Welcome to Growing Up Geek , an ongoing feature where we have a look back at our youth and tell stories of growing as much as be the nerds that we’re. Today, we’ve the lead analyst for mobile at PCMAG , Sascha Segan .
Once I turned eight in 1982, we moved house, I starred on a game show and we got an Atari 800 . The modem came a year later, free with the 850 serial interface . i wished it so i may print homework on my new Epson FX-80 printer.
The 830 acoustic modem had two rubber cups: you’d dial your number on a rotary-dial phone, listen for the “whee-ooo!” of the modem and slam it down into the cups, hushing everyone around you because an excessive amount of noise could break the relationship. One favorite game was to attempt to chat to the modem, determining which pattern of your personal “whee-ooo”s would create something that gave the impression of words. 300 baud was nearly as fast as i may read.
The 830 came with too basic a modem program, unable even to capture to disk. i discovered a board, chatted to sysop, and had him copy out for me a 12-line BASIC terminal program which I wrote down on paper and later typed into the Atari. You may use that program to bootstrap a wiser program, after which you were online.
In BBS world , nobody knew you were a child, but you almost certainly were anyway. The sysop of Greyhawk’s Gallery was 15. The Wizard’s Chamber had great ATASCII animations: I hit Y, chat to sysop, and located out Jamie was 11, swapping floppies in his own 800 after school. We became friends and spent long hours playing D&D at the phone before our families gave us subway privileges.
Me, at age ten, in line with something my mom wrote on the time:
“I notice that Sascha enjoys sitting at his computer, doing a little mundane homework equivalent to a handwriting exercise, while his automatic dialer is dialing a bulletin board through his modem, while being attentive to Scarecrow and Mrs. King.”
On the time, most boards had four phone lines, max; you needed to wait in line, enduring busy signals for hours if essential to get those precious ATASCII animations of a knight fighting a dragon, or to speak at the message board with folks who knew easy methods to get right through Ultima.
The Atari kids and Commodore kids were different tribes: question me, and I’d swear our D1: was far superior to their ,8,1 and POKEY just spanked SID. All their games sucked. They simply did, because our games were better and their games sucked. (My friend Ben, with the Commodore, felt passionately otherwise.) Later the vast superiority of the Atari platform was conclusively proven by the sport Alternate Reality , which came to us first. Case closed.
I’d defect to Apple II at my friend David’s house down the road because he had Wizardry, though, and Wizardry was the nearest i may get to playing D&D on a working laptop or computer before i discovered New York’s role-playing BBSes like Ellena Caverns.
In seventh grade i found Usenet, because of the Big Electric Cat , the primary public-access Usenet site in Long island. i used to be now 0 {bellcore,harpo,cmcl2}!cucard!dasys1!ssegan 0 — if you happen to sent email to someone at the network back then, you needed to spell out the full path, because our servers didn’t automatically create routings. After the Cat went down, I became a sysop on the Dorsai Diplomatic Mission, after which picked up an account on Panix.
I’d periodically go whole hog on Usenet off and on through highschool and faculty. i discovered a refuge for a number of teenagers and school kids and mastered the “spew,” the pre-Livejournal mass whine to a number of friends before there has been an internet to post it on. I chased a 1 French girl 1 through Minitel in 1989 and met a girlfriend on Usenet within the ’90s, however it took nerve.com within the internet-dating heyday of 2001 to finally find my wife.
Internet kids, we were your prototypes, the primitive ASCII-art versions of your Pixar perfection. We grew up OK. Of my old Usenet buddies, one’s an HR executive. One is knowledgeable within the behavior of teens on the web, of all things. One edits technical texts; one runs an arts education nonprofit. And Jamie, the 11-year-old sysop of the Wizard’s Chamber? He’s the senior mobile analyst at PCMAG.com. We chat on a regular basis.
Sascha Segan is the lead mobile analyst for 2 PCMAG.com 2 , writing about cell phones and tablets for the past seven years. You may follow his views on cell phones 3 here 3 , and (please) follow his Tweets at 4 @saschasegan 4 .
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