The Big Generation X Nostalgia Thread

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Acmegamer said:
Damn, how did you manage that. Back in the late seventies I still needed to halfies with my step brother to afford a used Datsun B-210. I can't imagine being able to get a car that ran for $200.00 back then even.
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i dunno, living in texas was cheap af in the 90s.
 
Jetstream said:
I live in Texas and in 2000, my first car was $10k. It was not new.
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mine was a 79 chevy station wagon. cast iron chassis, plastic seats, no air conditioning. i had to bring a change of clothes and basically peel myself off the seats when driving anywhere in the daytime. called it The Deadly Dinosaur.
 
TristramEvans said:
mine was a 79 chevy station wagon. cast iron chassis, plastic seats, no air conditioning. i had to bring a change of clothes and basically peel myself off the seats when driving anywhere in the daytime. called it The Deadly Dinosaur.
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I would describe that less as "living in Texas is cheap" and more "I bought a junker."
Acmegamer said:
I'm sorry... again.

TristramEvans TristramEvans Ugh. No AC? In Texas? (shudder)
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Look, I'm in Austin. It's fine. Austin and Dallas are fine. Dunno about El Paso. I didn't like San Antonio but that was probably just the school. Houston scares the shit out of me.

I avoid pretty much everything else that isn't full of Czech immigrants and descendants.
 
Jetstream said:
I would describe that less as "living in Texas is cheap" and more "I bought a junker."
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well, it wasnt pretty, but it ran just fine. i think an equivalent "junker" these days, up in Van, would run me minimum $3k

but no, living in Texas was f'n cheap. $200/mnth for a one bedroom apt, less than 50 cents for a gallon of gas, $100 would feed you well for a month.
I made $8/hour and lived like a king.


Jetstream said:
Look, I'm in Austin. It's fine. Austin and Dallas are fine. Dunno about El Paso. I didn't like San Antonio but that was probably just the school. Houston scares the shit out of me.
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yeah, Houston is where i was, and just outside of it, Richmond-Rosenberg.
 
My parent were kind and cruel. They gave me a station wagon and a crate motor. When I figured out how to put the engine in the car and get it running I'd have a working car.
 
I bought my first car at 15 for like, $500 I think and that was in the late 90s (I worked summers with my dad, he was a building contractor that mostly did reno/repair work, so I spent most of every summer painting/building decks/repairing roofs/etc, so actually had a decent amount of money at the time). It was an 80s buick century that someone had put a home made kayak rack on the top. Just bolted some pipe to the top basically through the roof which was probably why it was cheap as hell because it ran perfectly and was otherwise kept up well.

My dad and I took it off and bondoed and sanded the top down. Other than the fact that the roof liner was gone and it had four pink spots on it ran great. Until a deer decided to commit suicide on it on a blind curve.

Also, I miss how cheap it was to live where I do in the late 90s/early 2000s. I remember I used to pay like, $170 a month splitting an apartment with 2 other people. I made like, $12 an hour and could afford to do whatever I really felt like back then.

Nowadays, a 3br apartment is like, $2k minimum here.
 
EmperorNorton said:
Nowadays, a 3br apartment is like, $2k minimum here.
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In the Toronto area and suburbs, $2K will barely get you a 1-bedroom basement apartment these days.

My friend and his wife just bought a house, and their mortgage payments will be less than they were paying to rent a 2-bdrm apartment. It’s insane.
 
Evil Kenevil for the Win!

evelk_4.jpg
 
I'm late Gen-X, so my 70's toys were the Fischer Price variety. But 80's toys? Hoo boy - Masters of the Universe, the first post-deregulation after-school toy cartoon started airing my first weekend of kindergarten. I was and remain fully indoctrinated by all the major 80's hits - He-Man, Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, etc etc...even TMNT as my very last major toy franchise.
 
Anybody grow up using BBSes? I've been online since 1981, but it wasn't on the DARPA proto-Internet. I didn't get on the Internet until 1995.

Before then, I used Bulletin Board Systems. First one I ever logged onto was called the Rat's Nest in Fort Worth, TX. Thereafter followed dozens more throughout the years.

Screenshots of those days are super super hard to come by, because PrintScreen wasn't a thing back then on the old Commie64/Apple II computers. Basically you woulda had to take a picture of the screen on a camera and then save that picture for a few decades and then scan it in now. If you do a google image search for BBSes, you'll find a lot of modern iterations that were made to mimic the BBS environment of the 90s, with lots of color and unicode characters. But when I started, it was ASCII and it was monochrome.

My first modem was a 300 baud modem. I could read the text in real-time as it scrolled word-by-word across the screen. I resisted upgrading to a 1200 baud modem for a long time simply because I didn't want to have the text appear on the screen too fast.

In the mid-80s, BBS software advanced enough to use ANSI instead of ASCII. ANSI was kind of an extended character set for ASCII, and allowed for the use of a whopping 16 different colors. It also had the ability to issue cursor movement commands, which allowed for some very crude animation.

By the early '90s, and my last gasp with BBSes, they had evolved to the point where you could actually play ASCII games on them. They also had the ability to share data with other BBSes using the same software. One of the last BBSes I used was part of a global BBS network that worked essentially like a very slow web forum. I could make posts in the message board area, and then every night the BBS I used would zip up its message board data and pass it along to other BBSes in the network. And they would pass their data along to other BBSes, and so on and so forth. So I could talk to people in (for example) Bahrain. It would take maybe 3 days for me to get their reply, but it was a global conversation and it was pretty neat.

That was back in the day when if you were online, you were a grade-A geek. Nobody was online except for the seriously computer literate, and sometimes I really miss those days.
 
Afterburner said:
Anybody grow up using BBSes? I've been online since 1981, but it wasn't on the DARPA proto-Internet. I didn't get on the Internet until 1995.

Before then, I used Bulletin Board Systems. First one I ever logged onto was called the Rat's Nest in Fort Worth, TX. Thereafter followed dozens more throughout the years.

Screenshots of those days are super super hard to come by, because PrintScreen wasn't a thing back then on the old Commie64/Apple II computers. Basically you woulda had to take a picture of the screen on a camera and then save that picture for a few decades and then scan it in now. If you do a google image search for BBSes, you'll find a lot of modern iterations that were made to mimic the BBS environment of the 90s, with lots of color and unicode characters. But when I started, it was ASCII and it was monochrome.

My first modem was a 300 baud modem. I could read the text in real-time as it scrolled word-by-word across the screen. I resisted upgrading to a 1200 baud modem for a long time simply because I didn't want to have the text appear on the screen too fast.

In the mid-80s, BBS software advanced enough to use ANSI instead of ASCII. ANSI was kind of an extended character set for ASCII, and allowed for the use of a whopping 16 different colors. It also had the ability to issue cursor movement commands, which allowed for some very crude animation.

By the early '90s, and my last gasp with BBSes, they had evolved to the point where you could actually play ASCII games on them. They also had the ability to share data with other BBSes using the same software. One of the last BBSes I used was part of a global BBS network that worked essentially like a very slow web forum. I could make posts in the message board area, and then every night the BBS I used would zip up its message board data and pass it along to other BBSes in the network. And they would pass their data along to other BBSes, and so on and so forth. So I could talk to people in (for example) Bahrain. It would take maybe 3 days for me to get their reply, but it was a global conversation and it was pretty neat.

That was back in the day when if you were online, you were a grade-A geek. Nobody was online except for the seriously computer literate, and sometimes I really miss those days.
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I started on C-64 BBS's.
I tended to have my friends discarded modems so if they moved up the baud scale I was one generation behind. 300 when they were at 1200, 1200 when they were at 2400 etc.
Two of my close friends had extra phone lines in their houses and ran warez BBS's. I did that from the early 80s until around 1990 when I went to university. We had terminals in the basement of our dorms so I switch to the Internet for my fun and communication.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
In the Toronto area and suburbs, $2K will barely get you a 1-bedroom basement apartment these days.
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That's closer to what I am used to as well. If you can find a vacancy in the first place.
Afterburner said:
Anybody grow up using BBSes? I've been online since 1981, but it wasn't on the DARPA proto-Internet. I didn't get on the Internet until 1995.
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I was using BBSes in the 90's and MUDs for decades after that.
 
Afterburner said:
Anybody grow up using BBSes? I've been online since 1981, but it wasn't on the DARPA proto-Internet. I didn't get on the Internet until 1995.

Before then, I used Bulletin Board Systems. First one I ever logged onto was called the Rat's Nest in Fort Worth, TX. Thereafter followed dozens more throughout the years.

Screenshots of those days are super super hard to come by, because PrintScreen wasn't a thing back then on the old Commie64/Apple II computers. Basically you woulda had to take a picture of the screen on a camera and then save that picture for a few decades and then scan it in now. If you do a google image search for BBSes, you'll find a lot of modern iterations that were made to mimic the BBS environment of the 90s, with lots of color and unicode characters. But when I started, it was ASCII and it was monochrome.

My first modem was a 300 baud modem. I could read the text in real-time as it scrolled word-by-word across the screen. I resisted upgrading to a 1200 baud modem for a long time simply because I didn't want to have the text appear on the screen too fast.

In the mid-80s, BBS software advanced enough to use ANSI instead of ASCII. ANSI was kind of an extended character set for ASCII, and allowed for the use of a whopping 16 different colors. It also had the ability to issue cursor movement commands, which allowed for some very crude animation.

By the early '90s, and my last gasp with BBSes, they had evolved to the point where you could actually play ASCII games on them. They also had the ability to share data with other BBSes using the same software. One of the last BBSes I used was part of a global BBS network that worked essentially like a very slow web forum. I could make posts in the message board area, and then every night the BBS I used would zip up its message board data and pass it along to other BBSes in the network. And they would pass their data along to other BBSes, and so on and so forth. So I could talk to people in (for example) Bahrain. It would take maybe 3 days for me to get their reply, but it was a global conversation and it was pretty neat.

That was back in the day when if you were online, you were a grade-A geek. Nobody was online except for the seriously computer literate, and sometimes I really miss those days.
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I got my first modem for my C64 right around that time as well. Hunting down BBS's was great fun. Compuserv was the up and coming service, for which there wasn't a local number. Whoops lol. Good thing dad worked for the phone company when the $2000 phone bill showed up :shock:
 
Bunch said:
I started on C-64 BBS's.
I tended to have my friends discarded modems so if they moved up the baud scale I was one generation behind. 300 when they were at 1200, 1200 when they were at 2400 etc.
Two of my close friends had extra phone lines in their houses and ran warez BBS's. I did that from the early 80s until around 1990 when I went to university. We had terminals in the basement of our dorms so I switch to the Internet for my fun and communication.
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The cranking days when you were able to upgrade to 2400 bauuuuuuud! lol. Oh the memories.
 
Afterburner said:
Anybody grow up using BBSes? I've been online since 1981, but it wasn't on the DARPA proto-Internet. I didn't get on the Internet until 1995.
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I used to connect for door games and Bluewave packets when I should have been sleeping after getting home from my evening job. I still have friends I made in those days, although we can go years without catching up nowadays. I've been chasing that sense of community ever since.
 
Acmegamer said:
The cranking days when you were able to upgrade to 2400 bauuuuuuud! lol. Oh the memories.
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Yeah! The really fun stuff was towards the end of the modem era, when US Robotics was pushing out all kinds of crazy hacks on 9600 baud modems to get them to 14.4, 19.6, 56k, etc. For a while, before DSL became a thing, I was running three phone lines to the house with a 3 or 4 (I forget) line USR modem which would combine 2 or 3 of those lines into a Super-Connection! (tm). I was the total shit running 3 lines at 56k for a an amazing grand total of... 168Kbps. :hmmm:
 
bleys21 said:
Yeah! The really fun stuff was towards the end of the modem era, when US Robotics was pushing out all kinds of crazy hacks on 9600 baud modems to get them to 14.4, 19.6, 56k, etc. For a while, before DSL became a thing, I was running three phone lines to the house with a 3 or 4 (I forget) line USR modem which would combine 2 or 3 of those lines into a Super-Connection! (tm). I was the total shit running 3 lines at 56k for a an amazing grand total of... 168Kbps. :hmmm:
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I think my last modem was 56k.
 
Acmegamer said:
Loved my Amiga. Was such ahead of it's time computer and blew away my previous DOS based systems.
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Same here. I had an A2000 that I made a bunch of mods to. I think I even did one of those processor upgrades to it. The Amiga had a totally different design with custom chips to handle common functions rather than the CPU having to do everything, thus enabling great multitasking on a machine that only had an 8Mhz 68000 chip in it.

At work, for the video production classes, we bought A2000's with Video Toasters, which was an insane amount of video editing power in a personal computer box for the time (1995 to probably 2000? ) They were doing close to pro level work with those machines.
 
In the mid to late 80s I did a bit of BBS stuff. A friend of mine actually ran one for a very short period of time with his C64.

We sat on one BBS all night (it was a Software store's BBS) downloading Ultima IV. My friend got lots of cracked games.

I remember the BBS software was starting to support games in addition to sysop chat and message boards. You could play things like text adventures. There was some game that was similar to the old Star Trek sector clearing game that was pretty common.

I visited mostly late at night and the sysops would often be bored, and want to chat about fantasy novels, D&D, and stuff.
 
TristramEvans said:
View attachment 62198
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Lol, that was my dad in 1982, when I was asking for a C64 for Christmas...

...turns out, that purchase was a pretty good deal, as I ended up with a career in IT, and now I am being paid to stare at a computer screen all day. :grin:

No one told me it would totally fuck up my eyesight though... :thumbsdown:
 
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