Tag Archives: Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

Perspective

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Just caught this tweet from a colleague:

“Mom, I have a call at 1:30 so don’t use the internet.” HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

He was, of course, lampooning one of his friends who has the misfortune of visiting his parents who are still apparently using dial-up Internet. It took me back for a moment:

Back Then (1991)

When I was 11, our incoming Freshmen at IU East were just being born. The Internet, as we know it, did not exist.

We had a 486 SX desktop computer with a processor that was 25MHz, a 121 MB hard drive, 1MB graphics card capable of 256 color graphics, and 4 MB of RAM. (a later upgrade to 8MB cost $160) The modem we had, which connected over landline, would tie up our phone while I used it;  it could also only transfer 2400 bps (aka “baud”). (note that the lowercase “b” there indicates BITS and not BYTES. 2400 bps is roughly equal to 300 bytes per second, or Bps)

My friends and I would connect to local bulletin-board systems (BBS’s), which were kind of like websites: there was mail features, multi-user games, files to download, and you could communicate with people far away via mail relay services like FIDONet. To give you an idea about speed: when you would load a “page” on the BBS (login screen, a game, a filelist, etc.) you could literally see the text appear on the screen as it was received. It was that slow.

Downloading a single image (hot girls, funny pictures, desktop wallpaper, etc.) took anywhere from a solid minute for a small (15 kilobyte) image. A larger image, say 50kB, would take about 3 minutes. For a frame of reference, the banner at the top of this blog, featuring my picture and “Two-year-olds think I’m awesome”, is 22kB (about a minute and a half) and the entire web page is roughly 500kB.

That would have taken a half-hour. Just to load http://blog.amhill.net.

I am not even kidding. Continue reading →

Adventures of a Narcoleptic Student

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I’ve determined I kick ass. It’s official. We had a Chem quiz in..well….Chem today, and I kicked its ass, I think. I was first done, again, as usual. Of course, life will probably try to put me in my place by having me end up getting a shitty score, but that doesn’t matter because you, faithful reader, will never be the wiser. >: ) Anyways… Monday was really funny too. I was kind of nodding off in class and at one point, I woke up to a state of semi-lucidity right as the Prof was asking some question that no one knew; I answered it and nodded back off. It may have been something to do with Hess’s law or something, I forget.
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The life and times of old apartments.

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I don’t have any particular agenda for this posting, so we’ll just see where it goes.

I remember this apartment I had years ago….my first place on my own (not counting my dorm room at ESU). I moved in on Oct 1st, and I think I had a roomie by November. Being my first place and all I really had no clue about living on my own. I was still fighting with my parents a little bit (they weren’t happy with my choice to move out on my own), so I was pretty well ostracized. Anyways, that’s besides the point.

The apartment was right across the street from the hospital. It was a white 2-story duplex house. (it used to be a solid house, but was converted into a duplex). There was this elderly guy, he was a mix of senile and just plain crazy. I swear he would sit right by the connecting door (my entrance was on the side of the house, and you had to go up stairs immediately after entering. There was a door at the bottom of the stairs that used to be an adjoining doorway between the floors), and listen for the slightest noise and then complain about it.
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