"...for the very last time!", the connection-voice seemed to say.All I can really say about this is "You've Got Mail"!!!
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Goodbye AOL
- Thread starter MJ5150
- Start date
My last job used dot matrix printers to print labels for envelopes. As far as I know they still use them. They also had giant commercial printers capable of printing labels directly on envelopes. But we printed dot matrix labels on expensive label paper and manually put them on envelopes. I got pretty awesome at it.Indeed. My mom would always elect me, to make big PRINTSHOP banners for birthdays from a floppy. I would make them 10 feet long on that dot matrix paper ream
View attachment 7335630
It is a utility. The frequency domain belongs to the public and is managed by the FCC, whether its transmitted thru radio or over a wire, fiber optic, Bluetooth, etc. The FCC could have nipped all this cherry picking in the first decades but still questionable on dealing with it.What's really sad is the fact that there are still countless people in Middle America that can only access the internet from home by way of dial-up. I don't hear about it much anymore, but if the FCC were to ever declare The Internet a utility, it would establish a degree of "net neutrality" and force the Internet Service Providers to run high-speed cable and/or fiber-optic service to places they've long considered "not profitable". (The same thing happened to telephone service from the early-to-mid-20th Century. As time went on, having a telephone was deemed to be a basic, necessary function of a house, just like water, power and sanitation.)
[RANT]
But, since the makeup of "The Powers That Be" have become so big-business-friendly over the past decades, the only way many of these states cantwist the right armsincentivize such projects, is through local/statewide measures.
Furthermore, it is important to mention the ISP's that are the gatekeepers of online activity did not build the foundations they have profited off of for so long. They did not create ARPANET or packet-switching, they simply take money to allow access to something built by government contractors decades ago.
So, if anyone says the internet hasn't become a utility in this modern, information-driven age, they're either ignorant or lying. Don't believe me? Just ask how dependent kids are on computerization just to do their schoolwork, both in and out of the classroom. (And no, I'm not talking about A.I. advancements. That's a whole 'nother topic and not for this thread. I mean basic, computer-driven classwork and the necessity for some internet connectivity to perform basic school functions.)
[/RANT]
Okay…I got that out of my system.
OMG! Punch cards. I my first year of EE classes at OU we had to write a very simple Fortran program and have the punch card machine spit it out. Then verify that it ran. That simple program generated a probably 3 inch stack of punch cards.
This is such a trip down memory lane. I remember my first desktop that I could turn on and it pretty much came on. Instead of having time to go grab a beer. I thought of this because with it I bought a screaming fast 9600 baud modem.
Indeed. My mom would always elect me, to make big PRINTSHOP banners for birthdays from a floppy. I would make them 10 feet long on that dot matrix paper ream
View attachment 7335630
This reminds me of two things from "back in the Before-Time…in the Long-Long-Ago";
I.
Before the internet exploded into greater use, my mom brought home a deprecated 286 PC and a dot-matrix printer. Apparently, AT&T/Bell Labs had upgraded all the office computers…presumably, with 386's or something similar…so there was a stack of "take one home for free, 'cuz we don't need them anymore" computers. This was before corporations had to account for every piece of old tech and/or furniture they were ridding themselves of and nothing could go to the workers.
One day, when I was still in high school, either I got the idea...or more likely, my mom suggested…I ask my teachers if I could turn in printed out writing assignments. Almost universally, they said yes, which taught me two lessons;
- The joys and wonders of "word processing programs" and how easy it was to revise and edit them.
- How much less work I could get away with by double-spacing my lines of text!
II.
Concurrent with AOL helping usher in the Information Age, somewhere around 1992, a friend of mine kept urging me to set myself up with a Genie Account. Nowadays, such a thing is as common as breathing, but back then, I was like, "That sounds like 'work'!", so I never did. To be honest, I don't think I made that technological jump until I got my first Hotmail account somewhere in the mid-1990's, despite my mother's profession. I was more interested in developing my art-school skills and chasing girls. (Fun fact; the latter did the former no favors!
)
Future archeologist will find millions of AOL discs and believe we worshipped the god Aol.
Out of curiosity, I checked on Ebay. The AOL tin market is already heating up. I plan to hold on to my tins until my price is met. The dented one may go for a bit less. It has a bit of a strange aroma to the innards that I cannot readily explain.
Speaking of coasters, I had a friend who worked in support for Dell for a while. One day he got a call from a new owner who was griping about his retractable cup holder not being robust enough to hold his coffee cup.
That old shtick actually happened?! At this point, I was wondering if it was just an urban myth!
Did he tell the caller to push the little button by the "cup holder" before he told him to remove the cup?
I've been described as strictly a front end wussy for many years now. The first line was all I could remember.That old shtick actually happened?! At this point, I was wondering if it was just an urban myth!
Did he tell the caller to push the little button by the "cup holder" before he told him to remove the cup?
Not necessarily an urban legend. I was the young tech savvy guy at the time and informal tech support for my senior colleagues. I saw people using the cd drive as a coffee holder or donut holder.. Some of them did not believe it was for CDs, because CDs were for music as everyone knew, and the computers did not have speakers.
My son is a software developer and says he cannot understand how we got anything done with our Stone Age technology of dialup modems, floppy disks, unix based internet, lynx browser, monochrome monitors. I think he gets a little embarrassed when I remind him that it was that very Stone Age technology that fed and clothed him for years.
This question came up in a programming reddit the other day.
- Only the real (wo)men survived to become good programmers.
- Any knowledge was very hard won, so stuck with you forever and you really knew how and where to apply it.
This story might cook your son's noodle.
Back in 2004, I was attending and speaking at an anime convention and a friend of mine was running his own "Rising Tide of Technology" panel. I popped in to watch for a bit when my friend was trying to explain how much had been achieved with so little in the past. To illustrate the point he was trying to make, and possibly the entire point of the panel, I raised my hand and when he called on my, I turned to the crowd to give some context.
I said, "We sent men to the Moon using the computing equivalent of a Commodore 64." Then, I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a gadget I'd just purchased and followed-up with, "The Commodore 64 emulator on this new Palm Pilot only uses half-a-percent of it's total computing power."
He has heard that and more. My younger brother was a developer and the 2 of us give him ancient history lessons, like ENIAC and its 20K character limit, vacuum tubes in computers, punch cards, batch processing, Apple II computers and apple soft BASIC.This story might cook your son's noodle.
Back in 2004, I was attending and speaking at an anime convention and a friend of mine was running his own "Rising Tide of Technology" panel. I popped in to watch for a bit when my friend was trying to explain how much had been achieved with so little in the past. To illustrate the point he was trying to make, and possibly the entire point of the panel, I raised my hand and when he called on my, I turned to the crowd to give some context.
I said, "We sent men to the Moon using the computing equivalent of a Commodore 64." Then, I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a gadget I'd just purchased and followed-up with, "The Commodore 64 emulator on this new Palm Pilot only uses half-a-percent of it's total computing power."
My late FIL was an engineer who would talk about being able to complete calculations with a slide rule faster than the computers of his day could.
Digital tech has changed so quickly and radically that it is easy to forget what we had to work with not too long ago.
