In the mid 1980's Dad brought home a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer just like my neighbor Tracey and her dad Ed had. Running at 3.0Mhz the system ran an early version of BASIC and offered me Tombstone City and Parsec. More importantly, it offered a glimpse into programming. I still remember my first code:
10 PRINT "JASON IS COOL"Jealous aren't you? :) Somewhere between 1988 and 1990 the TI was sold and replaced with an IBM XT. The XT ran MS-DOS at 4.77Mhz, had a 10MB hard drive, a 360KB 5.25" floppy drive, and the upgrade 640KB of memory and sported a 12" green monochrome monitor. It was this XT machine that propelled my knowledge of computers and what they could be capable of doing (so little did I know). Dad claims to have taught me everything I know about computers -- a point on which we'll have to agree to disagree -- though I do certainly concede that he undoubtedly aided in providing the hardware that sparked my career path. This XT allowed me to run QBASIC which refined some rudimentary programming skills of the day into more advanced programs that drew circles on the screen and filled in boxes that made a face. It also allowed for Print Shop to run and put the 9-pin dot matrix Okidata printer through its paces.
20 GOTO 10
RUN
Moving on the XT left the house, replaced by an AT computer -- a 286 computer running at 12Mhz and sporting an unheard of 1MB of RAM. It was with this computer that I entered the age of digital communications with the necessary peripheral of the day, a modem. Running at 300 baud (300 bits/sec, or 37.5 Bytes/sec) this modem linked me to the first BBS I ever dialed, where the SysOp was my cousin Daryl. The BBS was called Abacus. You could dial in, share files and send messages to be read later by other users that dialed in. Too cool. This was the first in a long line of BBSes that I frequented; others being Trading Post and Troll's Cave. I also participated in FidoNet -- an early form of store-and-forward email exchange between BBSes. Yes, you could actually "message" or "email" a user on a BBS that you never called directly -- even across the U.S.! The emails were, in effect, routed from hub to hub until reached at the destination. Today, SMTP is the common mode of transport for emails (and in much less time).
The 286 was sold to Chip Boles' parents (can't believe I remember that) and replaced by a 386 running at 16Mhz. We also ditched that 300 baud modem for a blazing 2400 baud version. Then came a 486 DX @ 25Mhz and 2MB of RAM (and a 14.4K modem! woot!), followed by the fantasic Pentium powered machine screaming at 120Mhz with 16MB of RAM and -- yes -- a hard drive that topped 1GB (1.2 to be exact) of fathomless storage possibility. The 28.8K baud modem provided an excellent means to speedily chat online for hours and it was around this time that multi-line BBSes were all the rage and I became a frequenter of Sounds of Silence BBS which had 8-12 lines initially and I believe later scaled to 32+ lines. I met a few good friends on SoS -- a couple which I now see on Facebook from time to time. It was also around this time that I learned the awesomeness of Winsock 1.1 and Netscape to get on this thing called the Internet and it's fancy web pages.
Many years and many systems and modems (56K wha?) later I entered the broadband age near 1999 when I went to WKU for undergrad. At the time WKU students, faculty and staff shared a 10Mb/s connection to the Internet which was already showing signs of overburdened use. Today I have an 8Mb (with 20Mb burst) connection to my house. At work the connection tops 1Gb/s and can be easily put through it's paces by the students, faculty and staff.
Today, an 8GB USB key can be purchased for under $20 and a 1TB external hard drive for under $100. A box of 10 3.5" DS/HD floppies used to run over $12 alone (that's why you bought the cheaper 720K version and drilled a second hole to make them 1.44MB disks.) I write this blog post on a Macbook Pro running a dual core 3.06Ghz processor with 4GB of memory and a 256GB solid state hard drive (SSD). It's completely wireless to my broadband connection where, in less than a second, this post will be on Blogger, Facebook and Twitter -- accessible to hundreds of millions of users. All this to say that I wonder what Ethan will grow up using. He's 17 weeks old today and has his own website and blog to document his early life for out of town family and friends. Whatever it is, I will have taught him everything he knows. :)
