Ok, this is my first post in this forum (need to put that "invite message" out of its misery - as if anyone spending enough time online to find this forum is going to be bashful about posting, LOL).

My first online experience was on an Apple IIC - new and improved, compact for its day, sporting a huge 128k floppy drive with that amount of RAM - what a work horse!!

The modem was 300 BAUD.

My first service was the Source (surprised to see that only one other posted about the source), then, when it went belly up, I moved on to AppleAmerica or Appleonline or something like that - it was based in Virginia and eventually became America Online. Somehow, I found and joined Compuserve - still have my original subscription - with its xxxxx.xxx numeric ID numbers. I still run the classic compuserve version on my windows machine - have had no luck installing it in Ubuntu with or without Crossover.

My communications software was called AppleTalk.

There was no hard drive on the computer, so any downloading was limited to what would fit in ram or on my 5 1/4 inch floppy - but, oh, were those fun times. I felt like I was really breaking some new ground.

Other software of the time was equally ground breaking and time consuming. I upgraded my IIC by adding a zip chip that increased the CPU speed from 1 something to almost 8 something (was that Mhz??). Hard Hat mac would have spasms at that speed, and you could not keep up with Munchman at all.

I used a "sophisticated" desktop publishing program for which I paid a lot of money - came in a hard plastic box, had a slick thick manual, and the splash screen featured the letters SPRINGBOARD dropping down from the top of the screen and bouncing into position.

It was very capable, but too hungry for memory on my pitifully limited little machine. Anything more than a very lightly populated page would cause untold thrashing between the RAM and the floppy-contained scratch disk. But it worked - not unlike aps like Pagemaker that would follow in the Windows/Apple world.

All of this occured back in the early '80's. Thinking back on it, I was absolutely as hooked then as I am now. I had this text based game called Amnesia - a roll playing puzzle where you had to type in your responses to questions that would pop up during the course of navigating through the game. A close answer often was not close enough - agonizing.

I apologize for going a bit OT, but, this thread just brought so many memories flooding back to my brain. There were so many evenings when I would encourage my young son to sit and watch me plod around on the keyboard, all excited to have discovered this or that mundane feature of the fledgling internet. He would try to act interested, but, would often just nod off in the middle of some "important" discovery.

Ah, yes, those were (weren't) the days.

As one who experienced that age, I can truly appreciate how much more all of us can do on today's machines as we spend so much less on equipment and software (much less on software since having discovered open source).

I remember paying $1800 for my first flat-bed scanner. It was an Epson color scanner with 600 DPI resolution.

Still does an excellent job - although it uses a parallel interface - I should try to get it working in Ubuntu - think that can be done???

Well, I should close now - I've meandered all over the place.

Great thread - thanks!!

Del