In many ways, I'm a computing kid. I grew up in the 60's and 70's, when computers were in the process of becoming a major part of human society. But you needed to be a mathematician in those days (at least that's what I thought) to enter the field. And math and I don't get along.
So I entered into the electrician field after graduating from high school back in the polyester-clad days of 1977.
I worked construction for ten years, then landed a job as an industrial electrician. I really thought I had found my niche.
That all changed in 1993, when I sprang for my first PC. After spending two months playing games, I began tearing it apart to see how it worked.
Seven years later, I landed a job as a geek at the facility where I was serving as an electrician.
Fullfillment at last!
My first online experience was placing a phone call through my 2400 baud modem to a buddy who was much geekier than me. We chatted via Procomm Plus for a few minutes.
First lesson learned, taught to me tactfully: DON'T TYPE IN ALL CAPS. It means you're shouting.
My next online experiences consisted of dialing into local BBS's.
We had fifteen or so within local dialing range back in 1994.
The best was called The Chicken Coop. You could check it out for free, but it cost 20 bucks a year to join. It was worth it.
The sheer mass of shareware available at the Coop was unimaginable. Back in the days when a 250 MB hard drive was huge, the Coop had at least that much available to download.
You had an hour daily, then you were automatically logged off. One of the first things that I learned was that I could download a 200K partial zip in just under an hour. The sysop had cut everything up into chunks that size for the benefit of his 2400 baud users.
Another local BBS had lots and lots of mod files. The mod format was a venerable one, devised back in 1987 for Amiga users to play music efficiently. It was still very much alive in 1994. You could download a ton of music and the DOS-based players required to listen to them.
I upgraded to a 14,400 modem that year, and was amazed at how much I could download with that blinding speed available at my fingertips.
In 1995, with an upgrade to windows 95, I ventured out onto the WWW for the first time through a local ISP called Intellinet. I was also an AOL member, and when they finally offered WWW access later that year, I went exclusively with them. BTW, they had just announced their 2,000,000th member back then.
But after the great gum-up that occurred when AOL announced unlimited internet usage, I dropped them and went back to an ISP, never to return to AOHell.
About 1996, I restored my zipped and archived Procomm Plus phone book and tried connecting to the local BBS's.
Most were gone. The ones that remained weren't being maintained.
Today, BBS's have either moved to the WWW or vanished. But we geeks who were around fifteen years ago can recall when being "online" meant dialing in to a local computer with lots of modems connected to it.
