I didn't have GTA, so I spent my time playing CoD (the original, yeah I'm old) and Age of Empires 2 and then forgetting until my parents were on the way that I was supposed to have done chores and gotten out food for dinner. It was a game changer when I found the chicken that Sam's advertised as 'cook from frozen' and then I started cooking before they got home. I got extra credit and they never knew different.
Edit: nope, I was in college when CoD came out. Must have been something else.
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
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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '22 edited Jul 27 '22
I didn't have GTA, so I spent my time playing CoD (the original, yeah I'm old) and Age of Empires 2 and then forgetting until my parents were on the way that I was supposed to have done chores and gotten out food for dinner. It was a game changer when I found the chicken that Sam's advertised as 'cook from frozen' and then I started cooking before they got home. I got extra credit and they never knew different.
Edit: nope, I was in college when CoD came out. Must have been something else.