Happy Birthday ArpaNet(Internet)

[Pete Loney]

It's the 40th birthday of the internet, yesterday. I had no clue I was as old as the internet.

Pete Loney Factoid: at age 12 I was hosting a BBS on my Atari 800 XL over my own personal phone line.

History of the internet slideshow....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/in ... et-arpanet" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Mako Koiwai]

I started in '86 ... with a Tandy 102 "Portable Computer" ... it actually IS smaller then my MBP (macbookpro). So is the display ... 8 lines! Internet, CompuServe, at 300 baud. I had it maxed out at 32K!

The coolest thing ... the word processing program, via an add on chip, had a Document PREVIEW mode, that displayed in that 8 line space approx. what your doc would look like. Great for formatting ... it seemed amazing!

Some aspects of it are better then most any current laptop. 20 hours of battery life on 4 AA batteries!

http://www.planetnz.com/palmheads/tandy.php

[Kristoffer Gjevre]

I heard this on the radio yesterday
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =114280698" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Tom Tanquary]

In college I ended up hanging out with a bunch of nerdy weirdos doing a lot of "mind expansion" stuff. Hehe. They were all working on this thing call PLATO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28c ... _system%29 They would tell me about ruling the world one day. I had one of them take my Computer Science final exam for me so I would pass. I hated computers back then. I guess they had the last laugh.

Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, many consider its most enduring legacy was to be the online community spawned by its communication features. PLATO Notes, created by David Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools for online communication, including Personal Notes (e-mail), Talkomatic (chat rooms), Term-Talk (instant messaging), monitor mode (remote screen sharing) and emoticons.

[Bob Beamesderfer]

I started in '86 ... with a Tandy 102 "Portable Computer" ... it actually IS smaller then my MBP (macbookpro). So is the display ... 8 lines! Internet, CompuServe, at 300 baud. I had it maxed out at 32K!

The coolest thing ... the word processing program, via an add on chip, had a Document PREVIEW mode, that displayed in that 8 line space approx. what your doc would look like. Great for formatting ... it seemed amazing!

Some aspects of it are better then most any current laptop. 20 hours of battery life on 4 AA batteries!

http://www.planetnz.com/palmheads/tandy.php

The Beloved Trash 80!

[Steve Ekstrand]

1979 I started on a Rockwell AIM-65
http://oldcomputers.net/AIM-65.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

1980 I put together a Sinclair Research ZX80 Kit. Though 3 yrs newer in design it never had as much capacity as my AIM that was enhanced with 8K RAM and all 5 16K ROM sockets filled. I had BASIC, PASCAL, and FORTH on board.

1980-83 I set up our high schools first computers. We had an APPLE II+ then an APPLE III I got to use a bunch. We also had several models of the trash 80's.

Off to college in 1984 I got a IBM PC Portable
http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5155.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Stacey had one of the first Macintosh computers at home. For college, she got an IBM XT then IBM XT/286 in 1986.

We stayed with the XT/286 through undergrad adding a bigger HD and more RAM.

After that we started building our own desktops.

[John Coffey]

The first computer I got paid to work on:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/burroughs/B700 ... _Apr75.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;