You haven't lived until you've experience the sheer power of a CRT monitor, hooked up to a 286/12, with a 2600 baud external zoom for m00fing the shit out of other users in chat, so your friends with leech accounts can help download the 38 pkzip files via ZMODEM.

Shit... gotta go! iCE just released the latest pack on Sanctuary, and my ANSI art is being featured as the welcome screen on Pair O' Dice.

305, bitches!!1one

I know some of this words

K-RoD

What is K-RoD?

Me 17yo @3am

No-name 286 with 10Mhz turbomode, Hercules graphics on an amber screen, 9600bps US robotics, tries to connect to bbs:
dialing...busy...
dialing...busy...
dialing...busy...
dialing...beep kscchhzzz nrrrrtwwww dssschfhchh ...
I AM IN!!!
No new mail...
Reads some posts in a newsgroup that seems interesting...
Goes to file area trying to find something cool to download based on the a abbreviated 8.3 filename...
Start download "larry~1.zip" over zmodem...
Will take 5hrs to complete...
...

@mngr - It was slang, I believe from the west coast, for "fuckin' rad". This was all pre-internet, a few years before folks would go out and buy Netscape Navigator for $35 (equal to about $70 these days.)

AOL was the only real online community GUI, and everything else was all text base, using ANSI to create art/menus/UIs from shaded boxes of different colors you would meticulously structure from lines of text.

2600, which is still printed and available at Barnes and Noble, was and still is "The Hacker Quarterly" for everything from programming, to default codes that would get you through any gated community, to phone numbers you could call so the operators would send you hundred dollar checks for reimursing money you never had to put into the pay phone. :)

gopher anyone?

@JohanO @Nanos

We old. Btw, here are two tribbles swordfighting...

*/ \*

They need to revive three things, and I'm so close to just saying, "Fuck it" and doing it myself...

Crossroads, TradeWars (they did try), and completely customizable world MUDs.

@Hypergeek isn't it a dead buffalo up close?

I remember, going at 2am onto the highway and finding callboxes to dial into subscription lines so we can stock up on codes that would then be charged to those nunbers and we could then sell at GTs (Get Togethers... when people really were social) for a fraction of the price so you can have access to more "pie in the face" actions in an MBBS chatroom.

@JohanO - Those were always translated in different ways according to your geographical location and community members - who were fairly tight-knit on local boards.

@@8 p = Marge Simpson

H( . )( . )TERS

&BQ = Me, smoking

Is it good or bad that i expirienced an 286 compatible Cyrix hooked up to a CRT even though I'm Gen Z?

@StefanGliga - I would call you a hybrid. ;P

I'm 18 and i've used a 486 machine with a 56k modem on an amber CRT, does this count?

@Parzi - Woah, woah, woah. Slow down there fella. Where are you from? The future world of the late-1990s?!? :D

But, seriously. Good for you guys who take an interest in how things have evolved in technology. Contrary to popular belief, it's important to learn and will help you understand other, newer things that may seem unrelated, but actually are.

I am so sad that i missed that part of history... Although i had picked up a machine putnon the streets as garbage. My first machine was an IBM ps/2 286 with 2 megabytes ram and a hard disk of 24 megabytes.

But my parents at the time believed that the personal computer and that 'online cyber thing that looks like drugs for children' would make me mentally retarded. So it was 1998 and i have never been able to go online... When all my classmates already had at least a 486 machine and a dialup modems, one had even isdn!

When i left my parents a year later the first thing i bought was a modest computer and a visit to the cybercafé every day since home connections were still expensive, and adsl was to become available 'soon'...

My parents are messed up... But my revenge is the joy to tell them in their face i havent gone mentally retarded and that i'm fucking making more money in a year than they ever did in their lifetime.