Before the web ever became popular, I was a BBS surfer. In the early 90s, the early days of BBS in my hometown, my favorite hangout was COMPULINK 2000... a little BBS run by a cool guy and his girlfriend. I spent many an evening chatting with several online friends and playing some of the super neat BBS games like OPERATION OVERKILL or TRADE WARS 2002. Modems were huge and measured speed in BAUD. The main form of electronic mail on those systems was FIDONET and messages were basically loaded to the BBS and then batch transmitted to other BBS systems globally. Fun stuff.
Of course I went to University in the fall of 1993 and shortly thereafter, MOSAIC came along and knocked the socks of my tech geek computer friends and myself. A world wide web of what? We found out very quickly what it could do... and what we could make it do.
I talk with people of every so often about their initial introduction to different technologies. I wear my BBS and MOSAIC badges with honour, though most people don't have a blessed clue what I'm talking about. Someone once said to me, "Yeah! I remember way back to Windows 95!" Geez, F U N00B! Heehee! I worked with 3.1 and DOS for years and remember the release of Windows95 quite clearly. My friend bought a brand new computer with it installed just after release. We sat and played with it for days, finding all the neat new little things it could do to make our life at the office easier. It was no Mac, but it was good.
Of course, I talk like a sage but every so often someone comes along and trumps me... I'm not that much of a tech geek that it's *terribly* difficult to do. One day, I actually met someone who used the old punch card data entry systems on computers back in the dark ages. Heehee! Who's the N00B now MOFO!
But my march with computers has been a lifelong thing. At age 7, our family got a VIC 20. We soon upgraded to a COMMODORE 64 which I used for years and years. Later on I stepped up to the AMIGA platform from COMMODORE, though the company was in its final death throes... I then entered the world of IBM and of course Apple and after getting my first Mac in 1995, I never looked back. I have a Mac and a PC sitting side by each on my desk, I'm not predjudiced, but while I use them both regularly, the Mac has my heart. The PC is just a PC. The Mac holds my life in a pretty little white enclosure.
/End brief sojourn into my twisted techie timeline.
Oh, and just because it made me laugh, a little tidbit about the VIC 20 from Wikipedia:
The VIC-20 was originally meant to be called Vixen, but this name was inappropriate in Germany, Commodore's second most important market, because it sounds like wichsen, the German language word for "masturbate". VIC, which was subsequently chosen, has a similar problem—it can be pronounced like fick[en], the German word for "fuck". Therefore the VIC-20 was finally marketed as the VC-20 "Volkscomputer" in German-language countries—an obvious play on "Volkswagen".
I'm sorry kid, you're not fooling anyone. You don't know what a keyboard is and the printer is scaring you shitless.
