kurtsh
I was 10yo & had (access to) an original IBM PC 8088 with 64K & a cassette tape. It was my father's PC but I saved my paper route earnings & lawnmowing pay to get it to the max 256K on the MB & eventually buy a 360K floppy drive. JOY!
The sad thing was, despite finally getting a floppy drive, I couldn't afford DD floppy disks - they were $4-$5/each so I would go dumpster diving behind Computerland or the IBM Product Centers for casually discarded discs. My first 20 floppies were all from the trash. Some had bad sectors - one had coffee spilled on it - but I didn't care.
I eventually saved enough money for an "AST 6 Pack" expansion board clone at a computer swap meet. RAM expansion, battery-backed clock, 2 serial & 1 parallel port. And I'd buy memory one row at a time every month until I got 640k.
For Christmas, my Dad bought me a 2nd floppy, I was also around this time, a friend of mine "5-finger discounted" an accelerator crystal that overclocked the 8088 from 4.77mhz to 7.4mhz, almost doubling the speed.. and gave it to me for my birthday. I was in heaven.
One day, a friend said he'd sell me his 10MB Micropolis Hard Drive. He'd bought a 20MB Seagate MFM & an RLL controller to get 50% more storage from his hard drives but the Micropolis wasn't RLL compatible.
I borrowed the $50 I needed to buy the drive. It had 100ms access time & was the most massive, lousiest PoS I ever owned but it was mine & I no longer needed to boot to floppies.
All my nerd friends were BBSing by this time & I didn't have a modem. I'd cry myself to sleep dreaming of having the money for a Hayes 300 but it was $350. Too much for a 12yo.
One day, I biked to a De Anza College swap meet & there was a guy at a table selling a Hayes 1200 BAUD Internal modem. No packaging or anti-stat bag: $150. "It fell off a truck". I peed myself & called my Dad from a payphone to beg him for the cash.
I think he was proud of my gumption & drove over to loan me the cash.
Remember how my Hayes 1200 modem came with nothing? I also didn't have a Comms program but I biked to a friend's house who made me a copy of PC Talk. My first call was a BBS called Logon Unlimited, a 408 area code with 4 lines & live chat between users.
From that point on, my PC was left on pretty much 24/7. Downloading, uploading, wardialing & other "stuff", only to be interrupted by my parents occasionally picking up the phone:
CLICK <disconnected>
"MOM! I'm on the line!"
"OOPS. Sorry."
I worshipped WarGames as most nerds did & have vivid memories of that time during high school, discovering wonderful things like:
✅ Leechmodem
✅ Phrack Inc & 2600
✅ Qmodem/PCBoard
✅ Compuserve
✅ CopyIIPC Option Board
✅ Snatchit
✅ Assembly Language
✅ DoubleDOS
✅ HSLink
✅ QuadRAM QuadLink
✅ Leechmodem
✅ Phrack Inc & 2600
✅ Qmodem/PCBoard
✅ Compuserve
✅ CopyIIPC Option Board
✅ Snatchit
✅ Assembly Language
✅ DoubleDOS
✅ HSLink
✅ QuadRAM QuadLink
I should mention I had a green monochrome monitor for most of my childhood. I couldn't afford a $600 CGA display & EGA was absolutely not in the cards. (No, VGA had not been invented yet)
I replaced my old Hercules graphics card to a used "CGA-to-Monochrome" display adapter that converted a CGA signal to something visible on a Monochrome monitor.
I later worked for Fry's Electronics, Electronic Arts & Hewlett Packard during summers to get enough scratch for a used VGA display during college.
One of the most interesting things of the 80s for me was the emergence of the "CopyIIPC Option Board", an ISA card that was cabled btwn the floppy drive & the controller that intercepted magnetic traces. This included "weak bits", bit that were sometimes 1 & sometimes 0. (A copy protection technique)
Also... the maker, Central Point Software, swung a deal with Softgard SUPERLoK copy protection to disable the Option Board's ability to copy Softguard protected products.
steve mookie kong@kurtsh Fry’s Electronics was my favorite place to shop and walk around. Which one did you work at?
I was so sad when they closed. I wrote about my experiences and all the Fry’s that I visited over the years on my blog:
Goodbye Fry's Electronics
On February 23, 2021, Samir sent me a link to an article about the demise of Fry’s Electronics, I wasn’t surprised that the company was finally shutting down. I was surprised that the company lasted so long. In 2019, something started happening at the Fry’s locations that I had visited. The shelves became empty and this was a worrisome development for the company. Fry’s had said they were switching to a consignment model, but that never seemed to work out for them.
₵ⱧⱤł₴ ⱤØ₥₱ NZ6F 🇺🇦💪🏻🇬🇱❤️@kurtsh 1200 baud crew represent. 4 line BBS? Wow nothing that cool in my local dial area. There were 3-4 decent boards and I probably gamed on two of them, mostly LORD, BRE/SRE, and TradeWars 2002.
@rombat I was in Silicon Valley so y'know, adults were around with the cash for 4 active phone lines, 4 modems & a 80386 rig that could handle the custom software they ran. The owner of Logon Unlimited sold his multiparty BBS software to businesses so it was all a business expense for him to write off.
Most boards were small-time file trading RBBSs or meager Fidonet message boards. Later PC Board & derivatives. Honestly, you rly had to dial long distance to get to the big time boards.
@kurtsh “Accelerator crystal” sounds like something out of an RPG. 😂
@rombat You mean the +4 Accelerator Crystal of Nerdspeed!
Do you remember this beauty? "BBS: The Documentary"? God, I loved this doc.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE&si=68PCPzGH1-BQUh4j
George@Xorky Nice. 😉