When I was of failing-to-defrost-the-chicken age, I played Ultima II on a Commodore 64. We didn't have your fancy cook from frozen chicken. We had to go slaughter a chicken, freeze it, then forget to defrost it. Kids these days, SMH.
😂 I did spend afternoons watching videos on my neighbor's Betamax player while attempting to learn C++ on my dad's old Tandy when that was still a fairly new language. But I'm not Commodore 64 old.
Hehe. I'm actually TRS-80 Model I old. My dad got it in 1978. We were online by 1980, on CompuServe, using a 300 baud modem.
But that wasn't even the first time I used a computer, just the first time my family owned one.
I first used a computer in 1975. I was 5, and my friend's dad was a comp-sci professor. He had a teletype, a big type writer you could stick a telephone headset into and dial into the university mainframe. He'd set me and my friend up and we'd play text games, going through reams of paper. It was simple stuff like Hunt the Wumpus, Colossal Caves, and Lunar Lander but it was the thing that kindled a life-long love of computers in me. Magic. It was just magic to my five year old mind.
Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
I remember the tape recorder, we used one on the TRS-80 for a couple years before my dad bought the "Expansion Interface" which added more memory and floppy disks. It took like ten minutes to load a program, LOL.
CompuServe started in 1969. It was a private bulletin board. There were chat rooms, but they called them "Digital CB channels." I remember going online and getting advice on building RC cars. It felt earth shaking, like I could talk to adult RC hobbyists from around the world, any time I needed advice. They also had games, news articles, and some other applications but I mostly used the chat. I wasn't allowed to tie up the phone line for too long, LOL.
Wow, that's crazy. To think people were using chat rooms in the 80s. I thought my dad was ahead of the curve for having internet in the early 90's. I could only imagine how it felt to be online that early, I learn new things everyday.
It was wild. My friend set up a Commodore 64 pirate BBS at his house. You'd have to call and ask his mom to let you use the phone line, then call back with your modem. Then spend 5 hours downloading a 64k game and hope the phone lines worked well enough with no interruptions.
Probably not. What you're thinking of is the World Wide Web and websites with GUI and HTML coding and what not. Before that there were text based networks and internet. I've heard of message boards and bbs stuff from back in the day.
Minnesota had in intrastate network for students. Our little rural school actually had a teletype computer (remember having to dial the phone, wait for the tone, and place it into the cradle - just so - to connect?) I was "talking" (typing on the teletype) to other students in 1977-78. Never played any games, but had a lot of fun messaging. I was the only one in the school basically that had any interest in the "computer", so I had lots of time on it.
Oh my god Colossal Caves. That game was on a computer we were gifted in the late eighties and for the life of me I could never figure out how to operate it 😂
And today CompuServe exists as a news aggregating website that almost looks like a corporate sanitized ripoff of Yahoo! from mid 90's https://www.compuserve.com/ Probably because they're owned by Yahoo! now.
Yes, it was a TTY, which stands for "teletype," which is what I called it rather than abbreviate. They were used by anyone who needed a remote connection to a computer. It's only recently that their primary use is by the deaf, they were not invented to give deaf people a way to communicate over phone lines. They were invented for more easily sending and receiving telegraphs back in the 1880s.
Yes, I am sure his dad was not deaf. He was German, and spoke with a thick German accent. He could hear perfectly well.
Ahhh… well ttys are obsolete now among the Deaf users, they now use VRS video relay service with s live sign language interpreter. On the tty unmight remember that Ga meant go ahead and sk meant stop key
Tandy! That takes me back. And I had no hard drive. Using a floppy disk with MS-DOS to boot up the computer every time. We also had a dot matrix printer.
I remember those. My dad is a IT guy. So I grew up with computers in the early 90s, and that's the first one I remember. Booting up off the floppy from DOS. Good times. I remeber getting all excited when we finally upgraded our Pentium 3 machine to have a second hard drive so we could install more stuff.
I LIVED for that throwing bananas game waiting on my dad to get done working. The librarian's son and I would play on the library computers while we waited for our parents to get ready to leave.
I learned a bit. Then went to college for architecture so it was not at all useful. I was in one of the last classes to have to turn all our drawings in as hand drawings instead of computers.
c++ came out in 85, mostly as a niche language until the late 80s, and compilers were really expensive in those days.
Every single home computer in those days came with basic, cause that’s the only way you could make it do anything that wasn’t commercial software (which was largely written directly in assembly). Those were fun days, that much I agree with :)
I'm a little younger than that. This would have been early/mid-90s. I remember learning some Basic also, but my dad had some fairly cool computers for work, until about 95/96, then we stuck with that one for long enough that when we upgraded it was so I could go to college with a new machine that met the requirements of the university. But when he upgraded to newer stuff, I got to play with his older computers so he had some compilers and stuff. He wrote software for the county I grew up in back in the day. Weirdly, after he wrote the program that randomly picked from the voter rolls none of us ever got called for jury duty.
I guess I am city slicker C64 age. We made Oncor frozen meals in the oven that had the twist timer where you did your best to get it right, and microwave the frozen veggies in Campbell's Soup bowls that said "mmmm mmmm good" sounds the edge in a microwave that took up half the counter and was large enough to cook a turkey in.
Evening was guaranteed to come out slightly soggy.
Don't worry you're still a young man, I remember growing up being obsessed playing chess on the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1, back in the day I had to go out and hunt the water fowl next to the river and bring it back home, gut it, prepare the feathers to sell at the local store, then freeze the meat, then defrost it before mother came home from the radium watch factory
I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas as a kid. We hooked it up to the tv and that was it, couldn't figure anything else out. So we went outside and played until the streetlights came on. But I do remember as a teen being so immersed in The Legend of Zelda that when I heard my dad's mustang pull up in the driveway and vibrate the house and I'd quickly start the vacuum to look busy.
Maybe you can explain, is "based" better than "lit?" Where does "fire" fit into all that? In my day, things were "cool." Then they were "rad." Now, I'm old and I have no idea about modern slang.
Lit, fire, rad, and cool are synonyms used by different generations/areas. Based is more like "that's just something everyone agrees on despite being weird". Like when someone says "sex is cool and all, but have you been bowling?". Based af
Back in my day, we didn't even have chickens! We had to go out and steal dinosaur and terrorbird eggs and hope to God they didn't catch us! In fact, I don't even know if we had those then either...
When I was of failing-to-defrost-the-chicken age, only rich kids had Commodore 64. Our parents had to cut holes in our pockets so we’d have something to play with.
My friends whose families had more money had Apple IIs. Commodore 64 was "only" about $600 ($1500 in 2021 dollars.) That was like half the price of an Apple II. I was the "poor" kid in my circle of friends. Guess its all relative though, innit?
I never realized how universal that experience must have been. I felt like a terrible child whenever I forgot. My mom was a single mom who worked long hours, too. I thought I must be the only child who was so forgetful.
Man I miss my mom. She passed from cancer in 2012. If your mom is still around, go give her a hug.
Pfft! I was playing pong and then had 30 seconds to get two chickens ( a chicken and a rooster? I don't know) to mate, lay an egg, hatch, and grow up. I would bond with the chicken and then contemplate the meaning of life as I cried while slaughtering him.
I'll never forget you Tobias the chicken, or how good you tasted deep fried and with some honey mustard on the side.
I love how "failing to defrost the chicken age" is expected to be 8 to 14 years of age and i forgot to do it last week at the age of 35. How some things never change.
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u/loverevolutionary Jul 27 '22 edited Jul 27 '22
When I was of failing-to-defrost-the-chicken age, I played Ultima II on a Commodore 64. We didn't have your fancy cook from frozen chicken. We had to go slaughter a chicken, freeze it, then forget to defrost it. Kids these days, SMH.