25 Jan
1998
25 Jan
'98
7:59 a.m.
(does anyone else here remember the old computer club
meetings, back in
those days of the S-100 bus computers, where we'd all pack our cars with
all our homebrew computer hardware, take it to the meeting site, and for
the first couple of hours, brag about our stuff, show it off to everyone
else, then for the rest of the night, we'd all stand in groups and talk?)
I remember going to FOG meetings in the 80s where there'd be some
presentation of this or that and then everyone would break up into groups
and talk about computers and how computers would make the world a better
place. We'd get stuff from the library disks that we needed and,
sometimes, some of us would go out for pizza.
I remember driving from Ames to Des Moines, from a FOG meeting, in the
worst blizzard conditions I'd ever seen. I couldn't tell where the road
was, where the shoulder was and so on. By the time I realized how bad it
was, it was too nasty to turn back or pull over (a truck might have hit
me if I pulled over) and drove 30 miles in about 3 hours. I was truly
terrifying and maybe a little stupid.
But I met some folks from the FOG meeting back in Des Moines, we ate some
of the best pizza I'd ever had and we talked about all kinds of things
including computers. I really miss those days, which I why I collect the
computers from those days that I wanted but couldn't afford to own. It
takes me back.
At that time I had a Commodore 128, 1541 drive and a color monitor I'd
hacked out of some surplus stuff...it also had an Avatex 1200hc, IIRC,
that I wrote a LOVELY wardialer for...but we won't go into THAT even
though the statute of limitations is long since up. ;-D
Anthony Clifton - Wirehead