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  1. I remember all of this. I can remember buying a modem for my Atari 2600. You dialed in with an 800 number and you needed a credit card to pay 10 or $20 a month and you could download any game you want that was out at the time, to the modem cartridge, which had enough memory to store just one game at a time, and once it was downloaded, you could play it for as long as you wanted… Until you download it another game to play and it would replace it in memory. It was the coolest thing, and truly amazing at the time. It was essentially Xbox live for the Atari 2600. You had a list of games you could choose from and download and pay the monthly fee to do so. Very innovative for the time. Whoever thought of that and implemented it, way ahead of their time. By 10-20 years or more.

    I had the Vic 20 along with the light pan… Anybody remember them? Essentially, there was some software that used it, and you could buy a few other pieces… But there wasn’t much made for it. I would actually program my Victony in order to create stuff that used it. I created a text based RPG, that instead of typing in your choice for any situation… I would have 4 to 6 choices and you chose which one you wanted with the light pan. It was very cool and I wish I would’ve known that you could make money through magazines and stuff doing these things. Because I was always making my own games and apps.

    I think I moved to the TI 994A after that, and then learned to program it and the speech synthesizer, and had some fun with that for a while… Then I traded it to a friend for his Commodore 64 and was always trading up to the next best thing. God, I loved those wild West days of video games, and computers. Everything was so exciting, because everything was so new. I always had the fastest Internet that was available. Whether it was through dial app or, I was one of the first people in central Pennsylvania to have home cable, Internet. Which was a revolution compared to what most people were using, which was still dial-up at the time. I can’t remember how fast it initially was, but it left any modem in the dust.

    So the cable company wasn’t doing home Internet at the time. They were installing cable Internet to try it out for the library. Was just happened to be right behind my house. So I was talking to one of the techs and asked him how I could get that in my house. I gave him $100 and he ran a line from the library to my house, which I helped him burry. Which was probably a few hundred feet… Then me which cable modem I needed to buy and I got one and had free cable Internet for years. Still to this day, that guy is a great friend. He had the same interests in computers and technology. Something we still talk about to this day.

    But I remember being there for all of these milestones. The funny thing is, I never really touched AOL until later on after people were using other services besides it. I really like the way the AOL was set up. It was easy to browse and easy to find what you were looking for. it also had great communities in order to find like-minded people and hook up and do things with. I can’t tell you how many great people I met for my area through AOL. Great times and great people.

    I was always taking apart and upgrading or building my own computers. God, I love technology and that feeling of being on the cutting edge. I stopped really building computers years ago. Just because it seems every week something new comes out, and the price of GPUs has gone through the roof. The last one I built, was probably five years ago, and when I build a computer, I always build cutting edge to the extreme. Meaning that, when I build a computer… Guarantee I could run it until the end of time simply by replacing the GPU, if I really wanted to. But I don’t really play games on the computer all that much. But for what I use it for, which is music and video production… I can use that computer I built five years ago, with no problem, and render out a hour long 4K/60 HDR video in minutes.

    Which is what I always tried to do when I was building a computer. Essentially over, engineer it, so, I truthfully would never have to upgrade it, unless again… I was looking to play games on it. For video editing and audio production… I would never need to upgrade again. As, the CPU that I put in is a AMD thread, ripper 32, core 64 thread monster. With 128 GB of DDR4 memory, the motherboard came with four NVME slots built in, for which I think I have 8 TB of space on them. Again, over engineered so I wouldn’t have to upgrade, pretty much ever. Unless something happens to the hardware itself.

    The funny thing is, I haven’t thought about any of this stuff for quite a long time, and it really made me remember my love for just playing around with the hardware. Now, with all of the viruses and malware, and everything else, you have to worry about… it makes using anything other than a Mac or iPad scary. Simply because you can’t trust anything you download. Since PC has a pretty questionable storefront, you don’t know who to trust, unless you buy physical copies… Which are, and have been very hard to come by anymore..

    Used to love Nerding out with all of my friends over this stuff. Makes me miss those days. I always tell people that if we can choose to come back and live life again after we pass away… I would choose the same place, the same time, the same years, the same family. Everything. Because I just want to live through the pioneering days of musical instruments and computers and video games… All over again. The kids today will never understand how incredible being there during these pioneering era’s of technology. seeing it all unfold before our eyes. Being there to witness, it all start from nothing and turn into what we have today.

    I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And I feel bad for anyone who didn’t get to see it firsthand. Because it is something that will never happen again unless the human race is reset somehow, from scratch. That incredible sense of innocence and wonder has seemingly been lost to Moore’s law. Where the leaps we are taking any more are so small, that it seems like we are taking nothing at all. Technology, so good that there’s very little to look forward to. As it all has become so common place, that there seems to be very little to explore and create any more. God bless the 1970s and 1980s. such a great time to be alive.

  2. I think about mid 90s when I first got internet. 94/95? I was a kid. I think it was prodigy or compuserve. And then of course AOL. I remember using IRC chat too and downloading files from ftp sites. Back then you could also find illegal software and mp3s known as mp3z which was before Napster came along.

    And now look I'm typing this on my cellphone to a streaming video from my instant wifi. Crazy I've witnessed the changes

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