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Harold Mansfield
06-21-2013, 03:08 PM
"Imagine if you will, sitting down with your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper".

Doesn't seem that like that long ago that we were talking about the Internet as a distant future convenience.
I got a kick out of this video talking about the "the brand new system". I especially love rotary phone and the sound byte where the guy says "We're not in it to make money". My how that has changed.

Check out the clip:
News report from 1981 about the Internet. [VIDEO] (http://www.wimp.com/theinternet/)

Poor newspaper bastards had no idea that they were promoting what was to be thier eventual doom.

vangogh
06-21-2013, 03:22 PM
Interesting look back. I get a kick out of it, because I can still easily remember that time. It's fun looking back at what computers looked like, especially when you realize how the phones in our pockets are now so much more powerful. It makes you wonder where things will be and devices will have 30 or so years from now.

I don't see this as the newspapers promoting what was their eventual doom though. I saw it more as how they were ahead of the curve, but then let everything slip by them. They were thinking about getting the news online about 15 years before anyone really thought to do it and yet in all that time they couldn't figure out a business model to make it work. We're all reading the news online. We probably read much more of it than we did when it was only available in print. And still the papers haven't figured out how to earn money from all that content they create.

Harold Mansfield
06-21-2013, 03:42 PM
Yeah, that was probably a little overstated. It's just ironic that the guys were from a newspaper and made the statement "we're not in it to make money".

Dude was dialing a rotary phone! That part really cracks me up to see how far we have come in just a short time.
2 hours to download the entire paper? Just text? Amazing.

billbenson
06-21-2013, 05:43 PM
What gets me is the computers they appear to be using is the Apple II. That was my first computer in about 1980. I used it primarily for Lotus 123 which was the spreadsheet of the day. And I forget the name of the first Word type program - ahh Word Perfect.

In the 80's I had a sales job selling to the phone companies on the Eastern Seaboard of the US i.e. Maine to Miami. At some point in the mid 80's I distinctly remember making a sales call in West Virginia. The secretarial pool had disappeared and the engineers I was calling on all had pc's on their desks. That was the end of an era of how companies did business. And I realized it at that very moment.

KristineS
06-24-2013, 12:54 PM
It is crazy to look back and see how fast things have changed. When I was a kid, computers were gigantic things in rooms that giant corporation used. I'm only 44, so it wasn't that long ago. Now we have a computer that we can carry around in our hands that's far more powerful than the first desktop computer (with dial up!) I had. It really makes you wonder what the future holds.

vangogh
06-24-2013, 06:30 PM
@Bill - I thought the same thing about the computer being an Apple II. In 1981 there's a good chance that's what it was.

@Harold - It is funny the guy said they weren't in it to make money. Guess he got his wish. :) The rotary phone was great. Did they even have the giant cell phones in 1981? I want to say it was more mid 1980s when they were around. We definitely have come pretty far in a relatively short period.

@Kristine - I'm pretty sure they had personal computers when you were a kid. I'm a few years older and they had them when I was still a kid. Maybe not quite when we were born, but shortly after. Apple formed in 1977 and shortly thereafter the Apple II was on the market. I think there were one or two other personal computers around at the time as well.

The first computer I was was an Apple II in what was the very new computer room in my high school. It was probably 1979 or 1980. The first computer I owned was one of the very first Macs ever made. The university I went to started a program my freshman year requiring everyone in my major to get one. We went home for the winter break, watched the 1984 Super Bowl commercial and a few week later we had our computers.

billbenson
06-24-2013, 06:57 PM
I can take a pretty good guess at the time frames as I graduated in 1980 just before the Apple II came out. It was early in my sales career when the cell phones came out. I would guess 1985. The Motorola banana looking thing.

Harold Mansfield
06-24-2013, 07:36 PM
I remember the tech by where I was.

I had a big Motorola brick phone in Miami in 1991. But it was kind of stupid since no one else had a mobile phone.
I do remember that all of the drug traffickers had them though.

After that I remember seeing a guy with a smaller model at a TGI Fridays in Detroit around 1993 and I also remember that a lot of people that came to the club I was working in started having them. But it was still mainly car phones.

I probably continued to use a pager till about 1995-96 and got my first Motorola Flip here in Vegas somewhere around those years.


Been through a lot of phones since then.

vangogh
06-25-2013, 01:58 AM
I was never into those old giant cell phones. It wasn't something I would ever carry around. Too big for me. I was a late adopter of cell phones in general. Never really wanted one until I went into business and didn't want to use my home line for the business. The first cell was whatever was cheapest. Then I got into them and wanted something more than a phone. I bought a Palm Treo 650(?) and after that it's been iPhones.

Never had a pager or wanted one.

KristineS
06-25-2013, 11:57 AM
We had a Commodore 64 when I was a teenager. We never succeeded in making it do much. I remember personal computers just starting to come into larger use when I worked as a co-op my senior year of high school, which would have been 1986 -1987. I remember I went to college with an electric typewriter.

Didn't have a computer of my own until several years later, and didn't have a laptop for several years after that. Didn't have a cell phone for ever longer. Don't remember people having the big cell phones much when I was a kid.

billbenson
06-25-2013, 12:55 PM
I had a horrible statistics teacher in college. I had a homework assignment once where the bulk of the time was spent putting a list of numbers in ascending order. What a waste of time. 3 hours and learned nothing. A teacher couldn't get away with that today. The kids would just plug it into a pc. My Apple II with Lotus 123 would have done that as well.

vangogh
06-28-2013, 02:16 AM
We had a Commodore 64 when I was a teenager.

A friend of mine had one. It was probably 1981 or 1982. I remember he was all excited to get it, but I can't remember if he did much with it. I'm sure he used it, but I don't remember.

KristineS
06-28-2013, 03:24 PM
I remember trying to program our Commodore 64, but I never was able to get it to do much. They gave you some simple programs you could use to make it do really basic things. Mostly it just gathered dust. I don't think we ever used it for anything that was actually useful.

vangogh
07-02-2013, 11:55 PM
Too bad we didn't get into them at the time. Who knows what we might have ended up doing. A lot of the top people at many Silicon Valley companies will tell you they got their start on a Commodore 64 or a TRS80 before graduating to an Apple II.

patrickprecisione
07-03-2013, 08:22 AM
I love reading stuff like this. But it always makes me think about how we're going to look in a few years. For instance, when wearable technology like Google Glass is the norm.

Harold Mansfield
07-03-2013, 10:04 AM
I love reading stuff like this. But it always makes me think about how we're going to look in a few years. For instance, when wearable technology like Google Glass is the norm.

When they get that trimmed down so that it fits seamlessly into a regular pair of eye glasses, I'm all over it.

Marcomguy
07-07-2013, 07:13 PM
At my first job they had 2 IBM PCs and a couple of Apple IIs located in a common area. I remember creating a Lotus 123 file with a macro for doing some elementary calculations with the company's rate card. That file used to take 2 min 57 sec by the clock to load.

The first time I demo'd the file for my boss and colleagues, they all gathered around the computer, I launched the file, and then.. we waited... and waited... and waited. Those three minutes lasted forever! But once the file loaded, it moved along quite smoothly.

Eddie Pollard
07-07-2013, 10:14 PM
Great clip! I love the title bar "Owns home computer"

Eddie Pollard
07-07-2013, 10:17 PM
When they get that trimmed down so that it fits seamlessly into a regular pair of eye glasses, I'm all over it.

I cant wait till they use OLED over regular lenses! I have been waiting and waiting... maybe vuzix or someone else soon! I am most excited over Augmented Reality! I am working on an AR app for a friend now to be used on smart phones (android and IOS) HUD's will make the use of these types of apps so much better! :cool:

Paul
07-08-2013, 12:52 AM
Wow I'm old!

My first experience with computing was mailing in the IBM cardboard inventory control tickets from a retail store that were then hand fed into the home office computer.

Then I bought an IBM metal cased computer with ONLY a floppy disk and no mouse. I had to learn DOS...now thats OLD! Then my dinosaur died...

Harold Mansfield
07-13-2013, 07:18 PM
Back in the day, I remember my Mom worked as a keypunch operator.

I was around 6-8 so I vaguely remember going to her job on a couple of occasions, but it was a big room full of these big (well, they looked big to me at the time) machines, and each machine had an operator.
The operator had stacks of these cards with holes punched into them in different patterns. They fed the cards onto the machine one by one, which was basically sending information to a computer which was on another floor.

I now know, that was early programming and storing of information.
Amazing stuff.

It was only a few years later that my grandfather got a Tandy Computer from Radio Shack.
A couple of years after that, I was playing Space Invaders on an Atari 2600 after school everyday, and all the kids had those handheld Mattel football games....

...and technology was off and running.

Still remember my Simon. Hard to beleive we were wowed by that as technlogy. It was litterally nothing more than flashing lights.

LGCG
07-15-2013, 08:22 AM
Still remember my Simon. Hard to beleive we were wowed by that as technlogy. It was litterally nothing more than flashing lights.

Amazingly, the Simon game is still being sold in toy stores to this day! It just goes to show you, even if it's low tech, if it's a good idea, it's a good idea. Take video games- The graphics may be better, but you'll be hard pressed to find a modern game as fun as the original Super Mario Bros.

billbenson
07-15-2013, 03:01 PM
My first year of college I had a programming class that was really frustrating. You would write the program. They would send it out to have punch cards made. They then would send you the punch cards to run through the computer. Any missed character etc and you would get a 'doesn't compile' message from the computer. By the time this whole process happened, you usually wouldn't have time to correct any problems and get the punch cards back. I'm surprised I passed that class. Really frustrating.

By my second year of college we had a computer the size of a small car and it had a terminal you could type your program into. It probably wasn't any more powerful than an Apple II though.

vangogh
07-17-2013, 01:18 AM
My mom shared stories of having to punch cards to write programs for a college course. Fortunately I never had to do that. When I was a freshman though I was working on a computer network designed to handle about 7 computers. Unfortunately the school had purchased a lot of new computers that year and we were running about 120 computers on that system. You'd write a single line of code and then save it, because you probably had about 2 minutes before the system would crash, which it did all the time. It was a nightmare.


Still remember my Simon

Me too. Good memories. There's an iOS app for Simon, which I downloaded. I played it a few times, but that was enough.