Catt although Posted:

Up until some time in the 70s, there was only one “phone company” (in the U.S.) and you could only get phones from them, which you had to pay monthly for.

That supports my theory which says, Germany gets trends, influences from the U.S. ~10 years later. Some later, like liberalization of telecommunications – some faster, like ****ty TV formats.

My family’s first computer was a Windows 3.1 I think, Hewlett-Packard someting. I was like 6 years old, I forget when this was, really. I played on Paint in my living room as we set it up. :3

I think this is why I’m so bad at technology now; if you could make the punch cards and command lines work, then you were good to go and you’d HAVE to learn how computers work.

Now I don’t need to know anything about how the machine itself runs to play a game, so I suck at it. (As 1337lol can attest, remember that day my browsers wouldn’t work? Goood times.)

kittiejenn Posted:

My first computer was purchased before I was born. I’m not sure that this is the exact model we had, but it’s close.

The first machine I owned was a TRS-80 Model III (16K Ram, Tape Drive). I actually sold a couple of poorly written programs in BASIC that a friend punched up for me.

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Note the plastic covering the floppy bays – I never did get a drive to put in them.

The first machine I ever used was a Comodore Pet

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I remember two games – Canyon and Lemonade Stand. The first time I used it myself I put the tape in and pressed play – nothing happened. So I asked the teacher in charge and he said you had to type “Load”, so I went back and did that, but he forgot to tell me you had to press “return”

People paid for gasoline inside of the gas station. Everybody I knew had Pogs. You had no idea what you were getting into when you went to see Battlefield Earth. The news had nothing but boring/peaceful stuff. The Cold War was over, so people were starting to relax. Sure, there was war and stuff in Africa, and the Glbum-Stegall Act was being nutered. Nobody noticed that kind of stuff, though. I kinda miss the days when something like Clueless was on TV, and you could watch in quiet horror. Before the days of “reality TV”, before the Empire.

Ahh, the Trash-80. I worked for my grandfather as his Data Entry Tech. Basically, I simply filled out his database of customers from index cards into the computer. And we used a TRS-80 to do it.

Good memories.

Catt although Posted:

The first machine I ever used was a Comodore Pet

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I remember two games – Canyon and Lemonade Stand. The first time I used it myself I put the tape in and pressed play – nothing happened. So I asked the teacher in charge and he said you had to type “Load”, so I went back and did that, but he forgot to tell me you had to press “return”

I had one of those at home and school. I had lemonade stand at home, and got in trouble for playing it at school.

Hindsight being 20/20 is apparently a myth witnessed through rose colored glbumes. Log in to see images!

Phones and computers are much better now guys.

I’m sorry that drive-ins have died. Going to a drive-in movie was pretty awesome. Also, regardless of the health implications, movie theater popcorn was much better in the past.

Ms. Pac-Man and Tetris are still better than other games though. Log in to see images!

scully Posted:

Hindsight being 20/20 is apparently a myth witnessed through rose colored glbumes. Log in to see images!

Phones and computers are much better now guys.

I’m sorry that drive-ins have died. Going to a drive-in movie was pretty awesome. Also, regardless of the health implications, movie theater popcorn was much better in the past.

Ms. Pac-Man and Tetris are still better than other games though. Log in to see images!

What’s that? I can’t hear you over the sound of Sierra games.

Quest for Glory, how I missed you.

Samildanach Posted:

Every textbook I read while learning German would agree with you. Though, I’ll admit, when I was living in Hessen, Germany seemed ahead on the portable phone/pay as you go front. Took a couple years to hit the US.

Ya, calling somebody on the mobile phone was very expensive until a few years ago, so everybody wrote smort messages for a fixed price. Now they’re mainly used for lots of dumb contests on TV and stuff. I hope all that dies when data flatrates for 3g smartphones are absolutely normal and we can all use instant messengers.

The first PC that I could call my own, when I was a senior in high school, was a 486 DX4 with 8mb RAM and an enormous 450mb hard drive (inconceivable that I would ever use that much space). It still ran Windows 3.1, and I was a DOS master.

I remember nothing of those ancient commands. It’s a dead language anyway, much like Latin, and only meaningful to scholars.