Ah, the good old days of Usenet. Of course that was also the bad old days of ! path email addresses…
All your base are belong to us
He sounds like an online equivalent of a cargo cultist.
As for old email, if you didn’t know how to get to someone through decvax of ihnp4, you had no business sending them email.
No spam back then.
I mean, the chat rooms would come with you if you moved your laptop, Arlo.
“I prefer doing things the old way because I liked the old way better” is how I translate the last panel. It doesn’t make sense, of course, since desktops are still around (and better in some ways – I’m a tech, they’re a heck of a lot easier to fix/upgrade, and cheaper for the same specs). But that was his answer at this moment, anyway.
“better in some ways – I’m a tech, they’re a heck of a lot easier to fix/upgrade, and cheaper for the same specs”
Fix/upgrade is an advantage that is disappearing quickly, as desktop computers move towards more and more integrated designs… the original PC had exactly two ports built into the mainboard… the cassette port, and the keyboard port. Everything else came from an expansion port, and there were (if I recall correctly) 8 expansion slots on the PC-1 mainboard. First they moved the serial and parallel ports onto the mainboard, and then Intel invented USB, and then more and more systems had video on the mainboard, and sound, then network. Then the boxes started getting smaller… a lot of systems sold today have only 1 expansion slot, and the growing trend is no expansion slot at all, just lots of USB ports.
Tsk. Should go under the rec.arts.comics.strips (or at least alt.comics.* rather than alt.arts.*). RAC.strips still gets a dozen or so posts a day.
jjmcgaffey: That was my interpretation too. “Tradition means doing it the same stupid old way you’ve always done it”.
Whereas as “Progress means learning to do it a new stupid way that you probably won’t like, because if you don’t ‘upgrade’ the Kool People will sneer at you.”
The early 80s’ Usenet did have a calming lack of immediacy and a high technical barrier to entry. If a troll happened on, we’d find out who helped them, and literally everyone else would ban them, their modem hop, and the bangpath they rode in on.
Public chat rooms/BBS/IRC/&c – these were/are not nostalgia-worthy.
“No spam back then”
How soon we forget. Did you ever contact that lawyer to get your green card? Then there was the person (or bot) who would react to every post that mentioned the word “Turkey” whether it was about the country or Thanksgiving dinner.
As for chat rooms, everyone is over on VRChat now. Get yourself an Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality, get a custom avatar and immerse yourself.
Yeah, Cargo Cult thinking. If you only use your computer at the computer desk, then Facebook will go away, and LiveJournal will come back.
Ah…and then there were AOL chatrooms. Good times.
A family member met a woman on one of those. They’ve been married almost 20 years now.
<i.Tsk. Should go under the rec.arts.comics.strips (or at least alt.comics.* rather than alt.arts.*). RAC.strips still gets a dozen or so posts a day.
Yes, there is some traffic. For a while, much of it was narrowly focused, mostly complaining about reruns of Get Fuzzy or noting reuse of artwork in Family Circus.
Lately one of the members of rec.arts.sf.written, which is a bit more populated, has been cross-posting comics related posts to both groups.
James Pollock – Husband started building our desktop computers back at the turn of this century as he was tired of not being able to repair and upgrade same he bought. The current desktop computer I have is my first “new” computer. Before it if one of us needed an upgrade and we could not do so, he would get a new one and I would get his old one (he uses graphics much more than I do so he always needed the faster computer than I did).
My current computer is custom designed for the crazy person that I am. I have a parallel port and serial port (plus USB ports, etc) so that I can use the assorted items I plug in and don’t want to give up. It is set up to take the old round plug (forget the name) to plug in the keyboard and mouse (well, actually the thumb pad – I don’t use a mouse). It is Win 7, but has a WinXP virtual machine in it so I can run my old software and so on. I don’t ask for a lot of gifts, but when he makes upgrade my computer – it better work with everything my old one did. (He has promised me a virtual XP for my Win 10 laptop -which I hate – when he made me upgrade.
@Mark,
The green card lottery spam came in 1994. Domain name addressing started in 1983. Yeah, the DEC spam was before that (I never even heard of it) but that was from an inside the community source.
The first chat rooms/bulletin boards I used were on PLATO in 1975. Well before the Internet. It was on one computer, true, but PLATO terminals were scattered all over the world. We also had multiplayer interactive games, MUDs, a newspaper, and something just like instant messaging. And touch screens.
Another old PLATO user here, though only for a year or so. My housemate/significant other at the time worked for Control Data here in Minneapolis; I, being a non-tech type then (and now), mostly just used it for playing games — “The King’s Mission” and “DMT Dungeon Monsters Treasure” — though I did sometimes read and very rarely post a bit on some of the bulletin boards. Ah, memories. Almost half a century ago now.
Wow, PLATO, that’s a blast from the past for sure. I was in grade school; my dad ran the Arts Computing Office at the University of Waterloo, which is what it sounds like: a computing center for Arts students, away from the evil Math types. Heavily text-focused, of course. I remember tinkering with the PLATO terminal but don’t remember games there.
I do remember games on the mainframe, My dad would bring home terminals and let me use his account over blazing 300bps dialup (linemode, doh), and I’d play things like Adventure and my favorite, SUMER. In that game, you were the king of Mesopotamia, and had to apportion the grain for food, seed, bribing the barbarians, and you could buy and sell land. It only ran for two or three cycles (“years”), and that wasn’t enough. I looked at the “executable” and it was (what I now know to be) BASIC, so I hacked it. My first programming experience. And now, 45 years later, i’m still at it…
See? Computer games *are* a good thing!
“Public chat rooms/BBS/IRC/&c – these were/are not nostalgia-worthy.”
I strongly disagree with regard to FidoNet, at least.
Fidonet is probably the least nostalgia-worthy thing from the BBS era…, well, maybe second after PCBoard.
Your mileage must vary.
I have no idea of what the name was – but husband’ best friend from when he was a child (and best man at our wedding) was a professor upstate New York and told husband how to get online through some predecessor of our current Internet so that they wouldn’t have to pay for long distance calls to each other.
Strangely – it can take forever now for the friend to answer emails – can be a year or more.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Ah, the good old days of Usenet. Of course that was also the bad old days of ! path email addresses…
All your base are belong to us
He sounds like an online equivalent of a cargo cultist.
As for old email, if you didn’t know how to get to someone through decvax of ihnp4, you had no business sending them email.
No spam back then.
I mean, the chat rooms would come with you if you moved your laptop, Arlo.
“I prefer doing things the old way because I liked the old way better” is how I translate the last panel. It doesn’t make sense, of course, since desktops are still around (and better in some ways – I’m a tech, they’re a heck of a lot easier to fix/upgrade, and cheaper for the same specs). But that was his answer at this moment, anyway.
“better in some ways – I’m a tech, they’re a heck of a lot easier to fix/upgrade, and cheaper for the same specs”
Fix/upgrade is an advantage that is disappearing quickly, as desktop computers move towards more and more integrated designs… the original PC had exactly two ports built into the mainboard… the cassette port, and the keyboard port. Everything else came from an expansion port, and there were (if I recall correctly) 8 expansion slots on the PC-1 mainboard. First they moved the serial and parallel ports onto the mainboard, and then Intel invented USB, and then more and more systems had video on the mainboard, and sound, then network. Then the boxes started getting smaller… a lot of systems sold today have only 1 expansion slot, and the growing trend is no expansion slot at all, just lots of USB ports.
Tsk. Should go under the rec.arts.comics.strips (or at least alt.comics.* rather than alt.arts.*). RAC.strips still gets a dozen or so posts a day.
jjmcgaffey: That was my interpretation too. “Tradition means doing it the same stupid old way you’ve always done it”.
Whereas as “Progress means learning to do it a new stupid way that you probably won’t like, because if you don’t ‘upgrade’ the Kool People will sneer at you.”
The early 80s’ Usenet did have a calming lack of immediacy and a high technical barrier to entry. If a troll happened on, we’d find out who helped them, and literally everyone else would ban them, their modem hop, and the bangpath they rode in on.
Public chat rooms/BBS/IRC/&c – these were/are not nostalgia-worthy.
“No spam back then”
How soon we forget. Did you ever contact that lawyer to get your green card? Then there was the person (or bot) who would react to every post that mentioned the word “Turkey” whether it was about the country or Thanksgiving dinner.
As for chat rooms, everyone is over on VRChat now. Get yourself an Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality, get a custom avatar and immerse yourself.
Yeah, Cargo Cult thinking. If you only use your computer at the computer desk, then Facebook will go away, and LiveJournal will come back.
Ah…and then there were AOL chatrooms. Good times.
A family member met a woman on one of those. They’ve been married almost 20 years now.
<i.Tsk. Should go under the rec.arts.comics.strips (or at least alt.comics.* rather than alt.arts.*). RAC.strips still gets a dozen or so posts a day.
Yes, there is some traffic. For a while, much of it was narrowly focused, mostly complaining about reruns of Get Fuzzy or noting reuse of artwork in Family Circus.
Lately one of the members of rec.arts.sf.written, which is a bit more populated, has been cross-posting comics related posts to both groups.
James Pollock – Husband started building our desktop computers back at the turn of this century as he was tired of not being able to repair and upgrade same he bought. The current desktop computer I have is my first “new” computer. Before it if one of us needed an upgrade and we could not do so, he would get a new one and I would get his old one (he uses graphics much more than I do so he always needed the faster computer than I did).
My current computer is custom designed for the crazy person that I am. I have a parallel port and serial port (plus USB ports, etc) so that I can use the assorted items I plug in and don’t want to give up. It is set up to take the old round plug (forget the name) to plug in the keyboard and mouse (well, actually the thumb pad – I don’t use a mouse). It is Win 7, but has a WinXP virtual machine in it so I can run my old software and so on. I don’t ask for a lot of gifts, but when he makes upgrade my computer – it better work with everything my old one did. (He has promised me a virtual XP for my Win 10 laptop -which I hate – when he made me upgrade.
@Mark,
The green card lottery spam came in 1994. Domain name addressing started in 1983. Yeah, the DEC spam was before that (I never even heard of it) but that was from an inside the community source.
The first chat rooms/bulletin boards I used were on PLATO in 1975. Well before the Internet. It was on one computer, true, but PLATO terminals were scattered all over the world. We also had multiplayer interactive games, MUDs, a newspaper, and something just like instant messaging. And touch screens.
Another old PLATO user here, though only for a year or so. My housemate/significant other at the time worked for Control Data here in Minneapolis; I, being a non-tech type then (and now), mostly just used it for playing games — “The King’s Mission” and “DMT Dungeon Monsters Treasure” — though I did sometimes read and very rarely post a bit on some of the bulletin boards. Ah, memories. Almost half a century ago now.
Wow, PLATO, that’s a blast from the past for sure. I was in grade school; my dad ran the Arts Computing Office at the University of Waterloo, which is what it sounds like: a computing center for Arts students, away from the evil Math types. Heavily text-focused, of course. I remember tinkering with the PLATO terminal but don’t remember games there.
I do remember games on the mainframe, My dad would bring home terminals and let me use his account over blazing 300bps dialup (linemode, doh), and I’d play things like Adventure and my favorite, SUMER. In that game, you were the king of Mesopotamia, and had to apportion the grain for food, seed, bribing the barbarians, and you could buy and sell land. It only ran for two or three cycles (“years”), and that wasn’t enough. I looked at the “executable” and it was (what I now know to be) BASIC, so I hacked it. My first programming experience. And now, 45 years later, i’m still at it…
See? Computer games *are* a good thing!
“Public chat rooms/BBS/IRC/&c – these were/are not nostalgia-worthy.”
I strongly disagree with regard to FidoNet, at least.
Fidonet is probably the least nostalgia-worthy thing from the BBS era…, well, maybe second after PCBoard.
Your mileage must vary.
I have no idea of what the name was – but husband’ best friend from when he was a child (and best man at our wedding) was a professor upstate New York and told husband how to get online through some predecessor of our current Internet so that they wouldn’t have to pay for long distance calls to each other.
Strangely – it can take forever now for the friend to answer emails – can be a year or more.