Something fun

Unless, of course, you're in the UK. Here, we've always had a 3rd, earth pin.....well, since around the early 1920s, shortly after the Great War.
I wrote "Standard European Plug (EU)" very purposely, so I was technically (and sadly) correct.
 


There's still something to be said for the Timex's keyboard... Yeah, it was undersized and completely devoid of "tactile feedback", but it did actually work and, considering how inexpensive that thing must have been to produce, that's pretty amazing! But the more amazing thing, to my way of thinking, was how well it was integrated with the built-in BASIC interpreter that knew pretty reliably when to expect a keyword vs when to expect text, etc...

The Timex/Sinclair memory pack's mechanical extension seriously restricted my use of it as i constantly feared loosing time-consuming work, which simply felt too anxiogenic once i experienced a few crashes, while this wasn't a truly structured programming language. For that i much preferred the confidence of Hewlett-Packard's HP-48, especially when i got my hands on its books, not long after the initial purchase, early in the '90s.

I remeber local user groups. They had to be local because who could afford long distance charges for your 300 baud modem?

America On Line, GEnie and similar would have implied recurrent spending hardly justifyable at the time, even worse for a hobby! Lucky me, our local BBSes happened to be financially supported by generous donators and hence also provided access to FidoNet, etc. In Grand-Mère/Qc (which was a local call) we even got our own country-wide french-speaking alternative near the end:
CanadaMédia .JPG
Canada-Média, Universel, Michel Boulanger​

Possibly also available beyond the ocean thanks to the internet, eventually - which finally killed it...
 
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Phone phreak? ;)

Never load more than $20 worth of tones (in short order) or they'll kill the line because they think it's faulty. You can tone more currency at any time, but you never want to deposit more than $20 worth. They'll send a tech to check into it and they'll cut your lines - unless you hide them well.

Of course, none of that information would be valid today.

The GI Bill was a joke compared to today and I didn't have a ton of financial assistance. I suppose those are just excuses.
 
The Timex/Sinclair memory pack's mechanical extension seriously restricted my use of it as i constantly feared loosing time-consuming work, which simply felt too anxiogenic once i experienced a few crashes, while this wasn't a truly structured programming language. For that i much preferred the confidence of Hewlett-Packard's HP-48, especially when i got my hands on its books, not long after the initial purchase, early in the '90s.
I recall worrying about the memory pack coming loose but never had it actually happen. My main problem with the memory pack was that the video quality went all to crap when the memory pack was plugged in - you could still read the screen but it was harder. As a result, I usually didn't use the extra RAM. I also had the little thermal printer that plugged into the same port and I don't remember it affecting the video quality. I don't know what I paid for the printer but it must have been -dirt- cheap or I wouldn't have bought it.

"anxiogenic": Did you just invent that? If so, good work!
 
Here are a couple things that show my age... lets all jump in...

Do you remember...View attachment 22309

or View attachment 22310
I can remember the joy of having multiple tiers of IBM 3290 terminals. Four screens per monitor. Man when something would go wrong in the data center the first thing to do was go get a cup of coffee and wait for all of those screens to quit rolling. PC's were a novelty unless there was an irmalan card in it so you could bring up a mainframe session. I'mmm too old
 
Monochrome cathode ray tubes felt like glorious luxury after dealing with a TTY, the type with real fanfold dot matrix paper in days when CR/LF actually meant something... Oh and the music of it late in the evening! Yet even Google forgot about such nostalgia unless it's provided sufficiently precise magic words, no blame from me. Which somehow is a reminder of Space 1999 relying on paper rolls, that made a great return decades later with cashless pizza delivery.
 
Monochrome cathode ray tubes felt like glorious luxury after dealing with a TTY, the type with real fanfold dot matrix paper in days when CR/LF actually meant something... Oh and the music of it late in the evening! Yet even Google forgot about such nostalgia unless it's provided sufficiently precise magic words, no blame from me. Which somehow is a reminder of Space 1999 relying on paper rolls, that made a great return decades later with cashless pizza delivery.
Yeah, I remember in my college days they would have us log in on a printer that ran at 1200 baud so we could print our computer programming homework and run it right there on the printer. That must have used a ton of paper. Imagine all of those students each using about a dozen of those huge pages. Talk about noisy.

At least someone turned down that awful beep that happened every time someone logged in.

Signed,

Matthew Campbell
 
It's cool that so many of you have memories of a Commodore 64 and previous siblings... and that's what I got lately

I'm inserting them as thumbnails to avoid breaking your browser, but I am having lots of fun

View attachment 22325View attachment 22323View attachment 22324View attachment 22322View attachment 22326


Yeah i was a huge C64 geek back then ,, right after my first computer class on a TI-99/4A - at the boys/girls club in town. I was in 4th grade and paired up with a girl in 3rd grade that i knew from my own school. We wrote in BASIC - a two-player tic-tac-toe. It was pages and pages of it-thens but it all worked .. we were so proud of it .
 


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