While waiting for the announcement...

It has been pointed out to me several times that my name is about to get to the top of the list for a spot on a TV reality show - you know, the one where the person is living under piles of junk that he just can't get rid of. So, I decided to clear the shelves in my hobby shack. Possibly I don't need to store all that many 286 motherboards and XT power supplies.

As the piles of stuff was being carted out, I wondered just how many readers of this forum would recognise some of it. So, while waiting for my new MacBook AIR to be announced tomorrow (or possibly the next day, or next week or sometime in the fall) I have made a check list to allow a person to determine if they were really around at the beginning.

How many can you answer? (Without Googling, of course.) These aren't trick questions. All of the topics would be discussed in length at the computer meetings of the 1970's.



1. What is significant about the January 1975 Popular Electronics?

2. What was Bill Gate's first product? (I have the box, but so far can't find the contents.)

3. What is significant about the numbers 64k and 128k?

4. What was the first hobby OS? (Actually, not a real OS, just a command interpreter. Hint - it cost several hundred 1970's dollars - thousands in today's money.)

5. S-100 meant what?

6. An Acoustic Coupler allowed what?

7. One gig of Ram cost about what in 1975? (Actually, a trick question. There wasn't that much memory in the world at the time.)

8. 300 BAUD meant...?

9. If you had an 8080 you were running a what?

10. If it was a 6502 you owned a...?

11. The rich kid on the block owned a ________ for a printer.

12. What was the significance of a Bulletin Board?

13. Which was first available? Apple 1, Trash-80, IMSAI, Pet


Now, you were a guru at the time if the following makes sense.

13. 323 000 333 001 303 000 000

14. 74LS167

15. Kilobaud

16. JNZ, LDA and INX

17. ASR-33

18. Bugbook

19. James Company

I can only answer or guess at a few - without the help of Google - but I'm sure others will do much better.

3. Types of Commodores?

6. A device you slapped your telephone handset into to couple modem tones to your computer

8. 300 Baud - 300 bps (as opposed to today where typically there are many more bits per symbol) (I'm sure you're looking for a different answer but it's all I had - and I'm bored at work)

12. Bulletin boards were the early online social networks. Also reminds me of today's IRC.

That's all I can guess at without cheating. I'm off to google a couple that are familiar but I don't want to hazard a guess at - I'll let the real old timers do that.

BrianLachoreVPI said:

I can only answer or guess at a few - without the help of Google - but I'm sure others will do much better.

3. Types of Commodores?

6. A device you slapped your telephone handset into to couple modem tones to your computer

8. 300 Baud - 300 bps (as opposed to today where typically there are many more bits per symbol) (I'm sure you're looking for a different answer but it's all I had - and I'm bored at work)

12. Bulletin boards were the early online social networks. Also reminds me of today's IRC.

That's all I can guess at without cheating. I'm off to google a couple that are familiar but I don't want to hazard a guess at - I'll let the real old timers do that.

Click to expand...

Right on. You got three out of four. Your #3 is wrong. As to # 8, 300 baud (or about 300 bps) was the max speed a hobbyist could get on a phone line until the early 1980's. I remember the first 1200 baud modem - it cost a fortune and we couldn't believe the speed. If you had told us that someday the country would be complaining about a mere 4 megabit download rate, we would have laughed in your face at the asininity of that statement.

#3 is the only one I think I know. The Macintosh 64k and 128k were the first Macintoshes right?

*crosses finger* >.<

Printerman said:

#3 is the only one I think I know. The Macintosh 64k and 128k were the first Macintoshes right?

*crosses finger* >.<

Click to expand...

Nope. 64k was the maximum amount of memory that the processors in the early hobby computers (Apple 1, Altair, Imsai, Sol, Pet, Commodore, etc) could address. It was about a few seconds of highly compressed MP3 music or a short E-Book, not that either existed back then.

128k was the maximum amount of disk storage available at the time (to a hobbyist). On a single sided, eight inch IBM floppy disk. My first one in about 1979 was from Thinker Toys and cost about $1000 (in today's money that would be what? Four thousand bucks maybe? For 128k - not meg and certainly not gig - of removable storage.)

I recall dialing into a couple of local BBS systems back in the mid 80s. However, all the "exciting" ones were out of state, long distance calls, and we didn't know enough about reversing charges or phreaking... so we settled on local numbers, much less "exciting." By that time we had a 1200bps modem, Apple IIe, green display and 2 floppy drives. I remember our first Mac - an SE, which we opened with one of those long T15 drivers, replaced the video card, which boosted the processor from the 68000 Motorola to the 68030 and added 16-bit addressing. The video card drove a Mobius 20" grayscale display - the largest display I'd ever seen up to that point. We repeated the process a few years later when I bought an SE/30 and a Radius Pivot display. The video card replacement gave me 256 colors on the Pivot, and the monitor itself had live aspect change, so that you could, as the name implied, pivot the monitor and view it portrait or landscape.