I was thinking about life in general as I was driving in to work this AM sipping on a senior coffee.... that said why the hell is a normal cup of coffee now a senior coffee? Not that I'm complaining or anything it's way cheaper than the same cup called a small so sure, gimme that discount. I digress, the point of this was me reflecting on the past and I got to thinking about how nice things are now.

 

Back in the day, shortly after I got out of the Army, I devoted myself to following my dream of working with computers. Back then there was no such thing as Windows and Microsoft was a small company started by a drop out that sold the DOS system that ran the instruction code for PCs. I built my very first computer from a kit from Tandy corp later known as Radio Shack. There were no premade parts in that kit. I had to solder each component on the main board carefully and test along the way. It was powered by the super awesome 2MHz, yes MHz, 8080 single core proc.

There were no hard drives at the time, only floppy disks in the 8" or 5.25", if you were all high tech you used the smaller one, because it held so much more data and you could punch the disk case to make it double sided.

I became one of the go to guys in my area for networking systems together as i was one of the admins of a local BBS and had to figure out how to get all the nodes talking to each other so multiple users could be online at the same time. Then along came Windows Networking and tied everything together. No longer did you have to purchase overly expensive networking software for a peer based network as it came with Windows for Workgroups along with the new to us TCP/IP protocol that was only used for the internet by the government.

 

Today my cell phone is 120,000,000 times faster / more powerful than the computers used during the Apollo Space missions. Let's put that in perspective, a normal cell phone could pilot 120,000,000 spacecraft to the moon at the same time. Hell a TI-84 calculator can store roughly 14 thousand times the data that the guidance computer in Apollo 11 could. We all have access to the internet and not just government agencies. It just boggles my mind at how far we have come in just my lifetime. Today if I run into a problem I have never seen or need to set up something all I have to do is type in the question i have and Google will spit out pages upon pages of videos, tech articles, etc on how to fix or do what it is I want to know about. Just thinking about how much further along in my career or other pursuits I could be if the tools we have today had been available back then. Hell I even learned to play the bass from the internet and becoming friends with professional bassists such as Rudy Sarzo (Quiet Riot / Ozzy) and Billy Sheehan (Mr Big / David Lee Roth / Talas) who have taught me a lot about playing that I didn't pick up on teaching myself.

 

Well enough time spent on reminiscing about the "good old days" , in truth they really weren't that good tech wise, and time to get to work Googling how to get some things working on a project I have.

Cheers all, and Im glad we have progressed so far. If we hadn't it's almost 100% that none of us would ever have met.

 

PS: MS and Google are still the devil and our corporate overlords despite all the good that has come from them.

Genuinely nice story, @NetRngr . I started computing around the mid 1980's, while stationed in Chyenne, WY. The U.S. Airforce had just purchased a shit-ton of Zenith Z-100 computers (pictured on left). The computers ended up sitting in boxes by the hallway for months because nobody knew how to use them. Eventually, I ended up learning DOS, Wordstar, a DB software I can't remember name of, and a BBS software program (a text-only communication software) that required a "modem" device which enabled us to communicate between great distances (pre internet). We used a lot of "K" commands to modify/move text documents, to which I still remember a few of the commands.

 

Not too soon after, I remember our squadron's secretary got a new computer. The computer had a strange device with a cord and box attached at the end that moved a "curser" around on the screen. I distinctly remember asking her what that thing was called, to which she replied, "it's called a "mouse". The rest was history and have been fascinated with computing ever since. After I purchased and installed a new device referred to as a "CD burner (made by Hewlett Packard) for about $400, and replaced some onboard memory, I ended up getting the build a PC bug where I have continued to this day building my own PCs. I too have been thinking about what technologies have been and continue to be developed for both good and sometimes bad.