VT100

[VT100]

In case anyone was wondering, a VT100 was an ancient computer terminal from back when I was a kid. They looked like this:

When I was in college, we had them all over campus. We used to construct primitive animation with them. Here is a really cool example I ran into recently

That is the sort of thing I misspent my youth on. I learned the command codes for that beast. ]2J would clear the screen. That sort of stuff. We would build these elaborate scripts to display these animations, and email them to each other. They were forwarded back and forth for years. There were coffee cups being filled, snow falling, cannons firing, all sorts of things. All within the limitations of this terminal, which were severe to say the least.

OK, we used them for word processing, programming, and other things too. But I don't remember much about that. Just thr fun we had :-)

[Deb S]

VT, computer god indeed! My one 2009 resolution is to become savvy. A bit more savvy. Learn a couple things. Learn something. Resolutions. We'll see. How exciting - to see that kid in Tienemen Sq.! I know, the impatience. Us and speed. Remember that fairy tale about the fisherman's wife? (don't let me get sidetracked with a feminist rant here - focus) How she first made her husband ask for a cottage, a house, a castle, a queenship, then godheit? That's us. When my computer is slow (ha), I'm "Ok, what is the STORY!?" hahaha

[serenity]

ok being positive about comp sickness it will mean the comp gets upgrated to either 80 or 120 gig hardrive and i may see if he has some second had ram and up it to 1 gig, so will be able do do more stuff. it is amazing how thing becoem outdated so fast and browsers and new programs like adobe flash won't work.

thanks for all you well wishes for eve, that's her name, her pervious owner named her. i'm sure she's just as unhappy about missing staying in touch as i am. it's true i would come home a log in and do comp stuff, or i'd watch tv and go to my comp and check soemthing out they were talking about. it's so become an extension of our brains.

i'm amazed VT that you wrote a program to compress pics, wow. i didn't realize you were a computer god, although i guess i should have. me i'm lucky i know how to turn it on.\

well i hope to bring it into the shop next week so hopefully i'll be back in the 'stream' of the web again soon *crosses fingers*

[VT100]

Posting pictures of Senpa lead me to thinking about the old days. My first post-college job was working with images. At about 1/4 megapixels. On a system that would cost something like $5-10k. That included a computer, video camera, special analog monitor, special video card, and software we wrote. About as portable as a couple of cinder-blocks. Jpg was not available, but we did try to compress images using a similar technique. It took something like 30 minutes to compress one image. So we wrote our own method, which worked in a couple of seconds, and was not too far off, in terms of filesize or image quality. So the user needed to take a picture, develop the film, and we could scan it, compress the file, send it via modem, and it could be seen thousands of miles away by someone with the same setup. I saw pictures of the guy in front of a tank in Tienemen square before they were published using this set up. An electric moment. Now that technology, actually much better, is in a cheap cell-phone. I'm spinning 45 RPM in an IPod world, but I still complain it takes so long to boot up this laptop :-)

[naturegeek]

I think mine was maxed out at 2 MB of RAM. And had a 40 MB hard drive. MEGAbyte... now my 100 GIGAbyte laptop is too small... but that's partly because my word processing program will no longer fit on one small floppy (with all of the files and extra space)!

[VT100]

I had a mac plus. A full meg of ram! could be upgraded to 4. oh my goodness the old days.

[naturegeek]

It's ironic that I am one of the older nerds, yet most of you started using computers before me... I was living in the mountains, though, and didn't have them. I think the first time I used a computer was the Apple - uh, the first one that looked sort of like some of these, and it was in the mid-80's. It was at Santa Barbara City College when I started going there, and they had a computer lab - and I was in love. I knew I would never TYPE again!! People who grew up with word processors can never know just how amazing that is. Or how much I hated typing. Ugh. White-Out. I got a Mac Classic in the late 80's and had WordPerfect 1.0 on a floppy (the small one) and ALL my files on the same disk. I remember at the same time (early to mid-80's) my nieces and nephews had a Commodore 64 - it was fun playing Zork.

Until you encountered a Grue.

[Deb S]

Oh honey! We canNOT survive now without the computer. I just got in the door and it's the first thing that gets switched on. I hope it gets fixed soon. :-(

[VT100]

good luck S with the computer! They really do become part of our lives, don't they? especially now that they can actually do some thing more than move a little dot around on the screen :-)

[Evangeline]

Poor Seren! My computer is my bay-bee. I'd be lost too. :(

Am also loving Deb's stream of consciousness posts. :) And ditto for the moving to NS...probably Digby, Annapolis Royal or thereabouts. I'd feast on fat scallops every night and spend my days wandering orchards and rocky coves. *sigh*

[serenity]

it's ironic this being a a computer thread when my comp is all sick and not working. and trying to have conversations here at a public computer is just not the same at all...no privacy to think. i really am so beyond lost byt the loss of my comp and freaked by the money, that i don't have, that i am spending to fix it, argh...

i feel lost without my nerdfighteria :S both chatroom and gerd. and evenr just getting to pop up and google something..all gone. *rails at universe*

mel cool comp nostalgia, D for sure very middle earth the names :)

wish me luck with comp issues...