Last Generation With No Internet

Who remembers making words out of the numbers on the calculators - you typed the number then turned it upside down.

jackiemac said:

Who remembers making words out of the numbers on the calculators - you typed the number then turned it upside down.

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Me

jackiemac said:

Who remembers making words out of the numbers on the calculators - you typed the number then turned it upside down.

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Or went through a series of calculations that ended in a word.

Isaac-1 said:

Do you mean video game like space wars or pong, or do you mean handheld (ish) like Simon?

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Giving this one to Isaac.

Simon was the first game to have a computer chip.

I played it once. My cousin had Simon we played with it for a bit and then went outside and I think I never played it since that one time.

Conquest2011 said:

I mean the first game ever.

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Milton Bradley's Simon.
Retailed at $29.95.
My family was in the toy business.
We sold hundreds of 'em in our small-town shop. When we'd get a shipment people driving by while they were being unloaded from the truck would see the Simon name on the cases. They'd immediately park, come into the store, and stand there waiting for us to open the boxes. A few would even try to grab whole cases out of our hands, but we set a limit of 1 per customer until supply caught up with demand a few months later.
The wholesalers also held them hostage. We had to buy X dollars worth of other stuff for every case of Simon that they'd to ship us.

Born in January 1950.

First real experience was when we bought a business computer for our Ophthalmology practice in the mid 1970s.

It was an IBM 5110.  It had a small built in amber screen. built in keyboard, and huge stand alone cabinets housing two 360K, 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.

Fortunately IBM shipped very good documentation manuals with all their computers.  These came with a comprehensive training manual for teaching how to program in Basic A.  I spent many hours learning how to program Basic and later Unix, Zenix, and SCU Unix because of the early experience with that first IBM computer.

An interesting fact was that the IBM 5110 was the mini computer that served as the basis for designing and developing the first PC and AT.

A few years later when I started consulting I bought a Compaq portable,that looked like a sewing machine with a keyboard built into the removable base.  An option was a 10 meg hard drive for $1,000 dollars.

We have certainly come a long way.

I went to an engineering college for a couple of years in the late 60's. All the engineering students carried a slide rule in a a leather holster on their hips. Whenever an engineering student got too obnoxious, I tell him the definition of an engineer was a guy who'd pull out a slide rule to multiply 12 times 12 and get 143.  ;D

At that time, mocking a slide rule was a very bad thing to do at an engineering college.

IBTripping said:

I went to an engineering college for a couple of years in the late 60's. All the engineering students carried a slide rule in a a leather holster on their hips. Whenever an engineering student got too obnoxious, I tell him the definition of an engineer was a guy who'd pull out a slide rule to multiply 12 times 12 and get 143.  ;D

At that time, mocking a slide rule was a very bad thing to do at an engineering college.

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While I was earning dual EE/ME degrees, it was always a balancing act being careful not to offend either department by mentioning anything positive about the other department. Mostly, I just tried to keep my mouth shut...

I was born in 1949, we weren't allowed to use slide rules until grade 11. I remember the geeks packing briefcases full of Fortran cards at university but didn't actually see or use a computer until around 1986, I think it was an early Pentium. I loved being able to edit without the whiteout, still not an accomplished typist. ;D
I also remember my first exposure to the internet. The safety officer and I were trying to source information on some special pumps, calls to potential suppliers were not getting us what we needed. Then the light came on. We raced to our computers and found what we were looking for. And that was only 20 years ago, the five year old pc I am on is light years ahead and still outdated.

This is a great question!  I believe we have already reached this plateau.  Being that the world today is so deeply based on internet access for even the smallest need, unless you just live in the backwoods somewhere disconnected from the world entirely and totally self sufficient or independently wealthy and carry the money around in a shoebox, the need for internet is a must have.

I am not talking about a total net footprint with all the gadgets and features, i am talking about just the very basic conforts and existance in the average environment requires some kind of internet access.  We have become so used to using the internet that many times we use it and dont even realize we are using it.

There is real danger here and it is probably one of the most challenging times we have ever faced as a world.  What happens when/if someone flips the switch and everything is turned off or is taken over.  Noone knows how to do stuff manually anymore, that is a lost trade in many ways.  Noone knows how to get things done without the 0 and 1 and with every part of our utilities and basic functions being so codependant on binary, all it would take is one disaster and everything would just stop! 

Think about other societies of the past which have relied so heavily on one particular thing.  Regardless if it is a annual herd movement, a river, traffic, food source, climate, or other need that sustains them.  If that need disappears, changes or is challenges in any way, the breakdown comes from within and its like a domino effect.

I think we are certainly in for some challenging times as a world in managing that dependency.

Think about the great potato famine, even though it was about 170 years ago it speaks volumns.  People were so dependent on potatoes that when the crop was taken away through disease it totally devistated society.  Think of the internet as our current potato.

Oldgator73 said:

I was born in 1951. The first computer I used was in 1981 in the AF. Did not use any kind of computer, that I know of, prior to that. Is my generation the last to no have grown up with computers?

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Maybe for the time being but I see the internet being done in after I have long passed.  Then there will not be anybody with a brain who can fix it.
But as for me being born in 1939 my first exposure was in 1958 or so when in college I took a data processing class to learn about these new fangled computer things.  But it turned out all we learned was to to do key punch on cards that were fed into a computer.  If it wasn't fed in with a card, it didn't know anything.  Later in 1962 in the Air Force I was exposed to the supply folks Univac (I think that is what it was called) which sat in it's own room with about 20 racks and thousands of vacuum tubes and two or three technicians working full time to keep it running.

My first duty station in the AF was Barksdale AFB and I worked in the hospital. We had to send reports to the command each month. These reports were generated using key punch cards. The machine was located at Hospital Supply. One of my jobs was to punch the cards with the correct numbers. Big problem, as I remember it some 44 years ago, if I hit the wrong key I would have to get a new card and start over. Pretty frustrating when I would get right to the end and screw up and have to over with a new card.  I guess I didn?t think of that as a computer.

I strongly suspect that we are underestimating how early we took advantage of calculating machines. For example, I taught the Hawk Missile System in the early 60's. That system used magnetic amplifiers to calculate the parallax angle between a dedicated range radar and the main acquisition radar and subsequently the precise location of the target (ground range and height). The design was several years old at that time.

Ernie

IBM punch cards - LOL.  I have a few boxes left from when they switched from those to terminal access to the mainframe at the university where I worked.  Make excellent note pads. 8)

phil-t said:

IBM punch cards - LOL.  I have a few boxes left from when they switched from those to terminal access to the mainframe at the university where I worked.  Make excellent note pads. 8)

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Also, notorious for "hanging chads."  ;D  Of course, mainframe users always made sure there weren't any. The mistake was trying to use punch cards for voting by the general public.

phil-t said:

IBM punch cards - LOL.  I have a few boxes left from when they switched from those to terminal access to the mainframe at the university where I worked.  Make excellent note pads. 8)

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That is an obscene photo. Those things should be burned immediately.

Bill N said:

That is an obscene photo. Those things should be burned immediately.

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;D ;D Maybe you could sell them on ebay ;D ;D

phil-t said:

IBM punch cards - LOL.  I have a few boxes left from when they switched from those to terminal access to the mainframe at the university where I worked.  Make excellent note pads. 8)

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I remember those things from when I was in elementary school back in the late 1970's, used punch cards were always being given out to students for use as scratch paper, craft projects, etc.    I suspect the local school system had a excess of used recyclable punch cards from their computer system, but that is just a guess.      This was in an region where recycling is still not all that popular today.

I used to repair the machines those cards were processed in. Good times those. Cape Canaveral and the Saturn 5 ,et al, rockets. TGIF on Cocoa Beach strip. Good times.