OK, I was inspired by DarkMoon‘s post about this special period in the online evolution.
When I first got online, I was 14, it was 1984, and I was on my second computer, a Commodore 64. My first had been a VIC-20 when I was 10. The C64 had a great modularity to it, so I started with a $200 machine hooked to an old TV and using a cassette deck for its storage medium. I gradually added various $200 components, including a monitor, 270k floppy drive, 300 baud modem (that may have been $100), later a 1200 baud modem, an inkjet printer that sucked, a dotmatrix printer with the unlikely name Gorilla Banana, and so on.
The online world of 1984 was disconnected, and polite. If people were rude, they were banned by the owner of the BBS. Nobody owns the internet, so nobody gets banned anymore. We all typed our messages and waited until the following day to get a response. Constrast that with the folks on IconRequests who insist on a response within minutes sometimes.
I went to a couple BBS parties. They did not in any way resemble the LA LJ Bash, of course. One was in a park, and it was for the biggest C64 pirate warez board in L.A. county, River Conditions. RC had a massive 20 megabyte hard drive to store all those ill-gotten games. Another party I went to was at RoundTable Pizza, and was for a chat/forum BBS. I printed out several months worth of conversations to share with the table. I was sitting next to one woman with whom I’d had great conversations about life and the universe, and she was in her 40s – I was 17. We were peers.
Amazing to think of the liberating power of the online medium, when people don’t know the person on the other end of the line is supposed to be young and stupid.
current_mood: nostalgic
I don’t understand how the CIA can be allowed to have agents working for the FBI on a longterm basis. The CIA is foreign intell, and FBI is domestic. The CIA is not supposed to be allowed to operate in the US. Is that a law or just Atty General rule, though?
Anyone familiar with a supersaturated solution? It’s one in which, by all rights, the suspension should have crystallized, and it’s being held in solution by lack of a catalyst. One example can be sugar water, which will crystallize around a string to make rock candy but otherwise will stay liquid.
I think the air in Tampa is supersaturated. If someone had the right catalyst, the entire atmosphere in this town would turn into a ball of water. Geez, how do people live here?
current_mood: hot
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