# Hearth.com Home Page 11-05-1996 from the Internet Wayback Machine



## Don2222 (May 30, 2012)

Hello

http://wayback.archive.org

Check this out. See pic below:


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## Jack Straw (May 30, 2012)

Gee, I don't know about that Mr. Peabody


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## Don2222 (May 30, 2012)

Jack Straw said:


> View attachment 67800
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
That is exactly where the name came from!


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## BrotherBart (May 30, 2012)

In all its glory.

http://web.archive.org/web/19961222111122/https://www.hearth.com/

The old forum.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010809215113/https://www.hearth.com/ceilidh/ceilidh.html


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## firebroad (May 30, 2012)

Well, I SWAN, I believe I like the old format better...
Back then I though that only nerds and rich people had the internet.


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## begreen (May 30, 2012)

Don2222 said:


> Hello
> 
> http://wayback.archive.org
> 
> Check this out. See pic below:


 

Looks like that was back in the Efel Kamina days.


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## webbie (May 30, 2012)

Damn, I probably have about the longest running web site...with the same management...on the whole damn interweb! Started end of 1995.


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## begreen (May 31, 2012)

That would be awesome if this was the oldest commercial site still running under same management. Here's the oldest internet site I could find:

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html


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## webbie (May 31, 2012)

Yahoo was running off of servers at Stanford way back then.....

In many ways, AOL was one of the first biggies since they had a portal (an "internet" button) inside their software. That is how I first got to see the internet in 1994.

Of course, the real geeks had been online for many years  - at colleges, research, etc. 

The real WWW boom was because of the netscape browser. Before that time, there were a few experimental browsers (Mosaic) and otherwise it was all text based. 

The main thing I remember for the first couple of years is that it was nearly impossible to get hooked up reliably. I spent many a night getting hooked up - then dropped - then hooked up - then dropped again!

This guy, a Ham radio nut, was my first ISP. He had bulletin boards many years before:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961108075820/http://k2nesoft.com/

I put Stoveworks first site on his server...


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## begreen (May 31, 2012)

BBS is where I got started with the Amiga (ARCNet?). Remember CompuServe, Delphi and PSINet? I think CompuServe predated Yahoo by a decade or so.


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## firebroad (May 31, 2012)

I wish I had a single CLUE as to what language you are speaking
Oh well, I guess if I ever get a PC of my own I had better learn it


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## webbie (May 31, 2012)

begreen said:


> BBS is where I got started with the Amiga (ARCNet?). Remember CompuServe, Delphi and PSINet? I think CompuServe predated Yahoo by a decade or so.


 
I remember PSI was really big.......Prodigy was also pretty big at one time (owned by Sears)

I was on Compuserve in 1986 - with my Mac and a hack put together by a guy named Dennis Brothers. He's also been saved for history.....
http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/wiki/MacBinarySpecs
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,926733,00.html

I'm currently reading "What the Doormouse said" about the beginnings of all this stuff - and also drugs in Silicon Valley. The interesting part so far is that ALL that we are currently doing was envisioned and demoed in 1968 by Doug Engelbart and Steward Brand - the so-called "Mother of all Demos":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

1968! Yet, according to the book and history, all the PC inventors from that time onward forgot about the fact that networking was a BIG part of the deal. 

Think about that. In 1968 they demoed to an auditorium full of folks.....had video windows communicating real time with others located elsewhere!


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## BrotherBart (May 31, 2012)

In 1982 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram became pretty much the first dial up online accessible newspaper site. It was the first site I ever hacked into. I sent them the details so they could tighten it up. Got a free subscription.

ETA: Startext


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## nate379 (May 31, 2012)

We only got the internets up in northern Maine in the early 2000s


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## webbie (May 31, 2012)

Wow, check out clip #12
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Considering how many blue screens of death MS had years later (in demos), this 1968 demo went off quite well.


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## Jags (May 31, 2012)

Ahhh...memories. You guys have me lusting for my 1200 baud modem and 20 meg hard drive. " What in the world would you ever USE that much memory on." Remember using cassette tapes and a recorder set to "record" for memory.

IBM 8088 - man I was cool when I had that thing. Punch cards predate me, but not by much.

Hearthnet.net - I remember that.  Just a lurker then.


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## webbie (May 31, 2012)

Sorry, Jags, just mentioning a hard drive gives you away as a newbie!

Here is a pic with my first Mac - no hard drives were available, but I sprung for the external second floppy - 3.5", of course! This is a 128K Mac, the first model introduced in 1984. In fact, the only reason I have it is that I purchased it from the teacher at Drexel. They got them before the general public. You can see the D for Drexel logo on the computer next to the drive slot.

By this time I had already had a couple PC's......first an IBM PC ($5200 with printer, but only 160K floppies) and then a Compaq "portable".  Of course, all this time BB was running mainframes!


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## BrotherBart (May 31, 2012)

1200 baud was nirvana. I hacked Startext with a 300 baud modem and a 1977 TRS-80, the second one Tandy sold in Fort Worth. Dual 90k floppies and two 300 baud tape decks. It is packed in a box in the basement to this day. Along with the receipts. $6,284. The "display" was a 300 baud DecWriter LA36 dot matrix terminal.

Mainframes came a lot later in life. I was a micro and mini-computer kind of guy. The first shop I ran was running a Dec-10 36 bit machine using Tymenet for the network at 300 baud and later 1200 baud for a tri-state industrial distribution company's branches. Everything was written in FORTRAN because none of us could take the time to learn COBOL. The monthly reports for corporate took two days to print on LA120 1200 baud DecWriters printing around the clock.

To this day I have never written a line of COBOL code. Don't tell that to all of the COBOL programmers that worked for me over the years.


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## tfdchief (May 31, 2012)

This all reminds me of many years ago when my nephew, just a very young boy, hacked into the local University computers with a phone modem and a MS-DOS computer.  The FBI showed up at the front door and demanded to search.  There were some very worried parents until it all got sorted out.  Oh,  my nephew is now in charge of the IT department at that same University


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## Gary_602z (May 31, 2012)

Some where in the basement I have an old Sinclair. Probably have some PC-DOS stuff around someplace also.

Gary


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## fossil (May 31, 2012)

OK, I'll play. The first computer I owned was an HP-85 (it didn't hurt that my wife at the time worked for HP). 8-bit microprocessor, keyboard, 4" B&W CRT, tape drive, thermal printer, 32K ROM, 16K RAM. All in one neat little package. Of course, I added the 16K RAM extension module so I had a whopping 32K of RAM! Christmas 1982, wife gave me a really cool HP X-Y plotter I could drive with this computer that I had a lot of fun with. In 1982-1983, I did my graduate thesis work on this little guy, writing a program to perform Engineering Design Optimization. I became quite fluent in HP BASIC.


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## webbie (May 31, 2012)

fossil said:


> OK, I'll play. The first computer I owned was an HP-85 (it didn't hurt that my wife at the time worked for HP). 8-bit microprocessor, keyboard, 4" B&W CRT, tape drive, thermal printer, 32K ROM, 16K RAM. All in one neat little package. Of course, I added the 16K RAM extension module so I had a whopping 32K of RAM! Christmas 1982, wife gave me a really cool HP X-Y plotter I could drive with this computer that I had a lot of fun with. In 1982-1983, I did my graduate thesis work on this little guy, writing a program to perform Engineering Design Optimization. I became quite fluent in HP BASIC.
> 
> View attachment 67879


Looks like the first all-in-one iMac.


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## Pallet Pete (Jun 1, 2012)

We had a commodore 64 and the floppies where huge and loud ! I don't have pics of it so this will have to do. We thought it was so cool cuz we could change the background colors it was sooo high tech to us lol


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## Jags (Jun 1, 2012)

webbie said:


> Sorry, Jags, just mentioning a hard drive gives you away as a newbie!


 

Oh Craig, that was far from the first 'puter I had my hands on.  I just knew at that time that I had hit PC nirvana.


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## webbie (Jun 1, 2012)

The Mac pretty much sucked until 1986 when they came up with the Mac Plus (1 meg ram) with a 10 meg hard drive. That made it truly useful.


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## Jags (Jun 1, 2012)

webbie said:


> The Mac pretty much sucked until 1986 when they came up with the Mac Plus (1 meg ram) with a 10 meg hard drive. That made it truly useful.


Dunno - I spent lots of time behind the screen of an Apple IIe.  It did save me some time a couple of times.  When the teachers told you to write "I will not speak in class" 500 times, I asked if I could type it.  "Yes".  3 lines of code later and I was done.


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## Delta-T (Jun 1, 2012)

I still have my Apple IIe. It keeps my old desk from flying away.


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## webbie (Jun 1, 2012)

Jags said:


> Dunno - I spent lots of time behind the screen of an Apple IIe. It did save me some time a couple of times. When the teachers told you to write "I will not speak in class" 500 times, I asked if I could type it. "Yes". 3 lines of code later and I was done.


 
LOL.
And ever since, you've been sitting in a chair....ah, brain augmentation! Revenge of the Nerds!


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## Jags (Jun 1, 2012)

If memory serves me proper like, I believe 1978/79 would have been the time frame I first laid fingers on a computer keyboard.


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## MasterMech (Jun 1, 2012)

Jags said:


> Ahhh...memories. You guys have me lusting for my 1200 baud modem and 20 meg hard drive. " What in the world would you ever USE that much memory on." Remember using cassette tapes and a recorder set to "record" for memory.
> 
> IBM 8088 - man I was cool when I had that thing. Punch cards predate me, but not by much.
> 
> Hearthnet.net - I remember that. Just a lurker then.


 
Ok, I'm in too!

First machine - NEC PC8500 running CP/M ( a neutered proprietary version at that!) with 32K of RAM (user acessible). Processor speed was measured in single digit Mhz with decimals and that actually mattered! Learned to word process with WordStar and a lot of ^ codes.  Machine was dated 1983. Had a 300 baud modem built in but you could turn it down to 120? if that was too much speed for ya.  Had a 128K memory cartridge that had a button cell battery to keep the RAM contents alive. Damned if that battery didn't chit without warning! I think I still have that machine somewhere......

http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/nec8500/

Graduated (and fried) to whatever early 80's PC hardware a family friend would give me for free. Taught myself GW-BASIC and QBASIC instead of playing Nintendo and got very proficient. Sadly my computer interests died shortly after my HS graduation and I moved on to more mechanical pursuits instead....

All of the above took place sometime in the late 90's, !

Some of my favorite childhood games are now abandonware!

And Jags... one of our primary machines at work is still controlled via, you guessed it, punch cards. (Machine was originally designed/built in the early 70's) Our electronics techs just love rebuilding those card readers! We have a fleet of 8+ readers with 4 actively running at all times. Just keep pullin' and rebuilding them.


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## webbie (Jun 1, 2012)

Jags said:


> If memory serves me proper like, I believe 1978/79 would have been the time frame I first laid fingers on a computer keyboard.


 
That was before my time!

I didn't have computers in school or business.....Stoveworks ran fine with paper receipts. But my bro was into tech stuff and had a very early Apple I with a casette drive. He convinced me to buy a computer in 1982, and I decided on the IBM because....well, it was the latest and greatest.

I do remember in the mid-70's when I was working in Philly - some shop windows were advertising the first PC's. They were called PET (commodores early models).....

Realistically, computers in Stoveworks were not used for very much until I discovered Filemaker, an early db. That finally allowed me to use it for receipts, leads, etc.
The early macs had a networking system called localtalk which allowed communication over regular telephone wire - it was used, among other things, to hook a network to an Apple Laser Printer. Filemaker was set up for multi-user using localtalk - which then made us all able to see the same data, etc. 
It was probably 1986-87 before we really started to use them fully.


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## chuckie5fingers (Jun 1, 2012)

Pallet Pete said:


> We had a commodore 64 and the floppies where huge and loud ! I don't have pics of it so this will have to do. We thought it was so cool cuz we could change the background colors it was sooo high tech to us lol


 My buddies and I all had comm 64's as well. I was in 8th grade in 1983 and w/i about 2 weeks of our "computer lab" opening,(commodore computers as well) we had hacked into the hard drives and changed all the key commands around. We literally had the computer teachers going nuts cause they had no idea how we little 8th graders were able to hack the system.  good times
chuck


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## begreen (Jun 1, 2012)

The Mac was black and white and that cut it out for me. I wanted to work in color which forced me over to the Amiga and then the dark side with my first PC.


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## fossil (Jun 1, 2012)

Actually, in 1962/1963 I was in Jr. High School, in an "accelerated" math class. Our teacher was a Mr. Yost. He offered to teach about the nascent world of computers to whoever wanted to learn...after hours, then with visits to the Cal Berkeley "Computer Center" on Saturdays. I signed up. He started us out with Machine Language, and only after we'd gotten at least a rudimentary grasp of that and Assembly Language did he hand out the Fortran manuals...as I recall, it was Fortran IV. The Computer Center was in a large old home on Fraternity Row. The IBM card punch machines were downstairs. The IBM 1620 and card reader and printer were upstairs in the Living/Dining Rooms. We each had to make a deck of cards that would teach basic arithmetic to the computer every time it was started up, because it didn't remember much of anything. Then we could get it to solve quadratic equations and similar enigmas. I'm really glad Mr. Yost did that for us...and I thank my mom for picking me up late from school and driving me into Berkeley on Saturdays. Rick


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## BrotherBart (Jun 2, 2012)

Way ahead of me there Rick. In 62/63 I was herding cows after school and on weekends.  Never even heard of computers until several years later and then that was all it was Heard of them.


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## webbie (Jun 2, 2012)

fossil said:


> Actually, in 1962/1963 I was in Jr. High School, in an "accelerated" math class. Our teacher was a Mr. Yost. He offered to teach about the nascent world of computers to whoever wanted to learn...after hours, then with visits to the Cal Berkeley "Computer Center" on Saturdays. I signed up. He started us out with Machine Language, and only after we'd gotten at least a rudimentary grasp of that and Assembly Language did he hand out the Fortran manuals...as I recall, it was Fortran IV. The Computer Center was in a large old home on Fraternity Row. The IBM card punch machines were downstairs. The IBM 1620 and card reader and printer were upstairs in the Living/Dining Rooms. We each had to make a deck of cards that would teach basic arithmetic to the computer every time it was started up, because it didn't remember much of anything. Then we could get it to solve quadratic equations and similar enigmas. I'm really glad Mr. Yost did that for us...and I thank my mom for picking me up late from school and driving me into Berkeley on Saturdays. Rick


 
Wow, you must have met some of the folks in the book.......What the Doormouse said.
Good thing you signed up and shipped out, or you'd have been a 60's and 70's radical (most of the guys that took over the reins of computing out there were so).......

You'd probably like the book - although they center it more on the Stanford and Palo Alto scene than Berkeley. 
It was a interesting mix of folks - because much of the research was paid for by the Defense Dept, yet it was fairly free form - they didn't want anything particular at the start other than experimentation.

Later, during Vietnam, all the students rebelled when they heard that the computers were being used for war gaming and other such stuff. 

The guy credited in the book with starting the PC revolution was Fred Moore, whose dad was a high-up Pentagon muckety muck...but Fred was a famous anti-war activist. Fred was like a Ghandi figure - starting one-man crusades. When he was arrested and made the papers, Dad flew out and proclaimed "my son is his own man"......good for dad!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Moore_(activist)


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## MasterMech (Jun 2, 2012)

Pallet Pete said:


> We had a commodore 64 and the floppies where huge and loud ! I don't have pics of it so this will have to do. We thought it was so cool cuz we could change the background colors it was sooo high tech to us lol


 
Those are 5.25" floppies? I remember those, lol.  I have never run across the original (8 inch?) floppies.  My Epson PC (80286 and a Hercules Monochrome Display, Orange on Black! ) had a 40 MB Hard Drive that makes my Stihls quiet by comparison.


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## fossil (Jun 2, 2012)

webbie said:


> Wow, you must have met some of the folks in the book...


 
Hah! No way. I was 14-15 y/o, learning the very basics of programming through the good graces of a forward-looking Junior High math teacher, that's all. I was very nearly oblivious to the computer R&D going on across the bay (I don't think "Silicon Valley" had earned its nickname yet), and I knew nary a soul involved with it. The next time I had any significant involvement with computers was more than a decade later ('74-'77), working on my undergrad degree in ME at the University of New Mexico...lots of Fortan programming, then turn in my card deck to the folks in the computer center, wait a day or so for my output to be available...debug, punch new cards, repeat as necessary. Didn't own my own computer until the HP-85 I showed in a previous post, and that was another 4 or 5 years down the road. I've had one computer or another pretty much since then...but the closest I've ever come to knowing anyone involved in any aspect of the business was my ex-wife, who for some years was a sales rep for HP, back about '81-'86. What great perks she got in those glory days!


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## Jags (Jun 4, 2012)

MasterMech said:


> Those are 5.25" floppies? I remember those, lol. I have never run across the original (8 inch?) floppies. My Epson PC (80286 and a Hercules Monochrome Display, Orange on Black! ) had a 40 MB Hard Drive that makes my Stihls quiet by comparison.


 
I could probably find you a stack of 8" if you are interested.


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## MasterMech (Jun 4, 2012)

Jags said:


> I could probably find you a stack of 8" if you are interested.


I'm good, but thanks!


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## Jags (Jun 4, 2012)

MasterMech said:


> I'm good, but thanks!


 Awww-- come on, I will even throw in a box of BRAND NEW 5-1/4" to sweeten the deal.


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## MasterMech (Jun 4, 2012)

Jags said:


> Awww-- come on, I will even throw in a box of BRAND NEW 5-1/4" to sweeten the deal.


 
I was tied to a chair in the backyard as my computer "museum" was hauled out and destroyed in front of me. I wept for days. I have been sober for 8 years now so I'll pass on the free box of 5-1/4"s.
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 I know a select few of my artifacts have survived but I don't dare access them for fear of revealing their location.


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## Don2222 (Jun 7, 2012)

Jags said:


> I could probably find you a stack of 8" if you are interested.


 
I used the 8" floppies at work, they were really new and so much easier than the 9 track Mag Tapes. I used the 7 track real tapes but those new 9 Track drives with the auto load feature wow that was great! In college I learned the 8 bit Octal on the Dec PDP-11 much newer than the Dec PDP-8, then Fortran IV with batch processing using the IBM-029 card punch to type up our programs. I always had plenty of EOFs End of File cards! One typo and then another 3 days to get the program run so I could get more compile errors. Then after the compile errors were fixed we worked on the runtime errors !!
Did you ever empty the card punch bin with all those punched holes! Great confetti!

In High School we learned the Olivetti before we learned basic programming using a Teletype with paper tape reader!

Olivetti Programma 101
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rjp0i/museum/programma101.html

Teletype
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/teletype.html


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