We studied Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in class.
There were British quasi-computers in 1939 or the 1940s that cracked the German Enigma Code. Maybe I shouldn't call them quasi-computers, but they were nothing like today's computers.
The first computers were the size of rooms and could literally stop because of a bug. Supposedly Ada Lovelace found a millipede or something in a computer, taped it to an index card to a friend with "I've found a bug in the computer." Somebody else said it wasn't her, but it was somebody else.
20 years ago this weekend!? 20 years ago this weekend I rented an NES game because it was near my 11th birthday. We watched on American television as there were tanks in Russia and a coup. Then the following December, it became The Commonwealth of Independent States.
Some American brats on the internet troll in 133tsp33k or "Elite Speak." I always thought it was dweeby and it mangled the English language. They would type "PWNED" instead of "OWNED" or "BUSTED." I thought that The Information Superhighway was a dweeby term for the internet because nobody would ever stick to the same logic and call a phone or fax machine the "Telephone and Telegraph Superhighway."
Speaking of starting the internet, American politician Al Gore Jr. has delusions of grandeur and had been called the biggest idiot in the White House. He became a politician after being kicked out of divinity school. He said that he and his wife Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That's not true. Tipper is alive and the woman from Love Story died. Al Gore Jr. didn't have a clue when he said that he fathered the Internet. Actually, I had heard that Arpanet or CERN was founded 8 years before Gore Jr. was even a Senator. The movie "An Inconvenient Truth" can't be shown in schools in Britain without a disclaimer that it's propaganda. Gore Jr. didn't write his own speeches and in one of them, he said that his favorite Biblical quote is John 3:16. Then he acted like he had no idea what it was. He's the goofball that thinks that he fathered the internet.
The black and white Game Boys from 1989 have about the same computing power as the 1969 Moon Lander. I've heard that the 1998/1999 Furby toy had about 6 times the computing power of the Eagle Moon Lander. NASA's computers lost the telemetry data of the Moon landing!
I remember when you could fit several computer games into a 1.44 megabyte floppy disk. Now I have Unreal Anthology and it's something like 9 gigabytes of games on the hard drive. I now have a 1.5 terabyte portable hard drive. Our first PC had about 0.5 gigabytes, I think. Our black and white Macintosh or Macintosh Plus had a 10 megabyte portable hard drive.
In college, my Dad worked with a calculator the size of today's microwave ovens. It could only do plus, minus, multiply, divide, and square root. Dad and I bought an old mechanical calculator with gears, played with it, did something wrong once, and it got stuck. I've heard that Exabyte tapes were literally tapes! I never had an Adam nor ZX Spectrum game console, but I had heard that those games were literally tapes! 8-track music tapes in The United States were literally tapes! I think that our nearest antique store maybe threw out all the 8-track tapes because nobody will buy them anymore. But it was only a figure of speech when we said Nintendo or Sega tapes because they were cartridges. I used 100 MB Zip Disks before we had a CD burner.
In about 2001 in one of my computer graphics classes or in the computer graphics club, we had a guest speaker again. He said that he brought a magazine article about the internet to Microsoft in 1990. Microsoft said something like, "Oh, that's the internet. Don't worry about it. It won't go anywhere."
Per-Scan wrote:PS: I still love my VIC-20 though! You gotta play VicWolf (W3D clone on the VIC) somehow!!
What!?
EDIT: I think it was called The Commodore 64 in The United States.
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