Geek toy... Logitech MX Revolution cordless mouse

[Guest db99wj]

Well I use to program computers the size of a minivan, with rectangular pieces of heavy card stock paper, with a bunch of square cut outs.....Ok, I didn't, but I saw one on the History channel the other night...

[Marswolf]

I wonder if you know I mean Cassette Tape. I'd connect to BBS's with my 300bps modem as long as the phone call wasn't long distance. Mom would kick my ass if I ran up long distance charges. You've got 21 years on me age wise but it sounds like we were playing with similar toys. You just had more money than I did.

I don't think I got a disc drive for my TRS-80 until around 85.

Well, of course I know you were talking about cassette tape - Puppy.

I went upscale on the modem Novation Smartcat (1200 BPS). I had a Compu$erve account - 75216,1247. That's when "Marswolf" was born. I needed a password, so I combined two nicknames. The Smartcat script language wasn't compatible with anything else. That limited my applications to ones that could be changed to accomodate my modem. Would connect at 300 baud, do my searches, then disconnect & reconnect to do the downloads at 1200 baud. Know the difference between baud and bps? Yeah, you probably do.

[Marswolf]

Well I use to program computers the size of a minivan, with rectangular pieces of heavy card stock paper, with a bunch of square cut outs.....Ok, I didn't, but I saw one on the History channel the other night...

I used to punch my own programming cards for my FORTRAN 4 course at UT. Used to write my girlfriend that way too. I'd punch the cards and do a printout. Sent her the cards and printout. Geek kids do goofy things.

Anyone remember paper tape programming? Heath-Zenith sold those things for ever.

[Guest GT_Rat]

Well, of course I know you were talking about cassette tape - Puppy.

I went upscale on the modem Novation Smartcat (1200 BPS). I had a Compu account - 75216,1247. That's when "Marswolf" was born. I needed a password, so I combined two nicknames. The Smartcat script language wasn't compatible with anything else. That limited my applications to ones that could be changed to accomodate my modem. Would connect at 300 baud, do my searches, then disconnect & reconnect to do the downloads at 1200 baud. Know the difference between baud and bps? Yeah, you probably do.

Well I did know the difference between BPS and Baud. But it's been so long since I've used the term Baud I had to look it up.:hiding:

[Guest GT_Rat]

I used to punch my own programming cards for my FORTRAN 4 course at UT. Used to write my girlfriend that way too. I'd punch the cards and do a printout. Sent her the cards and printout. Geek kids do goofy things.

Anyone remember paper tape programming? Heath-Zenith sold those things for ever.

When I was in the Navy our Fire Control people used to program the Mk86 (I think I'm remembering the model right) fire control radar with paper program tape.

[Marswolf]

When I was in the Navy our Fire Control people used to program the Mk86 (I think I'm remembering the model right) fire control radar with paper program tape.

Ding, Ding, Ding! We have a winner.

Yes fire control used paper tape quite a bit.

[Guest GT_Rat]

I thought it was crazy in the late 80's early 90's when you could get tape drives, disk drives, and the like to do the same thing. But the 86 (after looking it up on line) was designed in the 60's so I guess it wasn't economical to update it to some thing newer by then.

[Marswolf]

After I decided to go into the PC world, I decided to bypass the 16 bit microprocessors and go straight to the 32 bit, So I bought a Gateway 386-20 with 4 Meg RAM and a huge 80 Meg hard drive!

Instructions to assemble it were on a floppy? Think about it.

[TGO David]

Since we're doing some geek dick measuring...

My first computer at home was a C=64. I had the 1541 360K floppy drive, a cassette drive and a SpeedLoad cartridge. The whole thing hooked up to an old color TV. Later I progressed to a C=128 with a 1571 720K floppy drive, an 1851 1.2MB floppy drive and the same old SpeedLoad cartridge but with an actual RGB computer monitor.

My first modem was 300 baud VicModem. I eventually moved up to a 1200 baud VicModem. I ran a BBS on that setup at night (my mom and dad hated my ass for that) using BlueBoard software.

I kept running BBS's even after I switched over to the IBM PC platform, for a long time using GAP BBS software, then eventually moving to Wildcat for a time (blegh) and ultimately running Renegade before I finally quit playing with dialup and started farting around on the Internet.

Getting back into the forum thing with vBulletin back about 6 years ago was kind of like coming full circle. The one cosmic truth about all of this is that ever since people have been able to get "online" and participate in "boards" in some fashion or another, there have always been e-Thugs causing everyone else grief.

[Guest GT_Rat]

Someone at Gateway has a sense of humor... or is a complete idiot..

[TGO David]

What I want to know is... who here ever had a Timex Sinclair? If you had one of those, chances are you still haven't had sex.

[Marswolf]

What I want to know is... who here ever had a Timex Sinclair? If you had one of those, chances are you still haven't had sex.

Bought one at Target in Chattanooga with the memory upgrade. That was long after the Atari 800.

Sex was long before that.

[Guest canynracer]

Bought one at Target in Chattanooga with the memory upgrade. That was long after the Atari 800.

Sex was long before that.

but, none SINCE!!

[Marswolf]

but, none SINCE!!

You count auto-stuff?

[Guest canynracer]

LMFAO!!!!! hey whatever works for ya!!

[TGO David]

You count auto-stuff?

You like to get "user friendly" with your "joystick" don't you?

[Guest db99wj]

[Rightwinger]

Baud = Baudot as I recall.

I learned baud rates with wired, cabled and radio teletype networks in the Army in the 80's (just pre-Singars and MSE)

The teletypes used the punched paper tape to read in the messages after we typed them to them.

Ahh, the memories....like the time my NCO did NOT properly ground the RATT rig and as I was exiting one rainy night when one foot hit the ground as the operator switched to "SEND" and I got knocked or jumped about 10 feet without trying! Lovely!

I learned basic on a TRS-80 cassette driven computer back in 77-78 and had a binary learning board so we could make that really neat thing in the middle make numbers....a LED!

10 Print "EAT ME"

20 GOTO 10

The loop of love we always left for the teacher.

[Marswolf]

and had a binary learning board so we could make that really neat thing in the middle make numbers....a LED!

The LED display certainly was a big improvement over the Nixie tube.