The Wonder Computer of the 1980's!

Garg, I remember using BBs services.  I thought my 300 baud modem was the cat’s azz!

BJCard, point to point connections on the BBS were way way before the internet and TCP/IP protocols were used.  You could used packet forwarding services using a BBS system but it did not use TCP/IP so was not interent.  Internet and TCP/IP are pretty much one and the same and did not hit mainstream until late 80s.  I mean the first web browser did not exist in the early 90s and the WWW standard is about circa 1990 ish.

I can remember my dad bringing home a PDP-8 from Inco to program.  32K of non-volatile magnetic core memory and that only cost the plant $50, 000.  Not for the computer but for the memory cabinet!

@MrMalachiCrunch:

Garg, I remember using BBs services.  I thought my 300 baud modem was the cat’s azz!

BJCard, point to point connections on the BBS were way way before the internet and TCP/IP protocols were used.  You could used packet forwarding services using a BBS system but it did not use TCP/IP so was not interent.  Internet and TCP/IP are pretty much one and the same and did not hit mainstream until late 80s.  I mean the first web browser did not exist in the early 90s and the WWW standard is about circa 1990 ish.

I can remember my dad bringing home a PDP-8 from Inco to program.  32K of non-volatile magnetic core memory and that only cost the plant $50, 000.  Not for the computer but for the memory cabinet!

I get ya- I remember using AOL in the early 90’s and we couldn’t get on the World Wide Web yet- just on AOL, which had chat rooms and BBS’s.  I had a 14400 baud modem.  BLAZING speed!

14.4 Baud AOL…. total crap.

@Imperious:

14.4 Baud AOL…. total crap.

Fact.  No disagreement here.

Yea, I remember those days too.  The best game out there was a text based Star Trek game called Space Wars because of possible copyright infringement.  It took about one minute to make a single move or fire a torpeedo.  If you warped into a sector with more than two Klingon ships, you’d better use phasers and knock them out in a single salvo or you may not get a second chance.

When I went off to collage I got my first taste of computer-to-computer stuff with a 1200 Baud modem connection on a teletype machine.

A few years later I bought my first PC with a 386SX processor (16MHz), 1 Meg of RAM and a 56k baud modem.  I thought I was in heaven compared to the 2MHz machines I was running a year earlier.  I remember that machine cost me over $1000, & I wouldn’t need to spend more than that now for a contemporary machine.  Heck, I wonder how powerful my cell phone is?

Is that the one where E is Enterprise and K for Klingon?… on a grid?

I remember you had to rearm and refuel at the starbase.

and every two turns or so another 10 Klingon ships came into play, lol. Great game, with all those long and short range sensor scans, but I think I never won :-)

I think I played Ancient Art of War more. And Nethack, now that was, and still is, great.

@Gargantua:

Do you guys remember text based gaming? Back in the BBS (Bulletin Board System) days? Pre-internet?

Here’s a Classic:

Hunt the Wompus!

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2006/08/hunt_the_wumpus.php

@dinosaur:

Yea, I remember those days too.  The best game out there was a text based Star Trek game called Space Wars because of possible copyright infringement.  It took about one minute to make a single move or fire a torpeedo.  If you warped into a sector with more than two Klingon ships, you’d better use phasers and knock them out in a single salvo or you may not get a second chance.

We had that game on our high school PDP-8 computer.  The key was to do a scan of the entire universe so you knew where the klingon’s were.  We had a grid made the represented that universive size, and could determine the number of units to warp to each occupied space.  Also used photon torpedos to pick off individual klingon ships instead of phasers that used lots of power.

I believe we did clear the galaxy once, but it was a lot of work to do so!