35 years ago TODAY.....

[DeanMk]

Microsoft releases Windows 1.0

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[Alexx1401]

Amazing how far things have come and how fast. First time Wife tried to show me the net was on a 386 that had been upgraded to a 486, with AOL. You turn the thing on, go make a pot of coffee, pour a cup, come back and wait for it to finish. When it finally got "on line" it was so slow I gave up. One day we are at some electronics store buying a new VCR. I see a Webtv set up. Sales guy turns it on, shows me how it works. Wife comes over, says no way, this is stupid. I said wrap one up I will take it. Wife was not talking all the way home. In 2 weeks I had to go back and buy another one as she was always using the first one .
When it got to Win 98 I finally learned how to use a PC. Wife still was using one of those Webtv boxes for many years until they finally cut off the service.

 

[DeanMk]

I always liked the idea of WebTV....too bad it didn't fly any better than it actually did.

 

[Alexx1401]

I always liked the idea of WebTV....too bad it didn't fly any better than it actually did.

In it's day it was great. You turn it on and it just worked and compared to the PC's of it's day fast, and cheap. It was of course dial up but was WAYYYYY better than AOL. We even got a printer we could hook to ours. They did not start to fall out of favor until PC's started to get so much cheaper and easier to use. When I was back in College the first time I was still using one of ours even though I had bought a PC to learn on for CAD/CAM work. I would still use the WTV box because I could sit in my recliner and do all the stuff I did on the PC. I did not stop using them until I finally tried broadband. Now after that no more WTV for me. Wife still stuck with the damn thing for a long time after that for a bunch of groups she was on that were exclusive to them. Soon PC's got so cheap and so many people had broadband that they had run their course. Microsoft did buy them out from the original inventor and he made bank selling the whole thing to them. I well remember many of the people on the Usenet boards HATED them. Up until then they felt they had a fairly exclusive clan as it was expensive and difficult to get on them. WebTV opened them up to all us riff raff and many of them HATED it, which brought me hours of joy tweaking them all
There is one heavily moderated gun group that ever since I joined one moderator made it clear he hates me. Since I do not remember him I have to assume he must have run into me on the old Usenet boards that were open and uncontrolled. I must have mocked him or something. He was so openly hostile to me that other moderators were shutting him down

 

[DeanMk]

Way back when, hateful mods were present EVERYWHERE.
I belonged to a few chat boards that had those.
One little comment that didn't jive with their interpretation of the universe and you were basically treated as an outcast.
In fact, I recently ran across that, from someone who apparently claims to be the owner of a board.
I can still go there, but can't post anymore, because we disagreed on something.
...that's ok. I usually only went there for info anyway, so its all cool.

Dean

 

[Alexx1401]

Way back when, hateful mods were present EVERYWHERE.
I belonged to a few chat boards that had those.
One little comment that didn't jive with their interpretation of the universe and you were basically treated as an outcast.
In fact, I recently ran across that, from someone who apparently claims to be the owner of a board.
I can still go there, but can't post anymore, because we disagreed on something.
...that's ok. I usually only went there for info anyway, so its all cool.

Dean

I got booted from one of the old Yahoo groups like that. Some scammer was offering for sale the "kit" to convert a G17 to G18. Several of them were talking like these "might be" for real. I told them they could not be as they could not be registered in the US any more. One woman who was arguing these could be real then announces her other half and her are Class III dealers so she knows what she is talking about. Had a web site to prove it. So I told her "you sell NFA items and you have no clue how the laws work??" Well this went over like a fart in church and she then said she also owned the group and I was of course no longer allowed. Really broke me all up and all

 

[DeanMk]

That story actually sounds familiar.
Could be they were preaching their sales on multiple groups / chat boards.

 

[SonicBlue03]

Our first computer was a TRS-80, 8" B&W TV, and a cassette deck to load programs into 1K of memory.

Today any digital watch has 100x the computing power of that thing.

 

[Dungannon]

I stayed with DOS 2.1 until Windows 3.1 was released.

 

[albin25]

That's around the time that I had to convert my pc's boiler from coal fired.....
.... to natural gas.
It's much more efficient

 

[RicInOR]

I never used it. I later saw Windows 2.0 on an old system in the lab.

 

[DeanMk]

I once worked in the operations dept. of a large international financial institution.
I processed cheques, because people still wrote them back then.
Those machines ran off of Windows NT, which was a commercial program based on Windows 95.
One of the managers still had his TRS-80 sitting in his living room.....I think he was still using it back then, too.

 

[Alexx1401]

That story actually sounds familiar.
Could be they were preaching their sales on multiple groups / chat boards.

If you mean the conversion? Yes it was being spammed on pretty much any group that was about guns that allwed the scammer to put the ad in. Don't know how many fools actually sent money to the guy but I would bet a months pay not a one got what was claimed if they got anything. Most groups if someone asked about the ad they had seen people would just tell them it was a scam and that was the end of it. This one when the woman said she was a dealer in NFA stuff and was not sure? That was when I said how can you deal in this stuff and not know the damn laws? That of course deeply offended her.

 

[DeanMk]

True. At that point, you HAVE to see the giant red flag she was waving in your face.

 

[quneur]

Our first computer was a TRS-80, 8" B&W TV, and a cassette deck to load programs into 1K of memory.

Today any digital watch has 100x the computing power of that thing.

We had 4K on ours. We had to program our own games in basic until flight simulator and asteroids came out.

 

[SonicBlue03]

We had 4K on ours. We had to program our own games in basic until flight simulator and asteroids came out.

Space Warp was my go-to. Jovians looked like tie fighters to me.

 

[RicInOR]

 

[DeanfromOregon]

Oh Lordy, I did love the 80's. The 100MB RLL drive that cost $1500 I ran my business on! LAN Manager sucked so bad, Novell owned the Universe, and Unix was still there for the purists. WordPerfect and Lotus were KINGS!

When NT came out, I saw behind the curtain with some developers and the source code had chunks in it that were basically Public Domain UNIX recompiled. They didn't even bother to remove the comments. NT did change the world though.

The funniest thing was Apple suing MS for doing a better job of stealing the same GUI that they stole from Unix.

Solitaire legitimately killed more careers than COVID.

Good times......

-Dean

 

[sobo]

Solitaire legitimately killed more careers than COVID.

True dat!