# First Experiences On the WWW



## mikeny (Aug 21, 2006)

There's a Firefox thread here and the Commodore 64 was referenced. It got me thinking about the first time I was ever "online". I would like to share my experience and would like to read your stories too.

My father subscribed to the ISP, IDT and had some kind of "shell" account where he was able to access text only using the Commodore 128. It was very odd. I think we went the CIA Factbook page a lot and some MLB stat page.  We also printed out the lyrics to every Pink Floyd song ever with some archaic dot matrix printer where we needed to seperate each page for 1/2 and hour after it was done. I remember also printing the script to Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

The first time I saw images online was on my future wife's Uncle's compuserve account which I was trying to use to get research articles for school. Of course I still needed countless hours photocopying in the library as the Library of Congress website didn't have what I needed and/or was too expensive.:eek2:

Remember your first times online?

It's amazing how far the web has come.


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## Stuart Sweet (Jun 19, 2006)

I spent a decent amount of time on Compuserve in the early 1980s. It was underwhelming even at the time, but the idea of being "connected" was very cool. 

In 1989 the company I worked for became a Prodigy Gold Vendor so I had an unlimited account. For those who don't remember Prodigy, it was the first widely-promoted online service that was even remotely graphical. Full of potential, but dog slow. 

By 1990 I was one of the first members of America Online when it required GeOS to work. I liked GeOS, it ran a lot faster on an XT computer than Windows did. 

I moved back to CompuServe in 1993 and by 1994 CompuServe had a method where you could download Mosaic and use your Compuserve ID to log on to the internet. I was really impressed except CompuServe charged by the minute.... oops!

I got my first true ISP account in the fall of 1995 and my first broadband connection (768k) in 1999. 

I continue to be impressed with what the web can do.


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## mikeny (Aug 21, 2006)

Good stuff Stuart. Yes, I remember my wife's Uncle's compuserve account evolved into Prodigy. He and my father in law could go online simultaneously from different locations which was a unique (and $ saving) feature. Then it turned into Prodigy/SBC Yahoo, right?


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## sigma1914 (Sep 5, 2006)

Around 1993-94...me and my dumb teenage friends discovered AOL and chatting. Then, we discovered AOL private rooms that distributed naughty jpegs. We were young and dumb.


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## naijai (Aug 19, 2006)

sigma1914 said:


> Around 1993-94...me and my dumb teenage friends discovered AOL and chatting. Then, we discovered AOL private rooms that distributed naughty jpegs. We were young and dumb.


 definetly remember those times and yes i agree with the assessment "young & dumb".


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## spartanstew (Nov 16, 2005)

No idea.


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## Jimmy 440 (Nov 17, 2007)

My 1st expierences online were with an Electronic bulliten board from Union Beach NJ called "Instant Access".They had all sorts of naughty photos too <LOL>.Then I moved onto PCLINK,the predecessor of AOL.Then AOL.I used to remember signing onto the service with one of those "modern 300 baud" modems through a local access #.They also had a gateway to the internet.It was sooooooooo slooow.
Boy,it took around 5-10 minutes to download a small picture.I think the first WWW site I accessed was a subway map of NYC.And if you had a problem connecting,you were sometimes online for 2-3 hours just to get to a CSR who were just about as equally useless as some others we can all think of.I fiddled around with others including Compuserve & Prodigy,and eventually wound up at [email protected] which is now just Comcast.


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## dennisj00 (Sep 27, 2007)

I did the Prodigy, Source, Compuserve and a lot of independent BBSes but life really changed the day I brought home a beta copy of Windows 95 -- I think it was August or September of '94.

It included a dial up MSN account and I got it working about 7pm that evening. At 3 or 4 am the next morning, my wife and I were still 'surfing' and could not believe the vast amount of information available! That was probably on a 32k dialup modem!

Still surfing!


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## FHSPSU67 (Jan 12, 2007)

I also subscribed to The Source for awhile, first using a 300 baud modem, then a 1200 baud, I think.
Memories!


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## ncxcstud (Apr 22, 2007)

My first 'online' experience was when I lived in Naples, Italy. After school on the Navy Base, I would walk over to my mom's office some days and hang out in the hospital. Why? Because she had Netscape and I was able to go to the Electronic Gaming Monthly website (which was like www.nuke.com or something...). Then, when we moved back to the states in 1996, I discovered a little program called Napster....and my dad bought a CD burner (1x!). I was the king of the school for a few months


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## HDJulie (Aug 10, 2008)

I first got on the Internet in 1993 when I went back to college to finish my degree. The first time I was in school in the early 80's we used a mainframe for programming & all we had was email. Going back, there were a few PC labs but the school was mostly Unix labs. We had Netscape (or whatever it was called back then -- had the dragon that breathed fire) but most of the searching was text based. Computer Science was in the College of Engineering & I was asked to give a presentation to the Engineering majors who were non-CS to show them how to use the Net. I remember talking to them about Gopher & Veronica. My mother was online at this time with Prodigy. I even remember her email address -- [email protected]. I also remember playing MUD's on one of the Universities two dial-up lines . Man, we were addicted to those games.


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## Mike Bertelson (Jan 24, 2007)

Stuart Sweet said:


> I spent a decent amount of time on Compuserve in the early 1980s. It was underwhelming even at the time, but the idea of being "connected" was very cool.
> 
> In 1989 the company I worked for became a Prodigy Gold Vendor so I had an unlimited account. For those who don't remember Prodigy, it was the first widely-promoted online service that was even remotely graphical. Full of potential, but dog slow.
> 
> ...


I was with Compuserve through the '80s and partially in the '90s. They had some great tech forums. I also used dialup to access a few favorite BBSs.

Prodigy, now there's something I forgot about. I seem to remember getting something from Sears of all places(I think it was an insert in my bill). I was on it for a while but liked the forums on Compuserve so I went back.

In '94 I started working in the IT dept of a local hospital. Until this point I used dialup through Compuserve to get the internet. For the next couple of months we worked on setting up a new network and systems. Then near the end of '94 we got a T-1 line. For almost two months I was the only one with access and had what amounted to my own private T-1 line with all the brand new Cat5 cabling on a fiber optic backbone. I was a happy camper. 

By then I quit using the forums on Compuserve as my sole source of info and bounced around between ISPs. Who ever could get me access to the web with the least problems.

Mike


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## elaclair (Jun 18, 2004)

Wow, this thread brings back some strange and interesting memories...

My first "on-line" experience would have been in the early 70's, on what I guess could be considered the consumer pre-cursor to the Internet. We'd go to one of the science buildings at the University of Arkansas, log on to one of the really spiffy IBM Selectric typewriter terminals, and remote connect to SuNY in New York (They had the best version of moon lander we could find)..we went through a LOT of paper on those terminals. :lol: I also ran the gamut of BBS's, Compuserve (I still remember my compuserve ID 71777,334 which, to say the least is a bit "odd") Like Stuart, GEM graphics/GeOS for AOL were a lot better than the native Microsoft stuff (Hmm, things haven't changed much....). Progressed from a 110baud acoustic modem, to 300,1200,2400, 16,800, and 56k flavors. Remember having to piece together like 10 downloads of encrypted text, decode the result, and get a really cool 800x600x64 GIF file. At the time JPEGs were EVIL because they contained compression, and if you had 1Meg of memory in your system, you were the bomb! My IBM AT computer cost more than my car....

Ah, been a fun ride........


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## BattleZone (Nov 13, 2007)

I was on local BBSs in the late 80s on friends' computers, and first accessed the Internet through Exec PC's (a huge national BBS) Internet link. All text-based of course. Gopher searches and FTPing files. Email that could get through in an hour, where email through our networked BBSs took days to "hop" between systems.

A year later, I moved into a house with a couple of friends, and one of them got a SLIP account, and we eventually got Mosaic working, but at the time there was very little to see, as there were only a few thousand websites and they are almost all text-only. It was also very slow, but much nicer than Lynx. Later we started downloading the Netscape betas, and soon after, websites started exploding. And they were all grey, and far too many of them had flashing red text...


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## Jimmy 440 (Nov 17, 2007)

And does anybody remember this , "Internet in a Box" ? That was my first web browser.
It came on 4 or 5 big 5 1/4" floppy disks.It was such a PITA to configure.


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## MIKE0616 (Dec 13, 2006)

mikeny said:


> Good stuff Stuart. Yes, I remember my wife's Uncle's compuserve account evolved into Prodigy. He and my father in law could go online simultaneously from different locations which was a unique (and $ saving) feature. Then it turned into Prodigy/SBC Yahoo, right?


Compuserve was owned by H&R Block and was later bought out by AOL.

Prodigy was a joint venture of IBM / Sears. Yes, P* was later branded SBC / Yahoo when Sears unloaded their part to IBM, which dumped it to the Mexican phone company, who dumped it to..... etc.


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## ncxcstud (Apr 22, 2007)

Do y'all remember Wow! ? That's what my grandparents used in the mid-90s

Y'all remember what ESPN.com used to look like???

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?page=anniversary/1995


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## Greg Alsobrook (Apr 2, 2007)

It was probably 1992-93... My dad had a friend who worked in IT... and they had internet access at their business... It was a Saturday afternoon... and he showed me The Trojan Room Coffee Machine and Yahoo!... I was so fascinated, I pestered my parents until we got internet access at our house...


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## tcusta00 (Dec 31, 2007)

Greg Alsobrook said:


> It was probably 1992-93... My dad had a friend who worked in IT... and they had internet access at their business... It was a Saturday afternoon... and he showed me The Trojan Room Coffee Machine and Yahoo!... I was so fascinated, I pestered my parents until we got internet access at our house...


That's pretty cool - I'd never heard of that.


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## Shades228 (Mar 18, 2008)

I used a public access line for Fermilab on their vax cluster all the way through high school. When I graduated in 94 I helped start an ISP.


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## phrelin (Jan 18, 2007)

Like Stuart, we first "got connected" in the early '80's with Compuserve. We were using Tandy Model II's and receiving text at a frustrating slow speed, it seemed only slightly faster than the teletype bringing "wire service" stories at a newspaper I worked for in 1969. It wasn't really very useful but it was interesting. By the mid-90's we ended up on AOL after weird experiences with PC Link which was it's predecessor.

Being a packrat, I still have a couple those early '80's computers and modems stored somewhere under the house and have a web page about them.


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## Steve Mehs (Mar 21, 2002)

My first internet experience was on December 26 1995. The day after I got my first computer. A shiny new IBM Aptiva with 4Mb of RAM, a 1GB hard drive, 2X CD-ROM drive and a 100MHz Intel Pentium processor and a 13" monitor. I remember unpacking the computer Christmas night and started to hook it up and asked my mother 'What is this for?' as I held a phone cable in my hand. She said 'I think it's for the internet' and I responded 'Why would I ever want to go on the internet?'

The next day she signed up for a 100 hour free trial of Prodigy internet. The first website I ever visited in my life? Porn.com followed by sex.com. Here I am, 10 years old surfing porn on 19K dial up. Life was so friggen cool! The good old days, all the porn I could handle with no fear of spyware and viruses. Other then porn I didn't see what the big fuss of the internet was about, so we canceled Prodigy. A few months later we tried Compuserve, had that for a while, then a friend convinced us to switch to AOL, that was version 2.0. In about 1998 got sick and tired of AOL and went with a real ISP, Sprint Internet Passport, they were bought out by Earthlink, I kept Earthlink until 2004 when I got Road Runner. 

I remembering turning on the computer for the first time, and being prompted to choose between Windows 3.1 and OS/2, not knowing what either was I chose OS/2. Now I have two Pocket PCs and a cell phone that can run circles around that first computer. In 1999 when I got my second computer I couldn't believe at how blazing fast 56K was.

I cannot believe at how much the net has changed since then. Even with all the stupidity like dancing babies, FaceSpace and Tweeters, there has been progress like complex database backends and CSS.


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## HDJulie (Aug 10, 2008)

Steve Mehs said:


> My first internet experience was on December 26 1995. The day after I got my first computer. A shiny new IBM Aptiva with 4Mb of RAM, a 1GB hard drive, 2X CD-ROM drive and a 100MHz Intel Pentium processor and a 13" monitor. ...


My first was an IBM PS2 with 4 Mb of RAM. The processor was a 486SX25 & to upgrade it I added the math coprocessor which I think made it a 486DX25. The 486 processors were the predecessor to the Pentium, right? Y'all remember when the Pentium first came out & it had a problem calculating past a certain decimal point & Intel had to do a recall?


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## Milkman (Dec 6, 2006)

I started in the 80's on my Commodore. There was a service for Commodore computers called Q-Link. It was kind of like AOL for Commodore. You would get x amount of _minutes_ per month for free (I forgot how many it was, but I think it was something like 200 minutes). After that, you are charged per minute.

Well, one month between me and my brother, we racked up a $250 bill. My parents very quickly removed our Q-Link access. 

I was into BBS'ing for a while, and even ran my own (all on my Commodore).

After that I got my first IBM compatible computer (which was an Epson 386). I kept going with the BBS'ing, and eventually got on to the Internet.

Been doing forums and stuff on the internet, all the way to present. In all of my years of doing this, on all the various different types of BBS', forums, etc., I have never had to actually place someone on ignore, but that streak was broken just in the last couple of weeks.


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## sigma1914 (Sep 5, 2006)

Steve Mehs said:


> <snip>In 1999 when I got my second computer I couldn't believe at how blazing fast 56K was.<snip>


Yeah, I was in shock going from 28.8 to 56k. I was then blown away again when our university added the Ethernet.



Milkman said:


> <snip>Well, one month between me and my brother, we racked up a $250 bill. My parents very quickly removed our Q-Link access.
> ...I have never had to actually place someone on ignore, but that streak was broken just in the last couple of weeks. <snip>


I had a few $200 & $300 AOL bills. Can you even see my post? :lol:


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## ncxcstud (Apr 22, 2007)

Did y'all ever have a computer with a 'Turbo' button? Effectively making a 133mhz a 166mhz processor with a push of a button? 

I believe ours was a Packard Bell that had it? Wasn't custom built either...straight from the store...


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## Milkman (Dec 6, 2006)

ncxcstud said:


> Did y'all ever have a computer with a 'Turbo' button? Effectively making a 133mhz a 166mhz processor with a push of a button?
> 
> I believe ours was a Packard Bell that had it? Wasn't custom built either...straight from the store...


Yup my 386, my 486 PCs, and maybe my first few Pentiums did too.


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## dettxw (Nov 21, 2007)

I had to call a kiddo to ask as I couldn't remember!

Back when we lived in Grand forks (circa 1992-1993) we had a second phone line and #1 son ran a dial-up BBS. He actually had quite a few users for what it was. 
I can't recall if we kept up the BBS when we moved to Palmdale. 
I loved going down to Pomona to the LA Fairgrounds to the periodic Computer Marketplace where all the local Computer Shopper-type places would set up their wares at really good prices. Spent a lot of money there and saw my first Pentium chip on display. 

Our first dial-up internet in 1995 was from a local Oklahoma City provider Questar (now long out of business). Then came [email protected] broadband cable, later taken over by Cox when @Home went under. 
Still using the Cox Cable internet service, but not their cable TV. :lol:


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Milkman said:


> I started in the 80's on my Commodore. There was a service for Commodore computers called Q-Link.


I spent quite a bit of time on QuantumLink and Compu$erve early on but it was too darned expensive. I joined PeopleLink later to be amongst other Amiga users. I spent many hours on local BBSs doing much the same as I do now but with a considerably more "utilitarian" interface. I eventually became a "forum op" on the local public library BBS. We didn't seem to need moderators back then. At the high point we had eight lines running on an 80286.

Does anyone remember the first modem they got that they couldn't read faster than?


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## Marlin Guy (Apr 8, 2009)

There seems to be some technical liberties being taken with regard to the Subject Line.

The World Wide Web did not come into being until late 1990, and even then it was limted to Europe, so it was hardly worldwide. The first server outside of Europe came online in December 1991.

The Internet is a different story, as that has been around since the 60's.

Being online and being on the WWW are not one in the same.

I was never on the Internet prior to the advent of the WWW.
I got on the WWW on the December 27th, 1996.
I signed up with AOL.
On December 30th, after a 45 minute phone wait, I canceled AOL and moved to a local upstart ISP.


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## MIKE0616 (Dec 13, 2006)

Marlin Guy said:


> I was never on the Internet prior to the advent of the WWW.
> I got on the WWW on the December 27th, 1996.
> I signed up with AOL.
> On December 30th, after a 45 minute phone wait, I canceled AOL and moved to a local upstart ISP.


and from what I remember of AOHell, how long did you wait to cancel your account?


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## FHSPSU67 (Jan 12, 2007)

"I loved going down to Pomona to the LA Fairgrounds to the periodic Computer Marketplace where all the local Computer Shopper-type places would set up their wares at really good prices. Spent a lot of money there and saw my first Pentium chip on display."

There's some memories I can relate to. 150 mile roundtrips to Pittsburgh at least once a month.


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

My first access to the Internet was in April-May, 1989 through a system called sactoh0. This was a AT&T box that was set up by a PacBell employee that had a dedicated connection. I could log in through my Apple //c through a terminal emulation for 90 minutes a day. You had to have some knowledge of Unix to use the system, and to retrieve files, I had to send a e-mail request. There was no such thing as www, but there was Usenet news.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Marlin Guy said:


> Being online and being on the WWW are not one in the same.


Today's web was not the only instance of hypertext on the Internet. Many of us that have been around for a while remember gopher that popped out of its hole in 1991.


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## tfederov (Nov 18, 2005)

My first experience with the Internet is when I was in pre-school....

Just kidding. :lol:

I think I was fresh out of the Marines in '94 and we got AOL at my mom's house. I did some chat room stuff and that was it. To be honest, I wasn't really impressed but then again I didn't understand the whole potential of being online either. My second stint in the Marines in 95 is where I started learning about Yahoo! and the ability to pretty much pull down and learn whatever could come to mind. My first big thing was pulling down midis because I loved music.


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## JcT21 (Nov 30, 2004)

my first experience online was with a webtv back in 1997. i was so overwhelmed with being online... feeling of pure excitement as i entered my first chat room... shewww i remember it well. up all night and all day ..just couldnt get enough of being "online". then in november 1999 i got my first desktop, a compaq loaded with win98, 64mb of ram and a 333 mhz amd k6-2 processor. i think it had a 4 gb hard drive. used compuserve for a long time before i got smart and got a cheaper local isp. kinda makes ya realize just how fast things change.


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## Shardin (Nov 26, 2006)

ncxcstud said:


> Did y'all ever have a computer with a 'Turbo' button? Effectively making a 133mhz a 166mhz processor with a push of a button?
> 
> I believe ours was a Packard Bell that had it? Wasn't custom built either...straight from the store...


Yeah, but mine made the 8086 (that's right, no 3 or 4 in front:lol boost from 4Mhz to 8Mhz


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## spartanstew (Nov 16, 2005)

Steve Mehs said:


> My first internet experience was on December 26 1995. The day after I got my first computer. A shiny new IBM Aptiva with 4Mb of RAM, a 1GB hard drive, 2X CD-ROM drive and a 100MHz Intel Pentium processor and a 13" monitor.


How do you guys remember that kind of crap? I don't even know what the specs are on my current computer. I have no idea how much ram or gigs or what kind of drive it has. I'm pretty sure the monitor is bigger than 13' though.


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## Shardin (Nov 26, 2006)

spartanstew said:


> How do you guys remember that kind of crap? I don't even know what the specs are on my current computer. I have no idea how much ram or gigs or what kind of drive it has. I'm pretty sure the monitor is bigger than 13' though.


Dang 13 foot monitor!:eek2:


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## rebkell (Sep 9, 2006)

Shardin said:


> Dang 13 foot monitor!:eek2:


Bigger.


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## ncxcstud (Apr 22, 2007)

spartanstew said:


> How do you guys remember that kind of crap? I don't even know what the specs are on my current computer. I have no idea how much ram or gigs or what kind of drive it has. I'm pretty sure the monitor is bigger than 13' though.


Obviously some of us are bigger dorks or nerds than others


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## Steve Mehs (Mar 21, 2002)

spartanstew said:


> How do you guys remember that kind of crap? I don't even know what the specs are on my current computer. I have no idea how much ram or gigs or what kind of drive it has. I'm pretty sure the monitor is bigger than 13' though.


Considering computers are my life, and I'm only on my 4th one, and that machine is currently sitting in a spare room, I have no problem remembering the specs.  Plus it was only 1995.


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## djlong (Jul 8, 2002)

I think I'd scare myself if I thought about all the computers I've had over the years. Not only can I remember them and all their specs, I remember what I replaced in each one of them. One particular PC was getting upgraded and upgraded to the point that the only original pieces were the case, power supply, power cord and floppy drive.


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## elaclair (Jun 18, 2004)

spartanstew said:


> How do you guys remember that kind of crap? I don't even know what the specs are on my current computer. I have no idea how much ram or gigs or what kind of drive it has. I'm pretty sure the monitor is bigger than 13' though.


What I want to know is how can I remember every phone number I've had or been associated with since 1963, including timelines to go with them.....but can't remember where I put my keys last night!:grin:


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## jerry downing (Mar 7, 2004)

djlong said:


> I think I'd scare myself if I thought about all the computers I've had over the years. Not only can I remember them and all their specs, I remember what I replaced in each one of them. One particular PC was getting upgraded and upgraded to the point that the only original pieces were the case, power supply, power cord and floppy drive.


I was in that situation for a while until I decided I needed a new case to accomodate all my drives. Then I started getting drive errors due to the fact that my power supply was too weak. I bought a stronger power supply and did away with the floppy drive since I hadn't used it in years. I still have the power cord though.


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