Your Friday Google Tube
Haha mainframe nerd, even after high school you will continue to suffer soul-crushing rejection.
Seen over at Doc Barnett's hizouse, I really have only one thing to say about this video:
There was a Windows before Windows 95? Crazy!
Okay actually I have followup questions for those of you who participated in the 1980's:
- You had to run an application to get the time?
- Were keyboards really that loud?
- "I'll just go online for that." Wait a minute…computers didn't used to always be "online?"
- Did you really use phrases like "Here we go. Back into word processing."?
- Token "can-do" woman, check. Token "efficient but annoying secretary," check. Token "computer nerd," check. Token "handsome stranger," check. What, no token "black guy who acts white?" Not even a token "gay guy who's always with the double entendres?" Did you people just live in freaking caves or what?
Have a great weekend everyone, peace out!
January 19th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
1) Yes, though most people had these hardware devices called “swatches” that they wore on their wrists because cell phones hadn’t been invented yet to tell the time.
2) Yes, and I miss it.
3) Actually, in the 80’s it was only the very, very rich who were able to connect to other computers since the government charged an hourly tax to anyone connecting a phone to their computer.
4) Black people landed on our planet in the 80’s, c.f. the documentary “Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension”, so they were still integrating into our society and had not yet learned to get jobs in PR.
5) Gays didn’t exist in the 80’s until the Gay Cancer hit and started infecting straight people … some survived and became gay people and some didn’t.
January 19th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Amber, I’m counting on multiple shots of you changing from heels to high-tops in your next flick. Plus an interpretative rap interlude: Wa-wa-wa-warcraft / warcraft / war-craft is so dumb-ass. Etc.
January 19th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
You had to run an application to get the time?
Actually, only if you were lucky. Back then we programmers had to write our own program or run a batch script to pull up the time! Back when geeks were GEEKS!
Were keyboards really that loud?
Ah, but you missed the membrane keyboards of certain computers in the early 80’s. Sort of like a McDonalds cash register. In fact, people would make jokes about those all the time. People would upgrade from their silent keyboard just to get people to quit saying “you want fries with that?” when they were showing off their computer.
Computers didn’t used to always be “online?”
Choose which self-contained bulletin board you wanted to go visit, unless you happened to work at a university or the military, in which case there was kinda-sorta the Internet. Telnet, FTP, and UseNet, baby! I don’t know WHAT this lady was dialing into… I think at this time (when was it, 1989, when Windows 386 came out?), the “World Wide Web” was… uh, a couple of GOPHER pages.
There wasn’t even an “online” to go to
Did you really use phrases like “Here we go. Back into word processing.”?
Hey, my mom sold “Word Processors.” Not word processing software… actual machines with keyboards, integrated printers, tape drives (or new-fangled 8″ floppy disks!), and a cabinet larger than your average end-table to store the hardware… just to run word processing! That’s all it did! A $5,000 typewriter.
What, no token “black guy who acts white?” Not even a token “gay guy who’s always with the double entendres?” Did you people just live in freaking caves or what?
Ah, those were simpler times. When you could deliver a report in black-and-white paper format and not get laughed out of the office. And apparently back when a woman would change clothes with a man in her office while spouting white-boy wannabe rap.
January 19th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Ohhh swatches! I had one of those. The little rubber facegaurd was green, and the face was a checkerboard pattern. IIRC the second hand was pink. Chicks dug it. Ohh yeahh. In fact, I was kinda into checkerboard patterns now that I think of it. I had the checkerboard Vans, and the checkerboard skinny tie for more formal occasions.
To answer the original question, Windows/386 really was a sad attempt at cloning OS/2 and Mac. Some trivia: Microsoft and IBM jointly developed OS/2, and then Microsoft did what it always does and got greedy and pulled out of the project so they could pursue the whole enchilada.
Windows/386 (also called Windows 2.0) was, if memory serves correctly, the first Windows that could have overlapping windows. The Windows before that could only be tiled.
Ahhh Gopher! Wow that takes me back. Yeah, Gopher and Usenet were the internet. I remember using Mosaic (the precursor to Netscape) for the first time and thinking “oh, graphical gopher. How quaint. And what a waste of CPU cycles.”
Those were the days when you really only used a GUI (X baby!) so you could have multiple command lines, there was no such thing as spam, and we had email addresses like gandalf!froboz!pulsar!moxcamel. (Bonus points if you can identify the format.)
I still have my noisy IBM Selectric-style keyboard somewhere. More trivia: the original IBM PC keyboards were noisy on purpose. Since they were aiming the PC primarily at businesses, they wanted the keyboard to behave just like their typewriter, the IBM Selectric. If you’ve ever used one (either a Selectric or an original IBM keyboard) there is a definite tactile feedback that you just don’t get in keyboards anymore. When you pressed the key there was an initial resistance and then it would kind of “pop” down. Hard to describe. When cheaper mushier keyboards started hitting the market, people complained that their typing speeds actually decreased on the new ones and I agree.
Good times.
January 20th, 2007 at 6:37 am
The funny thing about that is the first computer keyboards were silent, but secretaries, typists and others complained about the loss of the typewriter sound that indicated they had hit the key hard enough for it to appear on the page, they felt they needed to look at the screen when transcribing which slowed them down. So, the sound was added to the computer keyboard.
January 20th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Down the list:
* You had to run an application to get the time? Yeah. “clock” on UNIX, or “time” under MSDOS.
* Were keyboards really that loud? Yes. The IBM ones with gold-plated contacts were legendary, though.
* “I’ll just go online for that.” Wait a minute…computers didn’t used to always be “online?”
* Did you really use phrases like “Here we go. Back into word processing.”? No, that’s ridiculous!
* Token “can-do” woman, check. Token “efficient but annoying secretary,” check. Token “computer nerd,” check. Token “handsome stranger,” check. What, no token “black guy who acts white?” Not even a token “gay guy who’s always with the double entendres?” Did you people just live in freaking caves or what? The 80’s was a cave all on it’s own.
January 25th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Just a point on the tokens - at least we had Token RING! Man, what a network!