Gold Dot Club

[Pami]

I carry Gold Dot does that count for anything here?

It only counts toward the inspiration for the name of this club.


BTW, I would just like to point out that Scutter broke the 4 Gold Dot barrier a few minutes ago.

 

[ATM]

Pretty sure ATM broke the "Mod Ceiling", but if not I am right behind him.

Nope. I did that, but you guys earned your way here, too. Congrats, Techres, and !

Blessings,
Bill

Bill and Rhino respectably cleared that hurdle before me. I careened through the gate sideways and upside down due to horrific oversight by those who reward me with rep when I'm a smarta$$.

I'm not worthy.

*but pass the bacon, please*

 

[Cwood]

Bill and Rhino respectably cleared that hurdle before me. I careened through the gate sideways and upside down due to horrific oversight by those who reward me with rep when I'm a smarta$$.

I'm not worthy.

*but pass the bacon, please*

I am just hoping that I did not contribute to this wretched mistake!

 

[MACHINEGUN]

Maybe someday I will be a member of the gold dot club.. but that is too far away to even think or worry about.

 

[ATM]

I am just hoping that I did not contribute to this wretched mistake!

You know you did. The burden of shame must be overwhelming!

 

[Bigum1969]

Maybe someday I will be a member of the gold dot club.. but that is too far away to even think or worry about.

Me too. I'll hit 35,000 posts first!

 

[Cwood]

You know you did. The burden of shame must be overwhelming!

Hmmm... in that case I will have to start giving you negative rep so I can redeem myself!

 

[Lars]

Refused to cook bacon? I don't think that's allowed.

*checks the again*

Clearly an infraction of club etiquette and BCC (Bacon Code of Conduct.)

Flame on, fry boy!

Congrats Lars!

Just Sayin'

 

[Bill of Rights]

It only counts toward the inspiration for the name of this club.


BTW, I would just like to point out that Scutter broke the 4 Gold Dot barrier a few minutes ago.

Congrats, Scutter!

I bet Pami's not too far behind him. I'm a ways off yet, but I'll get there when I get there.

(ETA: A couple of reps from INGunOwners - View Profile: Mike <=THIS guy would go a long way! that's gotta be like 75 points each time!)

Blessings,
Bill

 

[Bill of Rights]

I careened through the gate sideways and upside down

I do believe this is known as "keyholing".

 

[rhino]

'

I retract part of my previous statement. Apparently being an old school internet user has perks

Dude, you're not old enough to be an old school internet user!

 

[Lars]

Dude, you're not old enough to be an old school internet user!

I disagree.... Started with bulletin boards in the early 80's, moved to the internet via SLIP/Trumpet Winsock/Windows 3.1 ~ 1992, Installed slackware 1.0 in 93 (downloaded 30ish floppies iirc....)

I just started young.... The first computers I used were Burroughs Mainframes, connected via dumb terminal and 300baud at St. Joseph's Hospital in Milwaukee. Played Castle, and Adventure on it.

 

[rhino]

You must have been five years old!

 

[Lars]

I'm 32 Rhino.... in 92 I was 15/16

 

[Pami]

You must have been five years old!

I will say he is very much his father's son, and his father currently runs the network for a large health care conglomerate up in WI. It's in his blood.

 

[Bill of Rights]

I disagree.... Started with bulletin boards in the early 80's, moved to the internet via SLIP/Trumpet Winsock/Windows 3.1 ~ 1992, Installed slackware 1.0 in 93 (downloaded 30ish floppies iirc....)

I just started young.... The first computers I used were Burroughs Mainframes, connected via dumb terminal and 300baud at St. Joseph's Hospital in Milwaukee. Played Castle, and Adventure on it.

Good God... Trumpet Winsock and Win 3.1? I'd almost forgotten that combination. I started with DOS 3.0 and eventually moved to Win 3.1.

My first 'puter was a Radio Shack special... 80286, I think... no hard drive initially, though I added one later, but I did get a second 5.25" floppy for it at time of purchase. 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, too, and logged on to PC-Link (predecessor of AOL) and Prodigy. Damn, that was a long time ago.

Blessings,
Bill

 

[rhino]

My first 'puter was a Radio Shack special... 80286, I think... no hard drive initially, though I added one later, but I did get a second 5.25" floppy for it at time of purchase. 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, too, and logged on to PC-Link (predecessor of AOL) and Prodigy. Damn, that was a long time ago.

Okay, junior!

My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 model III back in 1980. It was a Z80-powered dynamo with a full 16K (that's kilobytes) of RAM, expandable to a whopping 48K if you had a lot of money! (which I did not) Woo-hoo!

Floppy drives were an unattainable luxury item for me then. The only way I had to save or load programs was with a tape cassette. The 80286 probably wasn't even conceived on the drawing board (and it was paper and pencil back then) at that time! They were just then neutering the Intel 8086 into the 8088 to make them cheaper to make for early IBM PCs and compatibles.

My high school in those days had an old teletype terminal with an acoustic coupler modem. We got Apple IIs when I was a junior (I think) in 1981-82, but none of them had a connection the outside world.

I remember the days of local BBSs that grew into networks of the same like FIDOnet (ATM and I were on one of the same BBSs back then!). I cut my online teeth on GEnie, which by today's standards was shockingly expensive ($8 per hour at night!). GEnie and Compuserve were the only commercials games in town then.

Then when I was living in the Bay Area I discovered the legendary WeLL based out of Sausalito. That's where I "grew up" in online terms. When I started there, the only meaningful access to internet (we didn't put the "the" in front of it then) was through universities and maybe some big corporations. You had to know your way around unix-based systems without fancy graphics-based front ends because . . . they didn't exist yet!

Fun trivia: I was actually logged into Prodigy (it was owned by Sears back then) at 1704 hours when the big earthquake hit on 17 OCT 1989 in the SF Bay Area. My first warning was the power surge that fried my trusty '386 and killed knocked out the power across most of the region. Then things started shakin' and it got . . . interesting.

I suppose things have changed a little since then.

And I acknowledge that a 15-year-old whippersnapper could have been poking around online, especially if he was following in a nerd family tradition.

 

[Bigum1969]

Good God... Trumpet Winsock and Win 3.1? I'd almost forgotten that combination. I started with DOS 3.0 and eventually moved to Win 3.1.

My first 'puter was a Radio Shack special... 80286, I think... no hard drive initially, though I added one later, but I did get a second 5.25" floppy for it at time of purchase. 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, too, and logged on to PC-Link (predecessor of AOL) and Prodigy. Damn, that was a long time ago.

Blessings,
Bill

My first computer was a TI-99/4A. Remember those bad boys? I learned how to program in extended basic and would spend hours tinkering on it. I actually used a cassette drive to store programs. It would take 30 minutes to load a program!

 

[ATM]

Sinclair ZX81 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was 12 or 13 when I got this gem.

 

[techres]

First I owned: Timex Sinclair 1000

First to work on for school work: Heath 64 running CPM (Before DOS existed).

First to program on: Apple IIe making D&D games with Basic. Man we thought we were cool!

First to get to internet (then Bitnet): VT100 dialing into a Vax network at 300 baud. Used email to send FTP requests one line per email at a time, then got 10k chunks of data back per email and had to manually rebuild files to then uudecode back into something useful. Man, stuff is so much easier to get now. And, no, there was never a time before pictures as such. They have always been there - just limited by hours/pic of workload and alot of squinting.

First to break spectacularly: 8088 laptop/luggable. Boy did it explode when it stopped accelerating towards the ground.

That about covers it...