Take a Look Back

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Take a Look Back - There are some nice folks who are here on MyLot who, bless their dear souls, were not around to see the Internet really come in strong - with all of its computer tech and posting nonsense - back around the early 1970s. Today we can upload and download texts, images, videos, and all sorts of stuff - both legal and illegal - at blinding speeds (gazillions of bits per second ) and get to cussing and carrying-on when anything slower than that gets in our way. Old timers, and I am one of those, actually uploaded and downloaded files at the fantastically fast speed of 10 baud and on up to the blinding speed of 30 baud (10 and 30 baud rates are essentially 10 and 30 BITS per second) using what were called "acoustic couplers." There is a picture of one up on top. You stuck your voice telephone onto the coupler's rubber cups and the gadget would beep and carry on in code, both inbound and outbound, sending text and images back and forth for you. Back in the early days there was a "website" with the catchy name, "The Source." It was sort of like a baby version of "Google" or of one of our many other search engines. Right around that time there was some news about a huge sinkhole in the earth up by Kermit, Texas. It was a big deal to folks, and people wanted to know what was going on up there in Kermit before all of the people were swallowed up in that giant hole in the earth. At the same time, the "Muppet Show" was a big thing on television - really popular with the kids and us oldies. (Still is popular with me...) We were demonstrating how good little home computers were in keeping up with world events to a roomful of folks. Our telephone set got itself jammed into the cups of the acoustic coupler and was dialed in to query the then one and only search engine, "The Source." On the computer's keyboard we typed in our request for information about "Kermit" (using that one word as the tag). We wanted to know about the sinkhole stuff up in Kermit, Texas. Our printer started tapping the reply from "The Source" search engine, and the green screen (no color screens yet...) displayed the same information - all about Kermit the Frog, the little Muppets doll. Today, were we to ask for information like that, we'd probably get three pages of reply and all about every kind of Kermit ever known to man. Times have moved right along. One more thing in that photo up on top of interest. A "floppy disk" and its envelope are showing there. That floppy is one of several used back then. I had some of those "Elephant Disks" (that brand claimed that their disks would never forget) which were sized 5-1/4 inches in diameter, and I also had some that were 12 inches across. Up on my office shelf sits a big cardboard shipping box just full of those old "floppies." I am not sure why I hang onto them, but likely because they are old friends. They fit nothing that I own around here except for one thing - an old desktop computer from back in 1977 - the first one that I could claim as my very own. I remember using that old computer the first time for some word processing. I put its spelling checker to work on some text I had written. Watching it go to work, checking each word in the document, it was a regular marvel to me to see it check each and every word, one at a time - blinkety, blinkety, blink. Watching that was maybe the most amazing thing I'd ever seen a computer do up until that moment. Think what all you and I can do on a computer today. Even so, it is fun to take a look back, isn't it? * * * * * * * * * * Image source: Old Timer-Pixabay dot com, Acoustic coupler and floppy -Gus Kilthau * * * * * * * * * *