Remembering the old times.
My dear friend Dan Berte emailed me in the morning with some memories of vintage technologies and gadgets.
A couple of things we both missed:
- Ericsson cell phones which we used to connect to a slow Internet (9600 bps). It was only Ericsson back then, no Sony 
- Grayscale LCD powered cell phones and PDA’s we used for email. (there wasn’t any spam back then. You couldn’t include links, html or images in an email)
- Infrared connections (and the 10 minutes spent on figuring out why it doesn’t work, just find to out the coffee cup was in it’s way)
I just remembered a couple of things I did (over) 10 years ago:
- I coded a piece of software in assembler language to record and compress 7 seconds of music and play it back. We didn’t have any iPods back then and being able to use a delta algorithm to compress the music sounded pretty good. The code was written on a small computer which had a Z80 CPU and about 30Kb of memory to store data.
- I also coded a poker game under CP/M. The computer was only able to display texts, so I used some nice tweaks to draw the cards with *’s and other funky characters. It was the first game I have developed, about 4-5 years before I wrote my first PC hacker game. I didn’t know what marketing and selling games was back then, but all I know is that the 2 computer running CP/M back then, were mainly used to play my Poker game. It was an awesome feeling.
Those were the days when technology was used at it’s best. It was amazing what people could accomplish with tiny amounts of memory, slow CPU’s and very slow Internet connections.
I first started browsing the Internet using Lynx. I used to read my emails with Pine. Using telnet to connect to the college servers for some Internet access was the only way to go.
This things are pretty much like a Zippo lighter. They never get old fashioned
One of my many projects that still lie around on my desk, is to create a small virtual Internet, and allow people to connect to it through telnet or dial-up.
Bring back some of those old days and vintage technologies we so much miss.
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