Technology and computers and how good everything was in the old days

Sure does! I just checked my mail! Only thing is you now have to go through aol.com.

Malibuflyer wrote:

As said before: I was never part of the Compuserve Community

That explains it. Totally different world.

Malibuflyer wrote:

I get the impression we are talking about different times: AOL in Germany did not exist before 95 or 96. That is 10 years after Fido-Net arrived and even some years after the Fido-Lite split …

I started on Compuserve in 1990 with my first modem of 2400 bps and we had to actually call up in Columbus/OH, but got the first Swiss node in 1991. That is also when the German nodes became active. NAVCIS arrived at the same time and CIM for DOS in 1992, that is when I became active in the fora. The rate at the time was about 1$ per hour, which with the offline readers was not very expensive.

So if you are talking 1985 then yea, that is way earlier.

I got involved with all this via Sublogic’s Flight Simulator 2 and 3, which were released in 1986 and 88 respectively. 1989 saw Version 4, which was followed by the airplane and scenery generator. That was what allowed for the first time the development of add on scenery and airplanes. I got involved at that stage with Sublogic and converting scenery from MSFS to sublogic’s ATP. That was the time that Flight Simulation Forum on CSI was the place where the whole then very tiny scene came together, involving Bruce Artwick (the inventor), Mike Woodley(Sublogic, Scenery Disks), Hugo Feugen (BAO), Andras Kozma, Enrico Schiratti, Simon Hradecky (today of Avherald) and more. One can say that the whole addon scener for MSFS has it’s origin there.

I later became active in Avsig and Simpilot, where most of the FSF people had moved to, as well as the American Civil War forum.

Today ACW and some others have moved onto Facebook. Simpilot moved to the internet and became concentrated on real world aviation, eventually the founding of the Aviation Herald was initiated there.

172driver wrote:

Sure does! I just checked my mail! Only thing is you now have to go through aol.com.

The American accounts still work. I just got a reply from AOL Customer service: All European accounts were terminated (as announced) in July 2008-

I find it funny how this thread has developed into a debate of which is better the old internet or the new. The thing is that the world doesn’t stand still and with change there is usually both desired and unwanted consequences. Short of developing something new to get rid of or replace the unwanted consequences there is very little we or even governments can realistically do without incurring other unwanted consequences.
I well remember using Minitel for weather and notams. The only printer available for it at the time, which you could have in your own home was like a till receipt. For the young, who never experienced Minitel, just imagine the roll of paper needed for all the Notams and weather on a 2hr flight across France.
I also had Compuserve. At the time it seemed wonderful, it was complicated to get it all set up and I seem to remember something called Netscape playing a role, I remember buying the book for it. We had signed up for 3 Mb per month and honestly thought we would never use it all. Gradually our provider upped this to 9Mb at the same price.
Looking back now it was slow, there wasn’t anything worth looking at which would take you over the 9Mb limit in any month would mean leaving the connection on for long periods of time, such as when downloading a script, an then no one could use the phone. And there was no Google to help set everything up for you.
As I have written before I am a dinosaur when it comes to IT, I just don’t understand the logic of computers, to me it’s like doing a cryptic crossword with half the clues missing, so it was a surprise to be asked ,way back in time now, to get involved in a television series on technology.
I well remember a lunch with 2 guys from the research division of IBM as they outlined to me how they would soon be launching a box, which would sit on your desk and would be able to do things faster than the huge computers which took up a whole room. And not only that, every desk would have one, and you could even have one in your own home. To me it was the stuff of science fiction:) But just look where we are now, even this dinosaur is typing this on his smartphone and in a few seconds at the press of a button I can share it with a large group of people who share one of my passions, aviation.

America will always be at an advantage over Europe in these things because it is one country, one language, and most of the world’s top technology is based there. Huge economies of scale, negligible cultural resistance to what “somebody else” came up with, etc.

gallois wrote:

I seem to remember something called Netscape playing a role, I remember buying the book for it. We had signed up for 3 Mb per month and honestly thought we would never use it all. Gradually our provider upped this to 9Mb at the same price.

Compuserve were the first to offer Internet Access to a broader base via a browser called Mosaic. That thing was eventually sold and became Internet Explorer.

Netscape Navigator was a competition to Internet Explorer. It also was developed out of Mosaic initially, but became much stronger for a while, before Microsoft started bundling its Explorer with Windows. Consequently, Netscape was involved in founding the Mozilla organisation which went on to produce Firefox.

gallois wrote:

We had signed up for 3 Mb per month and honestly thought we would never use it all. Gradually our provider upped this to 9Mb at the same price.

The big difference was that everything was text, not graphics. That is why you did not need any large data volume. When Compuserve announced the file transfer capability, anything over 1mb was a no no. In order to be able to still send pictures, CSI developed the GIF picture format, which still is in use today.

gallois wrote:

And there was no Google to help set everything up for you.

I can’t remember how many CSI installations I helped set up in these days. Yea, that is right, we had no google or youtube to set things up, but we had friends who knew how.

johnh wrote:

First movers often don’t turn out to be the long term winners. I speak with painful experience as someone who spent a long time at DEC, who invented just about everything but didn’t stick around to see them make fortunes.

I agree. It is a shame the VAX people won over the Large Systems Group. I was sysop for a TOPS-20 installation for a couple of years. Still the best operating system ever, IMO. I would have loved TOPS-20 based workstations…

Trivia. A colleague of mine runs TOPS-20 on KL10 emulator running on an Arduino. He claims it runs faster than the real thing did.

Malibuflyer wrote:

There was also a major team in UK behind it but I do not remember their contribution

(GSM) One of them lives in the Isle of Man, and told me quite a few interesting stories about GSM development (he worked for Nokia at the time).

Can anyone think of a good title for a new thread to move all these posts to?

Technology and nostalgia?

How about Nostalogy ?

LOL !!