Monday, June 15, 2009

Blast from The Past

For all you youngsters out there, here's what we watched Anime on back in my day:



Now that's some serious equipment! Big screen analog TV complete with top loading Betamax VCR all in a gorgeous wood grain console. There is no date on the ad, but it's probably circa about 1982/83 (I was about 12 then). Well worth 4 months pay.

When not watching flicks I would have been jamming on my Apple IIE (which was already 3 years old), which had dual 5 1/2" floppies and no hard drive, but I did have a slick cassette tape drive for it as well.


This would have been right around the time that I installed my 80 column card for my green screen monitor. At some point I actually got a color monitor for it with a color card, and I also added a Winchester drive a little later, which I think was 5mb and seemed at the time to have more space on it that I could ever use. I had, and used, that computer for 12 years, and we did everything on BBS's over a 9600baud modem - the kind that had a coupler you had to set the phone handset into. No e-mail. No WWW. No My-Space. No I-Pods. No X-Box. No Cel Phones.

Mine is the last generation that will ever live knowing what life was like when there was NO Internet or any of this other stuff that just Vampires our lives away. Oh well, now you can just read about it in the history books - you know, how people once actually went outside from time to time... LOL! -_^

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I saw that same image earlier today-- one of the commenters at that other site said it was from '79 or '80. Either way, it's still from a looooong time ago.

Just looking at that ad makes me feel old-- that set was couch-potato heaven back when I was a freshman in college. Yikes!

Maybe that's why I like vacuum-tube equipment-- they're like old friends, unlike all this new-fangled transistorized stuph like cellphones. :-D

And I can hear the young whippersnappers now: "Hey, Old Timer, what's a vacuum tube? And why should I care?"

Unknown said...

Actually, with how big the screen is, I wouldn't be surprised if it was rear projection instead of vacuum tube. They've been around since the 60's-70's.

I still remember my Apple IIE. And all the catalogs to order my games. It seems like such a long time ago.

David C. Matthews said...

I was trying to figure exactly what anime you'd watch on this setup... this must be just before Robotech The Macross Saga and Battle of the Planets hit the airwaves.

Unknown said...

How about Star Blazers? That aired here in 1979. Ah, the memories...

Xovian said...

Oh I remember those old computers.
My first computer was an AT&T computer which ran dos 2.11 and there was no such thing as a hard drive. the old 5.8 disks were not fun. 3.5's were so much better when they were released.

Sometimes it's a good thing for us old timers to have aw little nostalgia. Thanks Bob, for the trip down memory lane.

Unknown said...

You certainly wouldn't have had a 9600 baud modem that early (thinking Apple II timeframe), and if you did, it would've been rather tough to find a system to connect to that would've supported that speed. And the cost for that hardware..!

I first started BBS'ing back in the late 80s with a hand-me-down and already obsolete 300 baud modem, and I borrowed a 1200 baud modem (also rapidly becoming obsolete), then got a 2400 baud modem for Christmas in 88-89 or so. It was a Supramodem 2400 external. Heaven!

The system I used was an Atari 1040STf, and when I finally upgraded to a 386/33 PC in 1992, I bought a 9600 baud ISA internal modem, and finally experienced speed, with every mainstream BBS out there by that time supporting up to 14.4k, and some even the near mythical 28.8.

Sadly, BBS'ing was already starting to die, and the advent of the WWW killed it dead.