Funny, as big a tech nerd as I am, I have only blogged about personal funny stuff. Sorry about that, I am depriving you of my tech knowledge. Then I thought, how do I blog about tech stuff? There is so much content out there, I just don't know where to begin or end.
How about I begin at the beginning?
The summer between being in 5th and 6th grade, at the young age of 12, I came home from Girl Scout Camp (5 days away from home!) there was something new and shiny in our kitchen. Dad had gone to Radio Shack and purchased a Tandy personal computer. I can't remember the exact model number, but from looking at Google Images, it looks like possibly a 1000TX. I do know we ran DOS as the operating system and booted it from a 3.5 inch floppy, running any programs in the 5.25 inch drive. We didn't have very many programs for it, but I remember some games that I played, Demon's Forge and Marble Madness.
We didn't really get full use out of our system until we purchased an internal modem. Its speed was 300 baud, 300 bits per second. Imagine watching letters appear on the screen slower that you can type, that's 300 baud :-) A modem allowed our computer to call other computers over the phone line.
We could at least call some local BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems) and create a "handle" (think username) and password and read some forums and personal messages, maybe even chat with a SysOp (Systems Operator). There were also opportunities to meet other BBS users, which today you might call a meetup, but we called them picnics or User Group meetings. It does sound a lot like today's social networking on the Internet, but on the local calling area scale. What is this about "local calling?" Calling long distance on your telephone used to cost money and it wasn't cheap.
So, we did eventually get faster modems, which allowed for a whole sentence to come across the screen in beautiful orange text. This allowed for more "research" to be done, downloading of Freeware/Shareware programs, making greater use of our machine. I taught my self programming in BASIC, moderated some forums, and eventually helped run a few BBS's. This was all before the Internet and home ISPs existed. I did use some other protocols before http, such as ftp, frame, vax, Gopher, Kermit, and possibly a few others. Lots of these were run by colleges and had toll-free numbers, one in Utah I remember, and Indiana State University, all connecting by modem to some type of information system.
This modem/BBS stuff continued until after I graduated high school, when, BAM, out busted the World Wide Web. There's a lot that happened in between and after to bring us to now, but this is a good start for my first tech-related blog. More to come!
