Remember 1981?? A trip "Back To The Future" ....

[BadeMillsap]

I had been working for IBM for 7 years in 1981 ... this 1981 news cast is an interesting look back ...

1981 Newscast

Enjoy!

[Condoman44]

That was so cute. And to think my first modem was 300 baud.

In 1981 I was knee deep in one of the largest IMS systems ever built. At that time I was the customer but, over time I moved to the programming side.

[twistsol]

In 1981 I was in high school and we had just installed a 300 baud modem so we could run programs on the MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) mainframe. It sure beat paper punch cards.

The next year we had a "Computer Lab" with two atari 400's and an Apple ][

Where I live, it still takes two hours to download the newspaper.

[LCHIEN]

In 1981 there were "2000-3000 computer users in the Bay area" - with a population of 7.5 million in the Bay area in 2012 (wikipedia) and in 2011 75% US homes having PCs (US Census report on the internet); I'll guess for the Bay area its higher and also three years later about 90% there must be at least 6-7 million users. More if you count people who surf at work but don't have a computer at home.

"2 hours to receive the entire news paper over the phone" - with no ads or pictures BTW

exciting.

In 1981 I'd already had a homebrew PC for 4 years. I had a 300 baud acoustic modem but most services like that described were not in town... I had to call Toronto, California or other places and the long distance rates would kill you. Later I got a Hayes Smartmodem - still 300 baud. It was more exciting to call BBSes which then were one-user at a time kinds of things and only a few a local call away, many of the good ones were again, a long distance call away. I ran the Pheonix RCPM (remote CP/M) and BBS for the local CP/M computer club for several years. A 1200 baud US robotics modem was a big difference, step up from my Hayes Smartmodem 300. About 1985 I got a IBM compatible Compaq and soon afterwards an internal modem.

At least one good thing, in 1981 your computer might have booted up faster than it does now...

[cwsmith]

In 1981, I was working for Ingersoll-Rand and trying to drag that company into the future. I was an illustrator and technical writer for the air compressor division and up until that time all of our parts catalogs were done manually... writing out 80-col list, interpreted from typed bills of material. It was a very long and tedious job and the keypunch dept was a disaster.

We had bought an Atari 800 a year before for our son and at this point we had added the 300 baud accoustic-coupled modem and the floppy drive. With a friend in the main computer room, I transferred the data on our LLE compressor parts to my Atari, manipulated it with Atari File Manager and the BASIC cartridge and then sent it directly to an Itek Typesetter. What normally took several weeks and lots of keypunch correction, was done in just three days (less than 24 hours of work) with no errors!

That got me in big trouble with the Systems folks and a year later I lost my job with that division. BUT... that put me into a position where I could take my talents to the other division and also to Corning Inc, where I was the first sub-contract writer to directly write documentation into a digital format! By 1984 I was back at the Rand, in another division, where we started desktop publishing and eventually digital illustration.

CWS

[Black wallnut]

Wow! Thinking of the advances in the last 33 years has me wondering what is in store for the next 30. I think I've only been online for 15 years.

[leehljp]

I started the "online" connection after most of you - in 1986 with the Ringo club of Tokyo. (Ringo is the Japanse word for "Apple.") I did learn "binary" from my HS physics teacher in 1964. Punch cards after that. But didn't get into the personal computer until Jan '86.


One of the most daunting tasks for me was getting online with the Tokyo Unix group in '87-88. Navagating the UnixBB System was a real learning curve at the time - If you forget where you were at any moment, you were not likely to make it back to the main forum (at least that was my experience).

On occasion, I would dial a BB in the US, which was fun. IIRC, Compuserve was my first venture to international "email", but it was AOL that really got me going on a regular basis. My first high speed was cable in Jan 1997. I got a discount rate that lasted for 3 years because I went to the cable company and talked my way into being a "foreigner" testing their internet service. It worked.

[bodier62]

In 1981 my first girl was born; don't remember much else!

[Pappy]

Wow! Thinking of the advances in the last 33 years has me wondering what is in store for the next 30. I think I've only been online for 15 years.

I came into the cyber world late, too. Well after I retired in '90.

[gsmittle]

In 1981 I was in my first year of attempting to be a professional actor. In three years I had exactly two paying acting jobs. The rest of the time I sort of supported myself by building scenery.

I got my first Mac in 1986, when I went to grad school. It was a Mac Plus, running System 3.6 and booted from a floppy disk in about 75 seconds. My current MB Pro boots up from an SSD in about 15 seconds.

g.

[Whaler]

In 1981 I was managing a marina in Alaska and never had heard of a computer, it would be another 6 years before I had the opportunity to touch one.

[Cochese]

I was two. I'd be programming in Apple Basic by 1985 though.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

[Carpenter96]

1981 I was working for a plastics manufacturing co. that had no computer. I was the plant manager. In late 1982 our company purchased a PC (don't know what brand) with a floppy disc for $5000 and another $5000 for the guy to train the office staff how to use it. At he time I was not computer user although I had taken computer science in HS and was quite good at it. Now I use a PC everyday at work and could not live without it.

Bob

[lrr]

In 1981 I was a computer sales rep for Hewlett-Packard. But we did not have PCs in the office. Our "secretaries" (yes, this was before administrative assistants) typed up our sales quotes! They started phasing in our first PCs around this time but they were DOS and no user software except some custom written apps for quotes and such. No Windows, no internet, and no email, of course. And the computer systems we sold were all end-user programmed. I was selling into technical markets where computers were used for instrumentation and data acquisition. Our customers lived by the motto "Real men don't buy application software -- we write our own!".

And no cell phones either! I called my secretary throughout the day to get my messages. Then I'd spend some time in the phone booth calling customers. Hard to imagine actually being able to conduct business without all the modern conveniences we have today.

[Condoman44]

Phone booth! That in itself is a rare item today. I guess they decided to get out of the coin business in CT at least.