Because mabfan asked me to tell it...

[gnomi]

...a story about my father (herein after known as Abba).

Abba is an Electrical Engineer by training and has been a computer jockey for my whole lifetime plus. As he has said in the past, he looks like he should be a COBOL programmer. And he's worked for The MITRE Corporation on and off since the late 1960s. One time not long after I had graduated from college (so we're talking mid-90s), a couple of friends threw a party and, as is not uncommon in this particular circle of friends ("The Thundering Horde"), they invited my parents to the party. A bunch of us were hanging out in the kitchen, shmoozing, and somehow we came around to the topic of e-mail and the Internet. People started playing one-upsmanship games about how long they'd been online, how long they'd had an e-mail address, that sort of thing. "When I got my first account, I was using a 1200-baud modem," said one. "1200 baud? Try 300 baud," said another one.

Abba walked into the kitchen. Conversation ceased. "He wins," said one of the people around the table, gesturing toward Abba.

(mabfan refers to this incident here.)

Comments

[cellio]

He goes back to when Fortran was not even three-tran, I take it? (My dad, too.)

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Yup. He has, in his computer room at home, 1/64 of memory from some machine they were decommissioning at MITRE (I believe). The board is the size of an 8.5x11 inch piece of notebook paper.

[arib.livejournal.com]

You had a modem?

When I was young we had to dial the BBS and whistle into the phone...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

You had 1s and 0s? We only had 0s!

[ckd]

So did we, but we figured out how to break a 0 in half to get two 1s.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

You got zeros? We had to use the letter "O."