Re:Whatever happened to the laptop computer? (1985)
by dgmdoug on Thursday January 14, 2016 @06:10AM
(#10900664)
"...and an agreement with everybody in the house to check before picking up the telephone handset."
This! If anything I think the challenge provided us with a reason to explore. Things weren't always easy and that made it fun.
And we generally had (sometimes indirect) access to the internet -- Usenet, uucp, email -- through some combination of Fidonet, WWIVnet, and somebody running an open-access Unix box.
And on those BBS systems there were door games as well as discussion boards, file download areas, etc.
The internet existed then too -- it's just that the national science foundation didn't allow what they called commercial traffic on it at the time. It was a wonderful resource for people learning to write software (comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.c) or who wanted to screw off (talk.bizarre).
And around that time '85 or '86, I had a PC Pursuit account that allowed me to hop all over the country to get to BBSs in other cities that weren't on one of the store-and-forward networks.
There was plenty for the average person to do with a 1985 computer -- provided they had a modem, telix, and kermit, xmodem or zmodem -- and an agreement with everybody in the house to check before picking up the telephone handset.