When did you get your internet connection?

[Mæstro]

I have had internet access from my earliest childhood, as long as I can recall. You lot are old.

[Moonchild]

You lot are old.

Yup! You young whippersnappers don't know anything about a life where the main method of real-time remote communication was a pulse-dial phone with terrible crackly audio quality! And where you wrote letters to your friends taking several days to arrive.

[mtosev]

I remember my grandmother having a rotary phone. I also remember having phone cards with credit which I used in those public phone booths. This was in the mid to late 1990s.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

... the main method of real-time remote communication was a pulse-dial phone [...] And where you wrote letters to your friends taking several days to arrive.

I remember when I was working at the European Space Agency in the early '80s and the way to contact observers to schedule their astronomical satellite observations was to use telex ... you wrote your message by hand on a form, put it into a tray, a guy collected it and brought it to the communication room where an operator typed it on a teletype. You later received the printed reply.
About rotary dial phones, it is curious for instance that in some languages there is no track of them in wikipedia (e.g. in Italian if you look for "telefono a disco" you get only a specific entry to a rather recent "double gray" specific model, but nothing e.g. for the older wall-mounted black phones. There is an entry about telephone tokens though.

[somdcomputerguy]

I remember my grandmother having a rotary phone.

teens try to dial phone at DuckDuckGo

I chuckled a few years ago when that came out. I read an article a while back from a Florida newspaper about some teens that attempted to car jack an old lady in a parking lot. They couldn't sign the deal because they couldn't drive a stick shift!

[Blacklab]

I remember my grandmother having a rotary phone.

I always rather fancied this rotary dial smartphone kit: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/th ... an-buy-it/

There was so much wonderful pre-digital equipment... younger people who have grown up surrounded by digital electronics seem surprised that humanity managed to survive quite happily without any digital electronics and without being permanently welded to a Smartphone and social media feeds!

Still in use by the Royal Navy into the 1980s was the MRS3 gun direction 'computer' for the RN's twin 4.5" gun mounting (mounted forward on a lot of RN frigates and destroyers of 60s, 70s, 80s era e.g. Leander class frigates). The 'computer' was in a beautiful armoured steel box about the size of a chest of drawers... filled with a mass of tiny cogs, gearwheels and synchros... an electro-mechanical thing of beauty... I do hope there is one in a computing museum somewhere.

Everyone tends to forget the 'difficult' transition from analogue to digital equipments and the couple of decades where you had often 'messy' combinations of the two in just about every field of engineering... phones, business computing, cars, aircraft, warships, etc, etc.

Early digital equipments' lack of memory and processing power seems pathetic now... but it was 'state of the art' in its time... e.g. the whole guidance programme for the Mk24 Tigerfish wire-guided torpedo system in RN submarines was stored on a 4K rotating magnetic drum about 6" diameter... yes I did say '4K' of memory... and it worked incredibly well.

TGCU 2.png

TGCU 2 (Torpedo Guidance Control Unit)... the 4K magnetic drum memory unit and its circuitry is in the bottom drawer!

Later the first generation computerised tactical command and weapons control systems fitted in RN nuclear submarines were built on modified Ferranti FM 1600 computers with 64K of random access magnetic-core memory.

DCB Command System.png

Control Room HMS Courageous - DCB Tactical Command & Weapon System operators' desks

Likewise the first SATNAV systems at sea in 1978 were in a 6' high cabinet with a dozen 'Post Office 27" standard racking' drawers crammed with electronics (similar to the TGCU 2 pictured above). That early SATNAV system worked really well and was a revolutionary development too... a huge technical leap to be able to know the ship's position to within a few hundred yards in the open ocean... accurate enough to update or restart the Ship's Inertial Navigation System (SINS) if necessary.

There were so few SATNAV satellites in orbit then (a dozen or so) we had to use a Hewlett Packard 9825 programmable calculator to find the optimum times to return to periscope depth to obtain a satellite navigation 'fix'... i.e. when there would be a couple of satellites above the horizon and with the right sort of altitude and crossing rate to give a good Doppler change on the signal.

Hewlett Packard 9825.jpg

Hewlett Packard 9825 programmable calculator... late 1970s

The joy of early satellite nav systems was you could listen in to the raw signal coming from the satellite on headphones... listening for your 'chosen' satellite to come above the horizon... squeak, squeak, squeak... hear how good the signal was (mast 'wash over' in submarines is a big problem with all UHF satellite signal reception...high frequency radio waves do not penetrate water)... and pull the mast down when you had enough data to calculate a 'fix' from the satellite... long before the SATNAV system's electronics had decided it had enough data. Only a few decades later any Smartphone has satellite navigation on a microscopic chip which is receiving signals from the hundreds of navigation satellites now in orbit.

[mtosev]

I think I've found my grandmother's phone. From what I remember it looked like this.
And because we are talking about phones I should mention my first mobile/cell phone the Ericsson A1018s. Some other pupils/students in my school already had mobile phones. I got mine in early 2000.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

If we go with retrocomputing, I have a gallery for my institute http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/R ... index.html

[Blacklab]

Last week, the Ars Technica website had an interesting essay by Jeremy Reimer called Revisiting Apple’s Ill-Fated Lisa Computer, 40 Years On, marking the 40th anniversary of the precursor to the Macintosh.

"Forty years ago today, a new type of personal computer was announced that would change the world forever. Two years later, it was almost completely forgotten."

The vision takes shape (extract from Ars Technica article)

GUIs were invented at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s. The Alto workstation, which was never sold to the public, had a bitmapped screen that mimicked the size and orientation of a piece of paper. PARC researchers wrote software that displayed windows and icons, and they used a mouse to move a pointer on that screen.

Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote the manual for the Apple ][, had visited PARC in 1973. He believed that GUIs were the future. Raskin managed to persuade the Lisa project leader to change the computer into a GUI machine. However, he couldn’t convince Jobs, who thought Raskin and Xerox were incompetent.

Raskin altered his approach and got graphics programmer Bill Atkinson to propose an official tour of PARC in November 1979. Because Jobs thought Atkinson was great, he agreed to come along. Jobs’ visit to PARC became the stuff of legend, a tale of a brilliant visionary seeing the future of computing for the first time. But in reality, Atkinson was already working on LisaGraf—the low-level code that would power the Lisa’s GUI—months before Jobs saw the PARC demo.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01 ... -years-on/

which links to: Inventing the Lisa user interface (24 MB PDF download available)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/242388.242405


PS. John Naughton recommended the 'Lisa' article above in the 'What I've been reading' postscript below his article 'Why has Alphabet hit the panic button? Only Google can answer that question': https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... t-question