How long have you been a member?

w1z4rd

w1z4rd

Valued Senior Member
Otherwise known as the "Im getting old" thread.

I thought I would see when I joined, in my mind I was, "Im sure Ive been here for close to a decade". Nope. I was wrong. Just over two decades.

Now I see names here still posting from when I first started so I was wondering how long some of you have been a member for?

Also, kudos for keeping the forum going that long. Its one of my oldest surviving online identities.
 
w1z4rd said:
Otherwise known as the "Im getting old" thread.

I thought I would see when I joined, in my mind I was, "Im sure Ive been here for close to a decade". Nope. I was wrong. Just over two decades.

Now I see names here still posting from when I first started so I was wondering how long some of you have been a member for?

Also, kudos for keeping the forum going that long. Its one of my oldest surviving online identities.
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Three years.
Regular posts and member participation make the site. I have learnt a lot in the short time (relatively speaking) I have been here.
 
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2.5 years here.

First modem dialup: 1973, Nebraska State Capitol mainframe, ran BASIC, and FORTRAN programs, chatted with other regional high schools through some primitive network.

Accessed Usenet newsgroups in 1984.

Designed primitive expert system (pseudo-AI user interface) at university: 1987

Couple years setting up Prodigy, CompuServe and LEXUS/NEXUS for Oregon library system, late 80s.

One half-year building criminal information database and front end, Oregon Department of Justice, 1989.

Various private (unaffiliated with institutions) science forum years: 2009-2026

Various film forum years: 2000-2019

NYT News/Science Forums: 1999-2004 (or whenever they took them down)

RSS feeds: 5 years

Web admin: 3-4 years

Total online years: 53. (ok, some gaps here and there)
 
The first "proper", programmable, computer I ever used was a Sharp computer/calculator that had a dot-matrix LCD screen that had room for one line of text with about 30 characters or so (although it could also be programmed to address each pixel on the display individually, allowing for very limited graphics). Total RAM would have a been a few kilobytes. This was also my introduction to programming (in BASIC).

Around the same time, I got my first games console: an Atari 2600. Prior to that, I played some early Pong-like games on friends' primitive consoles.

The first PC I owned was an Atari 800, purchased second-hand in the early 1980s. What was great is that it also came with a whole bunch of manuals and books on programming, in BASIC and Assembly. I typed in a lot of listings for various bits of software (mostly games) from magazines, and also did a lot of programming myself. I was in a club (a Users group) for a few years. The Atari 800 had a whopping 64KB of RAM, although only 48KB was usable for programs. I wrote several programs that exceeded the limits of the available memory. Initially, the only storage medium I had for the Atari was a cassette "drive" that used ordinary audio cassettes as the storage medium. Later on, I picked up a second-hand floppy drive, which was my first exposure to disk media.

Early 1990s, got my first IBM PC which, frankly, was a step down in a lot of ways from the Atari. But they got better once the "clones" started to dominate the market. 5 1/2 inch floppies were gradually replaced with 3 inch "floppies". At some point, I gained a hard drive. Total RAM on the early IBMs was about 640 KB, IIRC. Later came CD drives, then DVD drives, then USB memory sticks.

I didn't do very much online in the days of dial-in connections using regular (analogue) landlines, but I remember playing around with 300 baud acoustic modems, later upgraded to the astonishing speed of 1200 baud (bps).

I first saw a GUI at university, which purchased some early Macintoshes to supplement the existing (aging) mainframes (which had classic green-screen monochrome terminals). Learned how to program properly at university.

First used a web browser (Mosaic, then Netscape) in 1995.

Discovered sciforums in 2001 and joined as a member. This place - like many internet sites - was the Wild West back then.
 
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w1z4rd said:
Otherwise known as the "Im getting old" thread.

I thought I would see when I joined, in my mind I was, "Im sure Ive been here for close to a decade". Nope. I was wrong. Just over two decades.

Now I see names here still posting from when I first started so I was wondering how long some of you have been a member for?

Also, kudos for keeping the forum going that long. Its one of my oldest surviving online identities.
Click to expand...
 
I have been a VALUED member for 18 years.!!!

I started out on a dial-up Webtv a few years before I came here.!!!

An not to brag... but back then I learned some HMTL an wrote some code.!!!

I had a very successful forum for a couple of years until Webtv shut down.!!!

I have learned so much stuff here that I forgot most of it.!!!
 
13 years.
Regarding computer history, punch cards in college, mini-computer used in grad school, programmable financial calculators (HP and TI). First owned "computer" Timex/Sinclair membrane computer, Commodore 64, Gateway Win 3.1 machine.

At work the first computers were Mac dummy terminals to a mainframe with a floppy drive but no hard drive so you load to load the program from floppies each time and then load your files. In the early days, at one job, international communication was via telex, first punch the tape and then run it back though to send.

Later at another job we had a cell phone the size of a brick for international calls after hours.
 
My first computer was a Commodore CBM black-and-green monitor that my father brought home from school for the summer for my brother and I (we shared a room with bunk beds).
1771030492789.png

It did not come with a hard drive. We left it on the entire summer so it wouldn't lose our work.

But we had to divvy up the room in the BASIC system. My brother got lines 1000 to 20000 and I got lines 30,000 to 50,000. Wehn I esnt to run my program, I had to write 10 GO TO 30000.

The cursor flashed all night, so bright that it lit up the room: bright, dark, bright dark, every second.
Eventually we learned to set the first character to 1771030355642.png so that its inverse was the same brightness as it blinked.
 
First computer I used in a high school programing class. Coincidentally, given what today is, it was nicknamed "Valentine" since the school got it on Valentine's day. It was an HP9830A
HP9830A-HP9866.png
 
James R said:
First used a web browser (Mosaic,
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1771090036152.png

First time I used a computer was in school (i was moved to a specialized class), they were ZX spectrums. The tape loaded ones. Only application I remember was making this tortoise walk in a straight line (and it leaves a line behind it), then you would program in a new set of co-ordinates and it would make a line to that point. We had to try draw pictures and shapes with it.

First home pc, a "BMI" 8086 with 640KB ram. First Internet computer I think had a 14400 modem and we used Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11 to dial out.
 
My first computer was a Smith Corona PWP 365 ds

I didn't type good back in 1990 an it really helped out... especially typin out Forms W-2.!!!

m37878944170_1.jpg
 
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