Remember When

Remember When was Originally Posted on December 11, 2012 by lavarock

Decades from now, people will ask “Where were you on 12/12/12″ the same as they ask about the Kennedy Assassination, moon landing and 911.

There are lists with various where were you and what was your first, etc. So it should not be a surprise that I will ask you what your first access to the “internet” was.

My access is different from many. Our timeshare computer mainframe needed access to the outside world, without having to use 300 and 1200 baud dialup. We acquired a box called a “telnet engine” which was the size of a refrigerator and had cables that would come out and connect t othe serial ports on the mainframe. People could access our computer from this outside location.

Years before I used to connect to an HP3000 computer at the University of Virginia from Northern Virginia, through this invisible connection.

I also had played with a system called Minitel, which was not internet connected, but I could access it through local phone lines.

I also ran a dialup telephone bulletin board which had an email system and allowed one user at a time to download files. The mail was delivered in between inbound callers using a hierarchical connection service.

I played a bit with the internet and newsgroups, but it was not a web browser you know of today.

When I finally got a browser and started searching for things, I do remember a few of the first things I looked for.

One item was Mentos, the candy. I found a description of some of the commercials. I also started accessing a movie database, at the time called the Cardiff Movie Data Base and now known as IMDB, the Internet Movie data Base.

Finally I accessed a site (whose name escapes me) but contained a newspaper that you could arrange and choose topics. Now I use My.Yahoo.Com.

My first creation of a website was and still is available but has not been updated in perhaps a decade. It is MyHawaiianSite.Com and I was setting it up and adding content during the Atlanta Olympics. It still exists but is very old and I just have no time to bring it up to date. I also have a number of website ideas but no time or energy to finish them.

So there you have it. My first computer program was loaded with toggle switches on an Altair. My first computer, an HP150 touchscreen, which soon began to run my first bulletin board. The system ran off of two floppy disks and a very small hard drive of a few megabytes. near the end of my bulletin board days, I had a fairly fast (for the time) desktop computer and had added a cd jukebox with 10 cds of shareware programs. Overnight I went from a little BBS system to one of the biggest in the city.

Soon the regular internet took over and those BBS systems became less popular. Oh some people may still run them with an internet connection, but they are a passing fad. Still the idea of message boards and email conferences merged into things like Yahoo and Google Groups and so on.

Oh how far we have come from systems that ran off floppies, to being able to head to COSTCO and buy a 3 terabyte disk drive for just over $100. yet we can still fill one of those up in a few hours.

As mentioned here before, a unix type computer costs $35 (RaspberryPi) and I don’t want to even think how much I have spent on computers and disks over the years.