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Originally Posted by Sell4more2 20 years! What was eBay called back then? haha. | Auctionweb.
OK.... So the OP is slightly wrong on her dates. More like 16 years or so. But I was there too. And I remember the BBS's as well. In fact, I ran the Phantom Illusion in Chicago. I was lucky, my parents bought me a US Robotics 14.4k modem. Back then, it was $600. And a 30 MEGAbyte hard drive was $300. The first 1 GIG hard drive that came out cost $10,000.
Why, back then we had to dial our favorite BBS and endure endless busy signals until we could get on. Downloads were slow, limited not only by YOUR modem, but also on the modem that the BBS had. We all had HUGE phone bills. Compuserve cost $12 per hour. AOL was the cheaper one, at $6 per hour. Most people had monitors that were 12" and displayed ONE color - green or maybe amber. If you were lucky, maybe you had a CGA color monitor. They cost $400 and you had 16 colors to choose from. VGA monitors were $900 and we couldn't even imagine flat panels. The computers themselves started at about $1,000 for a very low end system. They had 640 KB of RAM. We had floppy discs everywhere. They held 360 KB of data. Then they had 720 KB and topped out at 1.44 MB.
We had dot matrix printers, and MAN WERE THEY NOISY! Black and white only, and they weren't so good with graphics either.
We could run only ONE program at a time. We had to know the DOS comamnds. Mice were optional. They had little balls in them that would get clogged with dirt and grime, and would freeze all the time until we cleaned tham, which was NOT an easy task.
Yet somehow we survived.
So all you younger people out there, show some respect if age has taken a toll and we are a couple of years off. Thanks to our generation you now have computers running 4+ cores at 3+ GHZ with 6 GB+ of memory, optical mice that don't need to be cleaned and HDMI graphics. You can actually download a movie, or stream one online. You can have 14 programs running at once. And you have plenty of space to store it all with 2 Terabyte hard drives that cost $100.
Life wasnt always this easy! |