Thread: how far we have come

Originally Posted by lebanon

Talking about texting, who still remembers ICQ?

Ahh I remember it well. I met a few girls on that system. Before I was a married man......

I had a some success on ICQ back then as well. ... ...Argh those were the days ...

Now you can get a phone app that tells you who and how many in your immediate vicinity want casual sex and their orientation. ...

I was a latecomer to the internet, 1997, but the first computer I used everything was input using punch cards.

Perhaps the most telling early computing story though is that on the successor to this we needed an extra 128k of memory - and it cost so much that it had to go to the company (BHP) board for approval. That would have been in the mid seventies.

John

In the late sixties I worked for a company in Sydney that boasted it had the first private sector computer in Australia about 1955. It took up two floors of a city building and had an engineering staff to maintain it. They employed over 3000 people at about 30 locations around Sydney and the computer floors were the only premises that had air conditioning.

I had one of the first personal business computers that could sit on a desktop. It was around 1980 and it was a Sord, 64kb ram, twin 360kb 5.25" floppies, no hard drive. It cost $5500 back then, had a proprietry operating system and a cbasic interpretter if you wanted to program it yourself. It had a word processor and some neat games. Very swish. Sord became Toshiba.

Many computers later, I can still remember paying $800 in 1993 for 4mb (thats megabytes) of ram so we could play Doom on a 386dx40 without a dos boot disk.

I think that was back in the days when you could make money selling computers...you can't now.

Originally Posted by lebanon

Talking about texting, who still remembers ICQ?

still remember my later id, 1955906

I thought Dick Tracy's wrist radio was cool.

I remember ICQ but never used it.