A Digital Journey

In the early months of 1977, I was tasked to work on computers. Now, in 1977, there were no personal computers, no desktop machines, definitely no laptops. No, these were massive semi-autonomous processing systems networked with a central processing unit designed to connect a calling phone to a called phone. They were fairly innovative in that the entire system operated in a digital format. (No, that's not me and we didn't wear ties)

I was also tasked to work with , and on, a mini-computer. A DEC PDP-11. This was about as small a computer as they were making in those days. It had a couple of "washtub" hard drive units which maybe stored 20 or 40 megabytes each.

It wasn't until 1981 that I bought my first small computer. An Osborne1 "portable" computer. No hard drive, two floppy drives, a 5" monochrome screen and 64 kilobytes of memory. Wow! State of the art. And then, a few months later, I got my first modem and discovered Electronic Bulletin Board Systems. There was no internet, no DSLs, no cable modems. Just telephone lines and modems that attained the magnificent speed of 1200 bps. Mine only went a 4th of that.

But it opened up a whole new world. The BBSes, as they came to be called, were very localized. You dialed them up and you basically saw text scroll across the screen. It was magic. There were no graphics, no widgets, no online games. But it was magic. You could find programs for your computer. You could leave messages, ask questions of other computer and modem users and get answers.

Along the way I started expanding and building my own computers. Faster ones, more powerful ones, more capacity. I pieced together several from spare parts and a few purchased parts. There were computer shows and computer swap meets where you could buy and trade parts. Computers are surprisingly simple.

As time went on, I got a faster modem, I got a more powerful computer and another and another. The BBSes found ways to link their message forums by transferring the data between them. I started my own BBS in 1989 on January 1st. It ran until 1996 when the internet started making the BBS an anachronism.

For a few years, I got into the forums. Some political flame wars, some technical assistance (mostly on modems), but I got tired of it. Not tired of computers, mind you, I still played with them. And I still used the internet for gathering information and for shopping, mostly for computer parts. I just lost the urge to interact with people on it.

Still, I liked the internet and I like to write so I guess it was inevitable I ended up here as a blogger. So many things have changed over the years; computers are 100 times more powerful, they can store thousands of times more data, and they have all sorts of fancy gadgets and options now. Still, the most fun, the most enjoyable feature, is the ability to connect to other people.