Category: Uncategorized

amusing attempt to re-live the old days…
[via Waxy]

for the record, at that time, i was in the early stages of my techie journey with a TI-99/4A (with the 128k (?) memory expansion, disk drive, voice synthesizer, 300 baud modem, printer – ah, what i wouldn’t do for a pic of my old desk), i remember reading computer magazines back then and hand-typing basic programs they had in there (they did NOT come with disks, though, you could order cassette tapes with that month’s programs on them, as i recall)… some progs were so big, they would publish them in parts, so, you had a month to type in all that stuff and then wait for the next issue… i guess i was eleven years old when dad bought me a book called something like “Beginning BASIC For Kids”, which taught me about strings, variables, boolean – i still remember some of the little visual aides and such from that book… after that book, my fate was sealed… for years to come, my notebook full of programs and notes was my best friend… i remember many junior high lunches spent with a mile-long print out of some program i had written, scrutinizing every line, command, subroutine, trying to debug the thing, comparing my original notes, looking for typos, looking for incorrect goto line numbers, any clue as to why it isn’t working…

a misspent youth, to be sure…

i spent most of my non-programming time playing scott adams text adventure games, but, i did my bbs time, as well… on one local bss – i wish i could remember the name – i had been caught cheating at tradewars… selling secrets back and forth – had three accounts, one for each opposing faction and one to collect my hush money payments 🙂 neither team ever figured out who their rat was, but, the sysop did… somehow it all worked out that he gave me co-sysop access and i eventually worked for him at the computer shop he ran… dick scheffler was his name…

on a bbs called “the twilight zone”, there was this little game where you could win more access time (you see, folks, you connected to a bbs using a phone line, so, they limited access to users, usually starting at a few minutes a day for new accounts, and there were things you could do to earn access minutes), this was a “guess the number” game… so, i had, say, 30 mins access time per day… so, i would log on and go straight to that game and try to win more time… but, in 30 mins, i could only guess so many numbers and may guess the same one more than once (it was a three digit number), writing down each number i tried ate up even more of my precious time… sooooooo, i wrote a little prog that could try out numbers WAY faster than i, a mere human, could punch them in, read the results, try again, etc., and would never repeat the number it had tried since i started it…
as i recall, i got busted using that, too…

and, you know, bbs’es live on, both dial-up and via telnet… when i got my psion 3c here just 3 or 4 years ago, i didn’t have any internet software for it, but, i did have a modem and a comms program, so, i got some bbs phone numbers, dialled them up, searched their files sections, and, after trying several bbs’es, eventually found an ftp client that i downloaded, then used it to get the rest of what i needed from the ‘net…

annnyway, fun article… the “oh, let’s make fun of 80s tech” joke gets a bit tired, but, this one is not too offensive…

btw, my brother got a “petster” for christmas one year, more like ’87…

oh, and, before i go, it would be a crime to bring up bbs’es and not mention textfiles.com and the bbs documentary… which bbs documentary? well, THE bbs documentary, of course 😛