Posted on 08/06/2011 12:53:42 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast
(cough - ahem!) Are you forgetting the transistor?
Right you are and how sweet it is...
Were? I know people who still use them.
Those are good, but I think I would go back to constitutional government and the printing press. It took the printing press over a century to have a big impact. I wonder about the internet. It's twenty years old and we have the most oppressive government anyone has seen in their lifetimes.
NeXT, the first Jobs cube computer.
Somewhere in my basement, I have bulletin board postings from the 1993-1995 era of Prodigy on floppy disks. It used to be too expensive ($3.60 an hour!) to read and reply to bulletin board posts online so we used a special program to download bulletin boards. Then we'd upload our responses and download new postings.
It all seemed so high-tech at the time! Back in that period, relatives used to visit me from miles around to see this "innernet thingy". Just having a computer in my home set me apart but being able to connect to the outside world with my phone line (through a modem) never failed to blow them away. My older uncles would have their eyes bug out of their heads as I showed them sports scores in real time and the latest weather forecast. The younger people will never understand but back before the internet, you had to wait until the 6 o'clock or the 11 o'clock news on the TV to get that kind of information.
Genie was about $8.00 an hour at the blazing speed of 300 baud. We had apps to log into a forum download and then log off, responses were made offline, then reconnect and upload.
The NeXT was a fine computer, but hardly the only speed demon on the block. A Sun Sparcstation and even a well outfitted Mac IIci would have had plenty of firepower for the job. Heck I was running doing POPmail and FTP over the Internet on Mac PLUSes in 1991 with a Frame Relay 56K connection. Even a 25 Mhz 386 with 16MB of RAM could have run a browser server under the right operating system (OS2 or Unix at the time).
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