computer labs gateway 2000 486 mac lc email pine plato ncsa mosaic

Sun Aug 12, 2018

for most of my childhood and high school years i used DOS and tandy 1000sx. i saw a graphic user interface but i didn't actually use it.

that all changed when i went to college.

in college, i brought my now obsolete 1000sx with me and continued used it. i found several of my classmates also had tandy 1000, more advance tl models

in college they had libraries, the libraries finally had card catalogs which i learned in elementary school, but on computer. it used DOS on ibm ps/2 model 30's and we could find books.



it was amazing and a completely new experience.

in elementary school, in junior high and high school we had to do book reports and we used card catalogs where books were listed by subject author and title on a piece of paper.

in college they had these dos based computers where we can type in title and computer would find the title and what library it was on.

and it worked quickly.

my college had computer labs.

this might sound hard for alot of people to understand but most college students in those days did NOT have personal computers, and the only phone we used, even in college was still push button telephone. i didn't know nor see any cell phones. only push button telephones and tape answering machines.

so the only way to use a computer, which was seen as limited usefuless, was a computer lab.

my computer lab had 2 types of computers i've never seen before

gateway 2000 with the new cpu the 486



it ran windows. it had an application, excel 2.0 for windows and word for windows 2.0

it was the first time in my life, in the early 90s, that i used windows 3.1. i quickly discovered mice which were track ball were very temperamental. i frequently tried cleaning it, as the mouse pointer didn't track very well to mouse movements.

i was oohing and amazed at looking at word for windows 2.0



it was crash prone and frequently it would either crash or lock up.

computer lab also had macintosh se/30 black and white and a few color mac 2si



the program i used most was word for mac 5.1



i felt that in many ways macintosh was better and word for mac 5.1 was better though it also was slow

i ended up mostly using gateway 2000 486 because it felt faster and more responsive. actions such as loading programs felt faster than on a mac. and due to that i went with gateway 2000

in college we were taught and used for the very first time of our life, email. we used a text based system called pine. we had to access our grades to another text based system called plato.

it might be hard for imagine but me and my college classmates we enter college never using email ever. never dialing in ever. in fact we've never even heard of email.  even i haven't heard of email and i played games on a tandy 1000sx and i knew how to figure the autoexec.bat and config.sys and IRQ on the serial board

it was all new.

on the gateway 2000 were a variety of programs, one of which was ncsa mosaic 1.0




we had no classes that made use of it, we were told it was something new

ncsa mosaic 1.0 was of course the very first internet browser for the masses. maybe there were earlier versions in laboratories, i've heard steve jobs next step had one.

there wasn't any useful content on it so i actually didn't pay any attention to it

using both

so from elementary to high school i used DOS on a tandy 1000sx, stand alone, no internet connection, no modem. modems were extremely slow. tandy 1000 itself was also very slow. i mostly used it to play games.
i used tandy sierra homeword writer for word processing

then in college i learned of email, windows and macintosh, word for windows, plato for grades, how to dial in using a modem which i got for my tandy 1000, and ncsa mosaic browser.

we were told that this browser was what we need to access something i've never heard of before in all those years of using apple 2e and tandy 1000

the internet.  on a campus no one had cell phones, though they did exist, only the super rich had them, in limousines.

to this day i prefer windows xp/7 to windows 10 and office 2003 to the newer office 2016 with its ribbon interface. i prefer to do things on windows rather than a smartphone, if possible.