what did you slackers do before these fourms?

[Nickshu]

Originally Posted by Scott R

Well we had newsgroups, and prior to that between about 1989'ish to about 1995 we had dialup BBS's we could call into that had message boards, the so called "Smartmodem" era. And of course even prior to that we had things like Fido, Renegade and Color64. Predating that goes back to the late 70's with some pretty clever university developed systems.

Haha yes this! My Internet car Forum addiction started in about 1991 with dialup BBS's.

[LakeCleElum]

I used to drink, chase women and ride my motorcycles so fast my friends predicted I've never live past 30.......

[look 171]

Originally Posted by porsche4life

I was still in HS when I found this place.... So that ate up most of my time...

what ate up most of you time, Sid? I hope it was school, chasing cheerleaders and not this place full of a bunch of old farts

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by look 171

I have always been out in the field, so internet connection was an issue. Normally I am on it after kids are asleep and there are only so much BS I can watch on TV. Get to my desk, log on do some work, check in here to see what's going on. Pelican was my first since I stumbled upon it through tech. I belong to a couple more, but not too active.

I think its safe to say most of you guys are on it at work? How did you burn that time before this?

CompuServe

And Homebrewing. lotsa homebrewing...

[ckelly78z]

Mostly, I was out in the garage or barn parting out old Datsun Zs on ebay and ZCar.com. I got into Porsches, because non-rust bucket Datsuns don't exist anymore.

[WPOZZZ]

I was an journeyman slacker until I found these forums. Then I upped my game and became a Certified Master Slacker.

[IROC]

Back before the internet, people used to stand around and talk a lot. And smoking. Lots of "smoke breaks". I remember when people were allowed to smoke in their offices. One place I worked, the coffee machine was right near where I sat and people literally hung around the coffee machine and talked.

Then, we started getting computers (this was the mid- '80s). And found this thing called turbogopher. And then there was email. And this guy named Stan Hanks (remember him?) created a mailing list called porschefiles. Oh, the epic Pete Albrecht and Harry Pellow email exchanges! Then Stan came back from some conference talking about this crazy new thing called a "browser"!!!

People didn't hang out by the coffee machine near as much anymore...

[Jim Richards]

My productivity at work was greater then than now.

I also spent a lot more time doing real things, like working, and sailing, and working on my sailboat, and reading books and magazines about sailing, oh, and working.

But once I started looking for my first 911, and I discovered the Pelican and Rennlist forums, it all went to hell in a handbasket.

[wdfifteen]

I traveled a lot and used dial up to go to AOL's Autos forum when I was stuck in some hotel. Like here, it was nice to communicate with people I was familiar with after a day of talking to strangers.
AOL had a 1-800 number that your modem called. On most hotel systems you had to dial 9 for an outside line. More than once I was met sirens in the parking lot and frantic pounding on my door after trying multiple times to make a connection. Somehow my computer was dialing 9-1-1 instead of 9-1-800. I thought I was going to get arrested once. Multiple 9-1-1 calls tend to get people upset.

[GH85Carrera]

I was on Compuserve back in the late 1980s with my Commodore 64. I even ordered a pair of Jeans on-line back then. I also searched the bulletin boards and finally set up my own using Wildcat software.

As far as sucking up time I was on the El Camino Central forum a lot going back a long time.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Originally Posted by Nostril Cheese

Wolfenstein 3D for me.

Oh, HELL no. The motion in Wolfenstein made me sick to my stomach. I guess the frame rate was too high or something on my kickass 25MHz 386 - after about 2 minutes I wanted to barf.

[scottmandue]

Ummmm... yeah... I was on dial-up and posted a lot to a Las Vegas form, back in the day I worked construction and did a lot of weekend roadtrips to LV with friends. That was so long ago casinos have literally been built and torn down since.

After a decade break from LV we did a visit recently and it was strange to see how much the strip and everything around it has changed.

About five years ago I found a religious BBS that I enjoyed posting to but the admins radically changed the format (moved it to facebook) and most of us left the BBS.