!

“WOW! I got color TV – an RCA Victor Color TV! All our shows are color NOW – WOW,I bought color TV’ea….” (catchy tune at the time)

I used to be able to impress young IT people by mentioning that I had written Fortran on punch cards, but these days, when most of them don’t even remember floppies, the reference escapes them.(And, yes, I still have an acoustic coupler and a 300 baud modem among the debris up in the attic… I really need to clean that up some day.)

I served in the U S Navy from 65-95. My first job was in the supply department at a Major Naval Base. I remember changing from a Manual Inventory Control System (hand entered with a pencil for each transaction) to a Computer Based Punch Card System. For three years we maintained both systems side by side. I will give everyone ONE guess as to which one was the most accurate in the day to day operation. If you get the answer WRONG it will go on your permanent record, and you will be subject to very harsh discipline in the afterlife!

This strip is pretty weird if you’ve read early “Foxtrot.”

No, they were real, Peter, and they could be VERY annoying.

The first time I saw a picture in the internet, was an issue of the uncanny x-men, supposedly the first to be available online officially, and each page could take half an hour to appear in the screen, back in 1990 or so, and almost no one in the campus who wasn´t in computer sciences knew what the internet was. E-mail, usenet newsgroups and the bbs boards were about it, and the thing closest to google was something called verónica.

wow!!! I do remember dial up. I first saw an acoustic coupler modem in the apple lab in college back in the 1980s. I started out with a 300 baud modem then eventually I was able to afford a 56k USR sportster modem. Does make me feel old,

When I first got on the internet when you connected to the ISP you had a choice of opening the browser or going to a BBS. On the BBS it had a list of everyone connected to the ISP. When at first I never saw more than 8 or 9 on at one time, and at 14.4 it was pretty quick (for those days) and you could always get right on. A year later they did away with the BBS and it would take you at least a half hour to get rid of the busy signal and get on and it was dog slow, about 10 megs per hour.

I first learned to use the computer on a Tandy TRS (and I was already in my late 30s).

Punch cards on an IBM 44 PS 4 mainframe using Fortran IV and Wang terminals in 1970. Got a Tandy Model 4 in ‘88 then another then a Mod 4P. 4 MHz CPU, 128K RAM (plus 2 add-on 1-Mb MegaMem boards) and the floppies changed from 180K SSDD to 720K DSHD 3 1/2". Still use both when I need simple documents or filing lists….and print them on dot-matrix printers. And I don’t have to worry about updates or malware…!

http://www.keyphonesdirect.com/Toshiba/Expansion-Components/AMDSIA-REF.html

Come back when you learn something.

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