Greensboro's First Blog - Or How Geeky are you?

OK let see how geeky you really are, or possibly how old you are.

I started using computers when I was about 12. My first computer was an 8088 with no hard drive and a 3.5 in disk drive. I bought my first computer with my lunch money for $200.00 at radio shack.

My second computer I built myself, an 80286. Unfortunately I couldn't afford a case, so the motherboard sat on the desktop loose connected to the power-supply.

This was back in the days of 1200 baud modems and BBS software. Back in the day there was about 30 BBS numbers which you would dial in separately to someones home, & their computer would answer and you would download files from their computer. A good GIF or JPG file would take about 8-12 minutes to download, and games would take overnight to download.
The overlords of the underground were called Sysops short for System Operators who ran BBSes like BFD, Dave's World, & several others I no longer remember. This was back in the day where you had to constantly check the area code and prefix to keep from adding up long-distance charges, and often dialed out on your only voice line.

The idea I'd be sitting someday behind a wireless laptop capable of a mind-boggling megabyte per second download rate and read multiple blogs, web-pages, and downloads instantly would have blown my mind back in the days of BASIC & pascal.

But maybe that's where Greensboro's successful blog scene began. In the hands of those 30 sysops and there late-night screeching modems that started the foundation for hundreds if not thousands of local citizens to connect and transmit information.

With the birth of the Internet BBSes faded into obscurity. Today's BBSes are websites with more content and users then any of us could have ever imagined back in the day. I'm sure there's a few of us that remember those days or were apart of that scene. We may have even talked, conversed, or "Chatted"... not realizing many years down the road we'd be right here again in a similar fashion blogging.

That's pretty cool Beth. Lots of parallels here. I was 16 years old. My fist computer was the Atari 800 computer. I paid 200 bucks for it and paid for it with coin I had saved in my sock drawer (litereally). I took it to the bank and got a cashier's check and sent it in to get the puter. I learned how to program on that computer and that's what I do for a living today.

My computer had a tape drive. Those disk drives were for the rich people. I later acquired a disk drive a couple of years later. I remember how cool it was that I could load a game or program in a minute instead of a half hour.

My modem was a 300 baud modem but it could be changed to go up to 450 baud. A couple years later I bought an avatex 1200 baud modem. Real cool. I was a big contributer to BBSs and even operated my own BBS at one time. It was called GameBusters (A play on the popular Ghostbusters movie popular at the time. Yeah... I dealt in cracked games and programs. Smile

It really is mind boggling how much the internet has changed how useful computers can be.

Who's the geekiest? Well... I still have my old Atari 800 computer stuff. I build all my own computers and have for some time. I have a wireless network in my house and have 8 (yes 8 ) computers + one server hooked into my network throughout the house. I have my own "happy place" computer room where my main stuff is. I have in there a fridge, TV, water cooler, and some nice computer furniture.

Some people might call that a bit geeky.... Smile

I know my wife does.
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"Has it ever occurred to you that nothing ever occurs to God?"

First computer was a TRS-80 with a whopping 4k of memory. Graduated to a Commodore 64 in about 1981 or so.

I remember the BBS scene in the early 90's. Back then it was BBS or Prodigy on a 286 with a stunning hard drive capacity of 40 MB and 2MB of ram. You had to tweak your conventional memory settings using just to play a lot of games. AOL was just getting started.

Radio Shack had deskmate and Windows had just come out. I remember the various free newsletters distributed with all the BBS listings, a few tech articles, and some ads.

When the Pentium came out, it was like the world had changed. Computers running at 100MHZ! Surely, there was no way they could possibly get any faster than that!

Ok guys, I'm sorry... The first computer we ever owned ran Windows 95 and it came with AOL already installed.

Yeah. Nice. Catch 'ya l8tr.
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Matt Hill Comer
http://www.matthillnc.com