Where did everyone go?

Please post! It all adds to the body of knowledge on the forum. You just mentioned a few things i wish i could have made for myself. Simple things are the basis for further explorations.

Glad to see you here.

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I haven’t been a cool kid in a while. What was your first computer? Club C64 here, from back in the QuantumLink days, lol.

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1992 for me, also BBSes at first. But then I subscribed to GEnie pretty quick. Largely because it was one of the big hubs of Apple II activity. (I’d started out with the Apple IIe in school and was using an Apple IIGS at home by that point.)

My early internet use was on GEnie, first just email but later ftp, gopher, etc when they added it. I think they eventually had lynx or some other text-based web browser near the end.

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i can’t remember the exact year i got online. probably hit my first BBS somewhere around 1988 or so. it was called the doctor’s office BBS. i still have an old tshirt buried somewhere in my dresser that says, “escaped mental patient from the doctor’s office BBS.” message boards and games. played plenty of risk and scrabble and chatted a lot. eventually moved to compuserve by the early 90s, and spent a lot of time there on the desktop publishing forums.

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@reynolds once I used to think like you. I encourage you to post whatever it is that you create with your :glowforge:, as this is a sharing community that not only cares to see the beautiful work some create, but also enjoys diversity, and the different approaches creative minds use to reach a solution, mind paths that inspire and engage the rest of us and contribute to the wealth and sense of identity of this community.

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This exactly, I post my mundane trivial things because I have learned and gotten inspiration from others mundane trivial things.

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Although I had access to mainframes in 1980, my first home computer was a Sinclair ZX81. I skipped the ZX80…

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I started with a TI99/4a in ‘81, then upgraded to the C64 a few yeards later. My wife bought a 1200 baud modem (which cost more than the C64) so she could access ODU’s mainframe for a financial modrling class. Formatting 80-character ascii pages on a 40-character TV screen was tons of fun! First online service outside of BBSs was Prodigy (owned by Sears & Roebuck). :sunglasses:

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Compuserve FTW!! :rofl:

I still remember my ID.

I wrote a couple of video games in assembler for my ZX 81. I had to type them in every time I wanted to play. Next came a spectrum, with their proprietary in a little tape drives, that was heaven. That was followed by an Amiga, and the rest, as they say, is history…

At college, my microprocesser professor used the 68000 as the foundation of the course. So I met with him privately after his introductory lecture. After a great conversation, he said – damn, you should teach this. Don’t bother showing up until the final exam. I got 100%…

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A C-64 with a huge Lisp plugin nearly as big as the computer was my introduction I got while working as a draftsman for a company that made liferafts for airplanes and started using Lisp to design things like a cylinder on a 30 degree angle when as flat fabric. I used that to get on a floating (?) shoe server that you had to download every nigjht. Somewhere in there I was on Compuserve & Aol till Aol ate everyone else, so I was just Aol. Much later to get a job in Autocad I bought and read a book and earned enough to get a windows computer.

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