how far we have come

I'm still astounded when I enter a search term into Google and manage to get 0 results/matches - it doesn't happen very often though. I can't recall what the last one was. Even this search gives a solitary result: "remote sensing gis fire mapping boundaries unmanned aerial vehicle 3dr y6 gopro near infrared".

I'll have to ask my Dad what the earliest internet applications were that he mucked about with. He was a Xerox technician back in the mid 70s, telexes, faxes, etc. We always had some new gizmo in the study courtesy of Dad's tech connections. Thanks for the trip down memory lane Inc.

Hi all, I will point out straight away i know very little about computers. Back in the 80's i remember IBM was the computer to have what changed? They had massive advertising on all medias,i can still remember some of the ads. Sorry if its a dumb question guys.

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Originally Posted by incisor

the things you could do with next to nothing....

i ran a bbs on a 64kb atari 800 with 300 baud modems i built myself. had people ringing it from all over the world.

then went bigtime / multiline on a modified atari 600xl with 128kb ram that bank switched 16kb memory pages so you could play stick figure games online with oasis bbs software, and 2 @ 2400baud modems

memories....

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I remember being a wide-eyed kid just getting to understand the potential of computers, and dialing in to your BBS.

No one will ever need more than 640k of memory.

How hair-brained would this have sounded in 1980?

23-year-old dropout tweets his way to fortune

My dad bought a Sinclair ZX80 in 1980 when I was a kid (9 years old) - with a magical 1KB of memory...

I learnt to program in BASIC - and progressed onto a Commodore 64, Tandy TRS-80 Colour Computer 2, Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga, IBM PC, etc, etc, etc.

I still program in basic sometimes at work... Oh the glory days!!! :p

My first computer was a home made Microbee , the mind boggles !

I started at Telecom in 1980 and installed a few acoustic coupler modems , the type that you sit a telephone receiver on, a whopping 300 bits per second, not long after 2400bps digital modems, the size of a shoe box were all the go and set new standards in data speed. Really geeky stuff !!

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Originally Posted by disco man

Hi all, I will point out straight away i know very little about computers. Back in the 80's i remember IBM was the computer to have what changed? They had massive advertising on all medias,i can still remember some of the ads. Sorry if its a dumb question guys.

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I grew up in Heatly on Mill drive and my first computer was a Commodore 64 with a floppy disk drive. All my mates were so impressed as they only had tape drives.
Then came the late 80s and Mill drive went all the way to Mt Lousia and didn't end in Fardon street and IBM brought out a machine with a hard drive built in ..... Ahhhhh I thought technology would never get better than this ....

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Originally Posted by goingbush

My first computer was a home made Microbee , the mind boggles !

I started at Telecom in 1980 and installed a few acoustic coupler modems , the type that you sit a telephone receiver on, a whopping 300 bits per second, not long after 2400bps digital modems, the size of a shoe box were all the go and set new standards in data speed. Really geeky stuff !!

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The Z80 was a very versatile CPU, IMO heaps better than the ones in the Comodore 64 or the Apple.

My entry to the field was early 1970 as a trainee programmer on an IBM 360/30 with 16K memory that was soon doubled to 32K. I remember being intrigued to see the ferrite cores with 2 wires running through the centres, 1 core per bit, 9 per word.

My first PC, belonging to my employer, was an IBM portable referred to as the "sewing machine" due to it looking like one, used for a/h remote system support of an unattended 24x7 online system supporting coal mining operations.