It was 1989 and I was driving an Intel 80286, what we called a “PC AT,” running DOS. I had the media for a unix installation drifting around in the piles on my desk, but never quite got around to installing it. Just as well. All I needed was the word processor, the spread sheet, and the asynchronous communications. The PC had, I believe, a 1200bps asynch modem card, and I had a 2400bps synchronous modem on the book shelves. Then we moved.
Part of the theory associated with the move was that DARPANET was coming down, great private online resources like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were available, and there was a hint of something coming next out of CERN. Location was about to be vanquished. people would no longer have jobs, but they would have work, and they could do it from anywhere. So we left Berkeley for a little farm outside of Madison, and put the vision on hold while we found work with others, at jobs, at locations not our own, and moved from the PC AT at 1200bps to Pentium processors running 56kbps asynch by the time that browser based communications started to drive the value out of CompuServe and the like.
I still think the Internet thing will take off some day.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
William "Papa" Meloney 09.28.07 at 4:53
It is just a fad Frank, it will never catch on.
Winston 09.28.07 at 5:18
Ah, yes… I think it was back in ‘85 when I joined Compuserve. It was still a pup then, but I quickly fell in love with it through my trusty GENUINE HAYES full-length 1200 baud modem card. That was in a strange box made by Olivetti and marketed as the AT&T 6300. Had a 8086 processor, not an 8088, running at a whopping 12 MHz. The guy that sold it to me convinced me to upgrade the RAM from 256K to 512K (”Trust me, you’re gonna need it with some of the new software coming out.”) and add a 20 MB hard drive in lieu of the second 5-1/4″ floppy drive. DOS 2.21 made it hum. Those were the days… And now it all just makes me an old phart…
Jon Husband 09.28.07 at 9:15
When it does, no doubt you’ll get a Mac ?
Brian Hayes 09.28.07 at 5:26
UC Berkeley has 100s of 1000s of current and former employees which cost a fortune each year in mandated communication - pension summaries and the like; tons and tons of mail. For future money saving, I was forming an encrypted dial-up system for UC to provide all employees with 3-1/2″ disks similar to the ubiquitous AOL disks. And suddenly, I heard rumors about the Internet. “What’s that?”, I asked. I still hear the replies, “It’s some sort of new thing that will replace dial-up.”