Data. How things have changed

[barryd]

Just an amusing observation. Probably shouldnt post this on the wildies but we are an all singing all dancing (and rather nice) site in North Devon. The free wifi is stonking fast but Michelle refuses to use it as she has 250gb of data and each month its her challenge to use it all. Its about a quarter of the speed of the free one. Just remembering the days where we wouldnt dare stream even youtube in case we busted our data allowance and ran up a huge bill! Well I thought it was amusing.

 

[REC]

Just an amusing observation. Probably shouldnt post this on the wildies but we are an all singing all dancing (and rather nice) site in North Devon. The free wifi is stonking fast but Michelle refuses to use it as she has 250gb of data and each month its her challenge to use it all. Its about a quarter of the speed of the free one. Just remembering the days where we wouldnt dare stream even youtube in case we busted our data allowance and ran up a huge bill! Well I thought it was amusing.

And that was if you could even get a signal to try and stream!

 

[Pudsey Bear]

Not forgetting Dial Up on a 9600 baud rate modem, ah, those were the days, listening to them struggle with an email, easier to send a Fax.

 

[wildebus]

Just an amusing observation. Probably shouldnt post this on the wildies but we are an all singing all dancing (and rather nice) site in North Devon. The free wifi is stonking fast but Michelle refuses to use it as she has 250gb of data and each month its her challenge to use it all. Its about a quarter of the speed of the free one. Just remembering the days where we wouldnt dare stream even youtube in case we busted our data allowance and ran up a huge bill! Well I thought it was amusing.

I remember my first "unlimited data" broadband deal. Got a warning email saying if I went over the 2GB of the "unlimited" allowance, my speed would be throttled right back (and this was already just dial-up speeds to start with!)

 

[r4dent]

A company I worked for back in the 70s had two data centres about 120 miles apart, and each acted as an off site data store for the other.

Every day a van drove from one to the other and back carrying mag tapes.
Someone had a brilliant idea to install a Modulator / Demodulators and do the transfer electronically.

After two months the van was back on the road,
It was faster / cheaper / more reliable.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

Ah, Bliss.

 

[wildebus]

A company I worked for back in the 70s had two data centres about 120 miles apart, and each acted as an off site data store for the other.

Every day a van drove from one to the other and back carrying mag tapes.
Someone had a brilliant idea to install a Modulator / Demodulators and do the transfer electronically.

After two months the van was back on the road,
It was faster / cheaper / more reliable.

We just call them "MODEMS"

 

[alcam]

Just an amusing observation. Probably shouldnt post this on the wildies but we are an all singing all dancing (and rather nice) site in North Devon. The free wifi is stonking fast but Michelle refuses to use it as she has 250gb of data and each month its her challenge to use it all. Its about a quarter of the speed of the free one. Just remembering the days where we wouldnt dare stream even youtube in case we busted our data allowance and ran up a huge bill! Well I thought it was amusing.

Had vans for over 12 years now and internet access has changed beyond all recognition . Looking for a McDonald's [not to eat] , struggling to connect in French motorway services etc .
Born traditionalist but certain modernisations are very acceptable

 

[barryd]

Not forgetting Dial Up on a 9600 baud rate modem, ah, those were the days, listening to them struggle with an email, easier to send a Fax.

You had a 9600 baud rate modem? You were lucky!! I remember the 1200 baud modems! Logging onto Bulletin boards and other stuff and trying to break into the college computer system. We thought we were hackers!

 

[barryd]

Had vans for over 12 years now and internet access has changed beyond all recognition . Looking for a McDonald's [not to eat] , struggling to connect in French motorway services etc .
Born traditionalist but certain modernisations are very acceptable

It certainly has! Going back to 2008/9 I remember getting the first Swiss military Repeat IT USB antenna. It was a game changer in Europe although you needed great patience and technical skill to get it to work properly. I used to mount it up on the top of the motorhome ladder on an Aire or wherever and spend ages moving it about, running back inside and scanning for an SFR FON hotspot or any open wifi. Would spend hours doing that and on occasion if I desperately needed to get online I would ride around with it on the scooter with a laptop aiming it at houses etc trying to get online. Got some funny looks.

Then Addie at motorhome wifi came up with a better one that was the precursor to the iBoost system and we would compete to see who could connect the furthest. I think he got a connection across the Bristol Channel once at about 10 miles. My best was about 5 up in the Alps I think. Probably just fast enough to send a text email.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

You had a 9600 baud rate modem? You were lucky!! I remember the 1200 baud modems! Logging onto Bulletin boards and other stuff and trying to break into the college computer system. We thought we were hackers!

Yup, that was back in the 70s, I didn't wake up to IT until the 80s, and the interweb about 1990 ish I still have a Amstrad Fax machine in a box I think somewhere.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

I also "somewhere" have two old Nokias 6310s? with spare fronts (oh how we lived) they would do internet but I never did, via Wap or summat.

 

[colinm]

A company I worked for back in the 70s had two data centres about 120 miles apart, and each acted as an off site data store for the other.

Every day a van drove from one to the other and back carrying mag tapes.
Someone had a brilliant idea to install a Modulator / Demodulators and do the transfer electronically.

After two months the van was back on the road,
It was faster / cheaper / more reliable.

Back in the day we had a dedicated line for sending full size drawings between Stevenage and Filton on a rotating drum fax, it was a sight to behold.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

Okay Okay, when I was at school in the late 50's all we had was a floor to sit on, a Slate to write on and bit of chalk.

And that is the truth too.

 

[Wully]

Satellite dishes on vans are now redundant. All you need is a fire stick and a phone with a decent data package hook up vie hotspot even for Europe works well. Hundreds of Tv channels. We have unlimited data packages from Vodafone capped in Europe to 25gb don’t even need a dongle it just always seems to work.

 

[barryd]

Yup, that was back in the 70s, I didn't wake up to IT until the 80s, and the interweb about 1990 ish I still have a Amstrad Fax machine in a box I think somewhere.

View attachment 135585

I feel quite privileged to have been right at the start of the home computing and PC evolution from around 1982 when I was 16 right through my career to where we are now. Blimey we have seen some changes. The one thing any IT person will tell you is you can't ever hope to keep up. Most of them fly by the seat of their pants. Always have, always will.

Funny story, when the internet first came out (proper) in the mid 90s as a young IT exec in a big international Franchise I had to do a live demo at our national conference. I had prepared what I was going to demo and as well as explaining and showing what email was I was going to do a demo of accessing the White House site in the USA and how you could send Bill Clinton an actual message. Sounds daft now but it was proper mystifying stuff back then for most. Did my rehearsal etc the night before, tried not to get too shitfaced that night and come the live demo all was going well until it got to putting up the White House site. It had been hacked and was now a porn site. This pretty much set the course for my entire career really and what the internet would become. Nobody ever forgot it and it was just a brilliant moment and talk of the conference. Hilarious.

 

[wildebus]

You had a 9600 baud rate modem? You were lucky!! I remember the 1200 baud modems! Logging onto Bulletin boards and other stuff and trying to break into the college computer system. We thought we were hackers!

Barry, you are only a spring chicken compared to many people on here.
Some of us remember computers before they were even called "computers". And before that time, "computers" were actually PEOPLE - it was a job title/role, not a thing, and were most commonly women.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

My first venture into it was with my 2nd wife Julie, She was a senior sister at Bradfors Royal Infirmary, on the men's accident ward so lots of bikers to mend.

Of course the NHS had puters so we decided to get one for home and both this POS colour Genie thing, worked off a tape recorder & Tv and was total SHITE, we got stuff with it bout very basic games, so we gave that to her brother who binned it.

We then got a new one of these, and got a bit further into it but still not a PC as we think of them now.

The first time I got into a real PC was a Elonex 286SX we needed to be able to do stock control and invoicing for Triple S customers, we had a Olivetti DM printer and that with a copy of Olive accounts did all we needed, and we could play the early versions of Tetris on the Orange screen on quiet days.

As an aside I wrote over a few weeks between work a spreadsheet version of the Simplex accounts book, and it still does what it did back then and still have it I think, I never did the VAT book as we didn't need it then.

 

[wildebus]

I feel quite privileged to have been right at the start of the home computing and PC evolution from around 1982 when I was 16 right through my career to where we are now. Blimey we have seen some changes. The one thing any IT person will tell you is you can't ever hope to keep up. Most of them fly by the seat of their pants. Always have, always will.

Funny story, when the internet first came out (proper) in the mid 90s as a young IT exec in a big international Franchise I had to do a live demo at our national conference. I had prepared what I was going to demo and as well as explaining and showing what email was I was going to do a demo of accessing the White House site in the USA and how you could send Bill Clinton an actual message. Sounds daft now but it was proper mystifying stuff back then for most. Did my rehearsal etc the night before, tried not to get too shitfaced that night and come the live demo all was going well until it got to putting up the White House site. It had been hacked and was now a porn site. This pretty much set the course for my entire career really and what the internet would become. Nobody ever forgot it and it was just a brilliant moment and talk of the conference. Hilarious.

Email was a lot more work initially to get going. nowadays people don't give it a second thought, but I must have spent a good two weeks solid trying to get email communications working between the Computer company I worked for and one of our customers in the oil industry. Considering both companies were globally in the top 5 in their respective fields of computers and oil, you think they would have had that sussed!

I also remember one of my colleagues was using trawling around the internet soon after it became generally accessible and for some reason when on the FBI website.
I would think it was likely the public facing part but in those early days it would have seemed amazing to see - and we successfully convinced him he had hacked into the FBI and he can expect a visit from the Secret Service within days. He was seriously terrified

 

[Norfolk NewBoy]

I travelled from punch-cards at school, with a week's turn around, through increasingly fast main-frames at university to personal computers (ZX80/81/spectrum; BBC; Dragon; etc). Returning for a university open day in the late 80s, one "must see" lecture was from a senior IBM official: unbelievably disappointing but hilarious!

It was done using an overhead projector and all of the slides were white print on IBM blue backgrounds. He started off with the first slide showing as upside-down. He got the print the correct way up but laterally reversed. Then it was upside down AND laterally reversed. Eventually he called for help.

Once underway, the whole lecture was boring and uninformative BUT it lives in my memory.

Gordon