…how bloody old are you?
I’m “got a tape drive for my Vic-20” old.
I still have a working ZX Spectrum (Frankensteined from mine and a friend’s) and tape player.
I saw Star Wars in the cinema on its original release, back then we just called it Star Wars because that was its name.
Same. Watched the matinee performance every day for a week during the summer holidays. Blew my mind.
Fifty in a couple of months.
I was a beta tester for cable modems in my neighborhood. Friends came to my (adult) place to play Everquest.
Gonna expand on this since it’s late and I’m drunk.
Loved the movie Wargames long before I had a modem but could never call myself a hacker.
Was on the internet in 1991 through methods that could’ve been called hacking if I’d discovered them myself.
Kept that illegal university access through various friends at the school until commercial (non AOL) became available in 95 or so.
Cable modems came a few years later while I was living with an internet girlfriend who became my first wife. (Only on two.)
Sit down kids and let me tell you the story of the Betamax wars.
We still have the family Betamax, packed away but never forgotten.
I’m “my first computer was a TI99/4A” years old.
I wrote me first program on a TI99/4A but played my first game on a SWTPC 6800 machine. It was either trek or adventure.
Did you have the tape deck add on?
Old enough to have had a crush on Justine Frischmann.
First computer experiences were with a Commodore CBM 4032 (and state of the art 5¼-inch dual floppy disk drive) owned by one of the physics teachers at school.
Sitting down, unsupervised, with a group of friends one lunchtime we quickly tired of typing in rude words only to see “Syntax error” every time and we all wanted to find out how to make it work for us.
Lost touch with one of the group, but the rest of us all ended up in tech or software development of some sort.
Old enough to have used, installed, and maintained V21. And most of the CCITT/ITU data transmission schemes which followed. Also a well known 50 baud network that went before 🙂 (Telex)
+++, ATH
My first modem was actually this bad boy https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8355735/magic-modem-for-the-bbc-b-computer-modem
It was modified by my uncle to work on the commodore aniga (basically a switch on the back to just force modem on/off, so you dialled the number on the phone flipped the switch and hung up phone).
