RE: ADSactly Tech News - Memory Lane and Forgotten Devices of the Past (Part 4)
I'm about 10 years newer than @bigtom13
I grew up with a rotary phone on what was called a "Party Line".
That meant we shared a phone line with one other household in the neighborhood.
We had different phone numbers so someone calling their phone wouldn't make ours ring but you could only use it one house hold at a time. If you picked up the receiver when the other people were using it, you would actually intrude on their conversation, you could talk to them.
Being a young kid, I would sometimes quietly pick up the phone and listen in.
Thats my first computer, a Commodore VIC 20. It comes with a whopping 20 KB of RAM!
You could upgrade it with a cartridge (the size of a pack of cigarettes) to a maximum of 32KB. That's 32,000 Bytes of information.
When I programmed my first BASIC game (BASIC is a Programming language) that ran into the Maximum Memory Limit, I knew 32KB was not that much.
Don't be impressed by my "programming" at such a young age. At that time I was just copying the program out of a magazine. 32,000 Bytes is roughly 32,000 letters, ABC's, you can easily fit that on a few pages.
That is also my first edition Sony DiskMan AM/FM Radio.
It got decent Radio reception, had superior sound but it would skip if you were walking to fast.
Maybe that's why it's not called a WalkMan.. ;-)
Yep, I remember the partyline, I must be of similar age because I had it when I was growing up as well. Its actually how I met my first real girlfriend.
"First real girlfriend", does that mean firs.... ya it's raining here, has been for a few days.
I never got that lucky with my party line eves dropping. Just boring how's the weather and kids kind of intrigue...
I'm glad I didn't work for the NSA, before computers. Real individual people would have to listen to all those boring conversations. ;-)