Wayne's history in the early days of the Internet...

[GH85Carrera]

So you are a life long geek!

Cool history. I am amazed you have links to those files. I started playing with computers in the early 80s but I don't have any of those files.

[red-beard]

Memories....

I still have the 1.5MB disk pack I purchased for personal storage on a Prime 300/550. I think I had to pay $70 for it around 1981!

I had a C64 in college. My father was notoriously cheap and wouldn't spring for the Apple. Montgomery Wards had a deal on the C64: Dual Floppy unit, CPU, Printer, Green Screen monitor and modem, $799. I think it was around 1983/84. Even having the C64, I was one of the few kids at Texas A&M that had a computer in the dorm.

In 1988, before I took my first field engineering job in India, right out of college, I bought a Toshiba 1200HD. I think it was around $3000, had 640 kilobytes of RAM (upgraded to 2MB), a 1200 baud modem (very fast for the time!), 10MB hard-drive, and a non-back-lit LCD screen. I know it was an 80C86 processor, but I don't remember the speed? 4.7Mhz, maybe?

That and a portable electronic typewriter (Thermal paper or plastic print cartridges), which doubled as a portable printer, was WAY out on the tech curve in the USA and just blew people away in India. Having a way to print even small documents was fantastic.

A few years later, our field engineering laptops (cough - 15 lbs!!!) had external CD drives and we had access to enormous amounts for field data sheets, service manuals, etc. 640MB of data was GIGANTIC.

Seems so paltry today...

[URY914]

Before Wayne and the PP message boards.........

Thank you Wayne for you have done for us.

[IROC]

I joined the old "porschephiles" mailing list in 1993. It was everything Porsche from 356s to C2s all in one list. Those were the days!! Pete Albrecht and Harry Pellow going at it over 356 stuff and Bruce Anderson posting on a regular basis...

[nota]

we had good old IBM cards [paper] at work on a 360
soon in 1970 we up graded to paper tape and brand B units
I had 18 chic's doing keypunch

[cstreit]

My first hard drive was 10MB. I never thought I'd fill it.

Current storage locally? 900GB used and 600GB free.

[cgarr]

I learned on an IBM 8086 single floppy boot up with IBM DOS then some company was giving away their DOS called MSDOS. Who the heck are these guys thinking they are going to roll over IBM!!


Sent from my iPhone

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by cstreit

My first hard drive was 10MB. I never thought I'd fill it.

Current storage locally? 900GB used and 600GB free.

Ours was too, in '95 and it cost a lot. I'll fallen way back or I never really caught on. Whatever.

Thanks for the history, Wayne. There's something more that Wayne didn't tell you.

He's tireless. He posted at 5am Pacific. He's probably been up all night and is just now catching a nap.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

You're a man after my own heart Wayne. I remember being a geeky Junior High kid in the early to mid 1980s - had an Atari 400 (the one with the crummy membrane keyboard) but swapped programming tips with a couple of other geek buddies at school. I think even back then we knew computers were the way of the future, even if we got laughed a lot for our nerd-dom. Had a Timex-Sinclair 1000 too and programmed the snot out of it.

I remember vividly getting a birthday gift of a membership to the brand new (at the time) "ComputerPlace" at the Museum of Science in Boston (at the time it was just some spare space in the garage that they finished and put a bunch of IBM-PCs into with a few MIT computer geeks to run it). Was really fun - I coded a rudimentary space flight game loosely modeled after Atari's "Star Raiders" game (that I was hopelessly addicted to at the time). I learned several years later in college (forced to take Vax FORTRAN and C++) that I had absolutely, positively no desire to do computer programming of any type - even though I liked (and still do) the algorithim-generation sort of problem solving aspects, I hated coding with a passion. Many long hours in the dingy basement of the Vax lab with crappy fluorescent lights fretting over the silly syntactical nuances of FORTRAN's old legacy punch-card formatting while I wanted to be out at the beach sorta' killed my interest. I know enough to understand mostly what computers can/can't do technology-wise but the stuff changes so fast now that by the time the ink is dry on a C.S. or C.E. major's degree, they're obsolete. Glad I just USE computers today and don't program them or do IT stuff. Way too crazy.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Originally Posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts

One of these days, I'm going to go get an old Commodore 64 setup on eBay and set it up at Pelican and play some of those good old games that I used to waste a bunch of time on (I'll play some of the old ones I wrote too). I have a box of all of my old programming code and notes that I keep kicking around the back of Pelican.

A real geek would just run it all on a C64 emulator on his cellphone.

[legion]

My dad was an IBM salesman in the late 70's to early 80's. We always had computers around the house, even before there were PCs.

I wasn't much interested in computers until I got to college. I just wasn't interested in following in my father's footsteps. Really, I didn't decide to add the BIS degree until i decided to show up a stoner friend who could hardly hack it.

I understood computers in high school, but I was more of what you would today call a hacker. Just some angsty loser kid who used computers for mischief. And without the internet to spread my brand of retribution, I had to make due messing up computers I could actually sit at. Probably the worst thing I did was delete all of the lines in the Autoexec.bat file on all of the computers in the computer lab at high school. As there was no network security, it was pretty easy, but I had to do them one at a time from my lab computer. Of course, it didn't cause any problems until they shut down the computers at the end of the day....

[stevepaa]

I'm like nota

older than earth. Wayne and others here could be our children.

started on a terminal connected to LBL in 1964, punchcards in college


congrats to you wayne, job well done.

[intakexhaust]

Wayne- Neat reading of your early ventures. Those Xerox scanners were the hot thing and helped launched virtual porn LOL!

Starting in 1978 I played with a Tandy and tape cassette. Next came the IBM PC Jr. In 1989 I thought it was cool to have a Toshiba T1000 laptop running a bootable drive with DOS 2.1. It was given to me as a gift by a Toshiba rep after I sold him a new BMW. I used it as a database contact manager and was an early user among car sales reps. Amazing to think that was a 10 year time span.

Then around 1989 / 90 (not exactly sure) I dealt with a co-founder of Netscape just before the big time and launch. That fellow was so excited, I couldn't quite grasp his lingo of what he was talking about. He traded in an 1984 MB 190E grey market car that still had the required German halon fire extinquisher (which I now have installed in my 1984 911 .

In the later 1990's I created a few websites. A specific one was geared to the specialty OEM vehicle market. While having a small warehouse and the rest dropped shipped it was obvious to see where the future was. Unfortunately for me, everything went sour after a partner screwed me out of everything I built. After that I needed a sabatical and went into the building trades.

Looking back, the learning, time and expense was insane compared to today. Nowadays, one could purchase a decent enough laptop for $300, own a domain for next to nothing, build a basic site in an evening, have a zero cost hosting and be in business collecting funds. Thats remarkable.

Cheers, Scott

[jluetjen]

Originally Posted by cgarr

I learned on an IBM 8086 single floppy boot up with IBM DOS then some company was giving away their DOS called MSDOS. Who the heck are these guys thinking they are going to roll over IBM!!

I'm of a similar era. I remember that when I started working after school most of us had VT220's on our desks, and a lucky few had IBM 8086 desktops.


The manager of our unit had a Compac ("lug-able") portable computer.


We were all so envious!!! The funny thing is that he was about 6'-2" and used to be hunched over his desk working it. In hindsight he really should have had one of these magnifier screens!

[LakeCleElum]

Wayne - U had email in college????? I had:
Press hard, there are 4 carbon copies on that memo....

[jtkkz]

I use to work for shell gas station back in 1985 (assistant manager) , and whenever i finished doing the books I had to dial a number and send info to Texas via internet.

Did not know what it was back then, I would tell my friends, I hear this dial tone and it dials and info I logged in somehow goes to texas via phone line....

[red-beard]

After I left Texas A&M in 1986, I still kept up with friends on BitNet. We we're such total geeks that once we setup 2 terminals, one in Texas and one in New York, and let people from 2000 miles away type at each other during a party.

Losers with a capital "L"

And to think I said in 1983 that I was going into Engineering "So I don't have to sit behind a keyboard for the rest of my life..."

[juanbenae]

all the third person as of late wayne.....

[fred cook]

was a Texas Instruments TI99A. It used a black and white tv for the screen, had no hard drive and only 16k of memory. If you wanted to run a program you had to type in using basic or, having done so previously and saved it to a cassette tape, load it off the tape player. There were some plug in cassettes that allowed the operator to play some simple games (pong for example) and a pair of simple/cheap hand controllers. The first basic program that I wrote to use on it was one that would use surveyor's traverse bearings and distances to calculate the true bearing and distance between two points. I think this was in 1979 or 1980. The most important thing that I learned from having the TI computer was that the typing class I took in High School was going to be important in my life!

Anyway, I'm glad that Wayne saw fit to fire up Pelican Parts so that we would have a place to spend our time and money!

[GG Allin]

Internet back in '93? Who knew? I thought Windows 95 invented the internet.