It's always a pleasure talking to someone who witnessed
the 'old days'. By the way, we are almost of the same age.
What kind of machines did you use then with the 1200 baud
modem?
My privat 'networking' experience started with a 14.4 and
a software called 'seyon' on a 486/50 PC running Linux 4.2.
The only equipment affordable then.
In my job though I remember sitting at the terminal
of a Univac mainframe with disk drives as big as a
freezer.
I started out on a "MagCard" basically an electric typewriter with an attachment to the side about the size of a mini fridge that saved all of your keystrokes on a magnetic card. After typing the document you would stick a brown 3" X 6" magnetic card in the top slot, push the save button, it would suck in the card, make a hell of racket while lighting up little lights of different colors and then spit the card out the bottom slot with all your keystrokes saved. Print the page, hand edit it, do a line by line correction, resave and start all over again. We then moved up to a Wang MainFrame with dummy terminals and then naturally progressed to the personal PC's starting with the 8088 and working our way up through the different iterations, 286, 386, 486, etc. I'll never forget when they came up with an upgrade on the HP 8088 that allowed the installation of up to 2 hard drives to work in unison with the dual 5 1/2" floppys. We went whole hog and got the biggest upgrade with dual 10MB hard drives. The technician installed them, and said "WOW, 20MB you'll never fill those". ROTFLMAO...
Started home computing on a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem dialing into a usergroup called "Grandpa's Place". Did a little rudimentary programming in BASIC and Pet ASCI and decided that wasn't for me. Moved up to IBM compatibles (386) and when HTML came out it blew me away and I spent a couple of years self learning that and got pretty good at web page design, also played a little with C and C++ but they could never hold my interest as I was more interested in building systems vs writing programs. Clepped my way to a degree in Information Management and Systems which cemented my career as an IT Analyst. Still have to chuckle when I think back on the countless hours sitting behind my 13" color TV monitor on my Commodore 64 typing in code (in machine language) from the Commodore magazine. Would spend hours typing in, debugging, testing, and finalizing a program. What a sense of accomplishment to play your little Asteroids style game that you wrote yourself and it
only took you a week. Then waiting with baited breath for next months issue to see what little gem they provided the code for that month. Ah, the good old days! Try to explain them to my youngest son and his answer is always, "they don't sound so good to me".
LTM,
Don