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Ah, sweet fidonet and your brethren.
Ah yes, Fidonet. I remember thinking that WWIV message boarding was more user-friendly than others, and had a gate to Fidonet to boot. Also sending UUCP email with bang paths. Those were the days...
...of stone knives and bearskins.
Ah if we are talking walking uphill both ways:
I once worked on a VAX with 1 meg of RAM...
shared with 250 other users...
... and accessed over 9.6Kbaud modem via a VT100 terminal (not an emulator, an actual VT100)...
I'm not saying that can't be beaten. I'm sure there are a substantial number of Buffista s who have used slide rules and abacuses.
We learned slide rules in high school. I am sooooo old.
How about an Atari 800 over an 300 baud acoustic coupler to an IBM 3081D shared by a couple of hundred people? I think your VAX trumps my IBM but I did have to shove the handset into the coupler. Good thing they were all the same shape back in those days.
I have a 110 baud acoustic coupler, made from a Heathkit I think, in my garage.
I may bring it to the FTF.
My first computer was a VIC 20. First computer I bought myself was a Dell laptop that was about 12 inches and a modem that took four months worth of calls to tech support to get working. Cost about $1200 in hard-earned babysitting money. (Well, I paid $600 of it. I had a deal with my parents that I could get my own computer if I earned the money for half of it and they would pay for the other half. I don't think they expected me to actually be able to save $600. I babysat for some truly crazy people to get that computer.) I learned to program on the VIC 20, though, so that one's still my favorite. And it still works.
First computer was bought through uni, in 1992 for $3,500. A PowerMac 7200. 32 MB HD, 8 MB RAM.
my first computer was a Texas Instruments with a cassette tape drive. I wrote adventure games in basic that took days to program and minutes to play.