The times they are a'changin'

t4tomo

FoldingJoe wrote:

Somebody on out street has one in their garden!!

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=ocean+view+road+bude&ll=50.836774,-4.542375&spn=0.007792,0.01929&hnear=Ocean+View+Rd&gl=uk&t=m&z=16&layer=c&cbll=50.836772,-4.542503&panoid=GV8Jj8-ou8GcDQfiKmHimg&cbp=12,329.22,,1,9.72

we've got two in our offices. Used as quite spaces for making phone calls etc

note the payphone gubbins has been removed, there is a stool and a shelf in there and it doesn't stink of piss

Cycloslalomeur

CiB wrote:

bompington wrote:

Nowadays Bompetta, aged 2½, can comfortably use my Galaxy to make a phone call, flick through my pics, or draw a picture - this includes navigating through the apps menu to get there.

One of my thousands of nieces at the age of 2 and having grown up with iPads & iPhones was also doing all that without a second thought. I did catch her once trying to resize a magazine picture with the thumb + finger action.

I once caught my son, 2 1/2 as well, trying to resize an image on the telly with the Apple thumb-finger action. He then informed me that the telly was broken.

DonDaddyD

Gaming:

I remember when online gaming was text on a page like MS Word. I remember when there was no online gaming because there was no internet - or at least none that was accessible to the public.

I remember having to wait for computer games to load (I think 20mins is the longest I've had to wait). Now if I have time to think that I'm waiting for a game to load something must be wrong with it and I'm due a refund.

I remember loading my computer games from a tape, then floppy disk, then CDs, DVD's, Blu ray and now I can download them from the Earth's ether.

I remember when 3D gaming was the future and when sandbox gaming (GTA 3, Legend of Zelda - go anywhere in the game and do as you please) was a mythical concept.

Emails are another thing. I remember when there was no email. How did people do work?

BelgianBeerGeek

MTB-Idle wrote:

DonDaddyD wrote:

Who remembers public pay phones?

I do, and when I was a cub scout I had to carry around 2p so that I could use aforementioned payphone in an emergency.

2 p!

Ah the emergency 2p (later 5p, that's inflation for you). They always smelt of wee and stale fags. And someone had nicked the phone book. A phone book! In the booth!

pangolin

DonDaddyD wrote:

Emails are another thing. I remember when there was no email. How did people do work?

Probably a lot more easily!

You're right about games, they are so much better. When GTA came out it was amazing (Both sandbox top down and later sandbox 3D).

notsoblue

I remember analogue modems. I could recognise the handshake squeals for the different connection speeds.

CiB

My first bike speedo was a small version of a car speedo - a round dial that went up to 40mph (never got near to that as an 8-y-o) with a mileometer to show distance. It was driven from a red plastic disc that ran against the front tyre and had a cable to the h/bars. Apparently I would have had one of those clickety click mile counters that fitted to the front wheel spindle and was driven by a peg on the spokes, but Pa rightly thought that I'd ride into the back of a bus trying to watch it.

Compare & contrast with what's followed, from huge LCD computers down to a complete health & navigation system for HRM, calories and GPS built into something the size of a packet of 10 Woodbines.

Wunnunda

notsoblue wrote:

I remember analogue modems. I could recognise the handshake squeals for the different connection speeds.

^^^This

....AND Group 3 fax. When my company started in 1979 we didn't have one. 18 mths later we got one. Thermal paper, no memory to speak of, £1500 (!). Now the G3 machines are buried in our big networked printers but never used. The under 25s in our office barely know what I'm talking about....


....now Telex....thats's a MANs communications tool :roll:

Kieran_Burns

I did remember a first for a technology WTF moment.

the very first time I loaded a page from the Internet. We'd accessed a site in Dallas. In AMERICA! We were actually visiting a site in AMERICA.

Honest to God I thought the whole world had shift.... Oh wait.

cjcp

Just been told my Blackberry is "too old".

WTF?

This means I'll be getting a new one. I've barely worked out how to use the "old" one.

Terrific.

veronese68

When I was at school I was told that computers would lead to a paperless office. The reality is that computers have resulted in people printing out heaps of shite that will never get read.

il_principe

cjcp wrote:

Just been told my Blackberry is "too old".

WTF?

This means I'll be getting a new one. I've barely worked out how to use the "old" one.

Terrific.

Take comfort in the fact that it's your Blackberry and not you who are 'too old.'

I didn't know people still used Blackberry's anyway.

SimonAH

Veronese68 wrote:

When I was at school I was told that computers would lead to a paperless office. The reality is that computers have resulted in people printing out heaps of shite that will never get read.

To be fair, my filing tray gets filed about once every six months as the stack takes that long to get about a half inch thick. I doubt I've printed a ream of paper in two years.

pangolin

SimonAH wrote:

Veronese68 wrote:

When I was at school I was told that computers would lead to a paperless office. The reality is that computers have resulted in people printing out heaps of shite that will never get read.

To be fair, my filing tray gets filed about once every six months as the stack takes that long to get about a half inch thick. I doubt I've printed a ream of paper in two years.

Some people love printing shite though. The last time someone handed me a stack of paper (that they were planning on emailing me too) I said 'If only there were some kind of magical way I could have viewed this on some sort of large electronic photograph machine".

"But I work better from paper!"

Pfft.

d87francis

FoldingJoe wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

DonDaddyD wrote:

Who remembers public pay phones?

I do. There's still about 67,000 of them in the UK. If you can't remember them then either you are a goldfish or you badly need to get to casualty as you've been hit by a bus and are suffering from severe amnesia

Somebody on out street has one in their garden!!

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=ocean+view+road+bude&ll=50.836774,-4.542375&spn=0.007792,0.01929&hnear=Ocean+View+Rd&gl=uk&t=m&z=16&layer=c&cbll=50.836772,-4.542503&panoid=GV8Jj8-ou8GcDQfiKmHimg&cbp=12,329.22,,1,9.72

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Speldh ... 4,,0,-0.18

CiB

I've just noticed that England play Poland tonight in the WC qualifiers. 39 years ago tomorrow we were doing exactly the same thing, except that was the must-win game otherwise they wouldn't go to W Germany the following summer and Sir Alf would probably be sacked. I'll be watching this tonight on a nice flat screen in HD with good sound in reasonable comfort, compared to the equivalent in 1973 when we had permission to watch it on a small borrowed portable b/w tv in our bedroom on the bunk bed, with no warmth, and certainly no c/h. That was when having BBC2 was a sign of opulence, not like today when apparently having access to 200+ channels on Freesat but no Sky Sports [stingy git here... ] is a mark of absolute poverty.

I wouldn't mind going back to then for a day or two, with an idea of letting me know what's to come. Or maybe not.

Greg T

I remember the first time we watched a VCR at school.

It was a programme about Elephants.

The teacher re-wound a section where the elephant crossed a river and the kids all laughed out loud - it was amazing! An elephant walking backwards quickly - just because you press a button!

EKE_38BPM

I remember the TV having a fully functioning intelligent remote control - Me. My dad would call me to turn the TV over, even if I was two floors away.

I remember Channel 4 starting.

I remember a mate's dad, who was a mobile phone engineer when mobiles were just starting, dying from brain cancer and then the standards for mobile phone EM emissions being implemented.

notsoblue

I remember when not everyone had a mobile phone, and you actually had to agree a time and a place beforehand when you wanted to meet up with someone.

bompington

pangolin wrote:

SimonAH wrote:

Veronese68 wrote:

When I was at school I was told that computers would lead to a paperless office. The reality is that computers have resulted in people printing out heaps of shite that will never get read.

To be fair, my filing tray gets filed about once every six months as the stack takes that long to get about a half inch thick. I doubt I've printed a ream of paper in two years.

Some people love printing shite though. The last time someone handed me a stack of paper (that they were planning on emailing me too) I said 'If only there were some kind of magical way I could have viewed this on some sort of large electronic photograph machine".

"But I work better from paper!"

Pfft.

In real life I am very unassuming and mild-mannered, but nowadays whenever I am handed a piece of paper that I know originated from a document on our network, I just say "email it" and conspicuously chuck it in the bin. Some of them are learning.

tailwindhome

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... aCg0#t=64s

rubertoe

notsoblue wrote:

I remember when not everyone had a mobile phone, and you actually had to agree a time and a place beforehand when you wanted to meet up with someone.

Having to talk to someones mum on the phone...

craker

pangolin wrote:

You're right about games, they are so much better. When GTA came out it was amazing (Both sandbox top down and later sandbox 3D).

That is a highly controversial statement! Is Fifa 2019 really any better than Sensible Soccer? Platform games didn't get much better than Manic Miner IMHO. Even most 3D shooters are Doom with frills.

Anyway... I remember getting out first colour TV, must have been the mid 70s. We turned the colour right up and I recall watching The Generation Game in retina burning purples and reds and greens. Well, it was the seventies.

EKE_38BPM

A friend has just bought FIFA 13 for the PS3.
We both sat down with a beer each and the controllers in our hands, looking for the Vs option. It seems that there isn't one, or if there is, it is bloody well hidden.
If we had two PS3s and played over the internet, that would be doable, but games seem to have evolved to the point where you can no longer play against someone in the same room!

pangolin

craker wrote:

pangolin wrote:

You're right about games, they are so much better. When GTA came out it was amazing (Both sandbox top down and later sandbox 3D).

That is a highly controversial statement! Is Fifa 2019 really any better than Sensible Soccer? Platform games didn't get much better than Manic Miner IMHO. Even most 3D shooters are Doom with frills.

Anyway... I remember getting out first colour TV, must have been the mid 70s. We turned the colour right up and I recall watching The Generation Game in retina burning purples and reds and greens. Well, it was the seventies.

I must have missed Sensible Sandbox Soccer.

To say CoD is Doom with frills is dumbing things down a bit. If they released Catacombs 3D or Wolfenstein 3D and said 'well that's that, anything else will just be this with frills' then we would be living in a very different world, using something like Windows 3.1, and probably not discussing this on a forum.

So yes, I would say they have got better.

Kieran_Burns

pangolin wrote:

craker wrote:

pangolin wrote:

You're right about games, they are so much better. When GTA came out it was amazing (Both sandbox top down and later sandbox 3D).

That is a highly controversial statement! Is Fifa 2019 really any better than Sensible Soccer? Platform games didn't get much better than Manic Miner IMHO. Even most 3D shooters are Doom with frills.

Anyway... I remember getting out first colour TV, must have been the mid 70s. We turned the colour right up and I recall watching The Generation Game in retina burning purples and reds and greens. Well, it was the seventies.

I must have missed Sensible Sandbox Soccer.

To say CoD is Doom with frills is dumbing things down a bit. If they released Catacombs 3D or Wolfenstein 3D and said 'well that's that, anything else will just be this with frills' then we would be living in a very different world, using something like Windows 3.1, and probably not discussing this on a forum.

So yes, I would say they have got better.

Well - speaking of Doom.

I can very clearly remember that moment when I fired up the 4 disk demo version of it and sat there stunned at being able to move around in circles CIRCLES!!! and walking smoothly forward. Mind blowing.

CiB

At the other end of things I recall compiling COBOL source code on an 8086 IBM-compatible PC (remember those) and watching the compiler scroll the source through on the screen, just that bit too quickly to be readable but enough to spot any compile errors in real time rather than having to go to the o/p log. By the time we'd moved onto 386 flying machines it was all a blur. Then COBOL stopped happening and we moved on. <starts to plot SC Stats in COBOL & Assembler...>

veronese68

I don't know what some of the above posts mean. The times may well be changing, but I'm not keeping up.

mudcow007

CiB wrote:

At the other end of things I recall compiling COBOL source code on an 8086 IBM-compatible PC (remember those) and watching the compiler scroll the source through on the screen, just that bit too quickly to be readable but enough to spot any compile errors in real time rather than having to go to the o/p log. By the time we'd moved onto 386 flying machines it was all a blur. Then COBOL stopped happening and we moved on. <starts to plot SC Stats in COBOL & Assembler...>

was that like on windows XP - thats pretty old

i remember getting my Amiga 500+ with 1Mb of ram (yeah thats how i roll) an throwing code into from the latest issues of Amiga Format

an being amazed that after 16 pages of code, i was able to get a box shaped "ball" to bounce on screen

that was living....

CiB

mudcow007 wrote:

was that like on windows XP - thats pretty old

Pre-Windows; everything happened via the DOS prompt but there was a v boxy file manager that might have been called Gold Star or some such. I had a spreadsheet prog called Calc [probably] that filled the screen with cells & handled simple input + formulae. Navigation was a faff, but it worked.

The extended COBOL compiler handled graphics, simple boxes with the ability to position objects at relative X Y positions within the boundaries of the container box. That was a step forward being able to position stuff rather than everything being a new line on the screen. Maybe that's how Windows 1.0 was born eh?