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Lessons to be learned from the Kavanaugh Hearing

LSSBB said:
Looks like 1983-4 was the watershed year, Using modems increased considerably, probably due to WarGames. https://archive.org/stream/1984-11-...e_Gazette_Issue_17_1984_Nov#page/n27/mode/2up
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It's important to understand also that "no modem" vs. "modem" is an oversimplification. There's a world of difference between the 1200 baud modems of 1984 and the 9600 baud modems of 1994. And a world of difference between those and the T1/DSL/Cable links of the late 90s/early 2000s.
 
And modems used to specialized, in some cases very, very specialized. "Online" was not this singular thing.

My grandfather was a traveling salesman for beverage distributor and have a palm sized (well brick sized which was palm sized in those days) device (essentially a keypad, a few function keys, and a horrible 1 line red LCD numerical display) he entered all his sales in and at the end of the week he attached this giant add on modem to it (which was larger than the device if I recall) of the type where you physically put the headset onto in those little rubber coupler thingies and used it to send his sales data for the week to the home office.

Let's just say he might have been "online" but he wasn't exactly part of a digital revolution.
 
JoeMorgue said:
And modems used to specialized, in some cases very, very specialized. "Online" was not this singular thing.

My grandfather was a traveling salesman for beverage distributor and have a palm sized (well brick sized which was palm sized in those days) device (essentially a keypad, a few function keys, and a horrible 1 line red LCD numerical display) he entered all his sales in and at the end of the week he attached this giant add on modem to it (which was larger than the device if I recall) of the type where you physically put the headset onto in those little rubber coupler thingies and used it to send his sales data for the week to the home office.

Let's just say he might have been "online" but he wasn't exactly part of a digital revolution.
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He was most likely dialing into a computer at his office. So he wasn't really online at all.
 
theprestige said:
It's important to understand also that "no modem" vs. "modem" is an oversimplification. There's a world of difference between the 1200 baud modems of 1984 and the 9600 baud modems of 1994. And a world of difference between those and the T1/DSL/Cable links of the late 90s/early 2000s.
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BBS, Dow/Jones and Compunet did not exactly require high bandwidth. That need came a decade later with www.
 
JoeMorgue said:
And modems used to specialized, in some cases very, very specialized. "Online" was not this singular thing.

My grandfather was a traveling salesman for beverage distributor and have a palm sized (well brick sized which was palm sized in those days) device (essentially a keypad, a few function keys, and a horrible 1 line red LCD numerical display) he entered all his sales in and at the end of the week he attached this giant add on modem to it (which was larger than the device if I recall) of the type where you physically put the headset onto in those little rubber coupler thingies and used it to send his sales data for the week to the home office.

Let's just say he might have been "online" but he wasn't exactly part of a digital revolution.
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I'd say he definitely was. He just didn't realize it.
 
Well, at least now that this is over, we can all go back to waiting for Mueller to charge someone with... whatever crime it is that he's supposed to be investigating.
 
theprestige said:
Well, at least now that this is over, we can all go back to waiting for Mueller to charge someone with... whatever crime it is that he's supposed to be investigating.
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Patience grasshopper.

A whole new soap opera is waiting in the wings to make its debut. I give it roughly 36-48 hours.

The non-stop train of entertainment in Trumpland never fails to deliver.
 
theprestige said:
I'm inclined to agree, but the subtexts of all your posts today seems to be "please make it stop!"
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I have my good days and my bad days.

- Some days I sit back and enjoy the popcorn-munching free entertainment.

- Other days I get sucked into the drama like a washed up reality tv star (insert Hail To The Chief music here).

- And then there are the days I wish for a 1000 metre high soundproof wall surrounding the entire USA.


It's quite the emotional rollercoaster.
 
I hope that for anyone accused of sexual assault in High School 30 years ago will be:

don't defend yourself the way you would have at the time: have some modern sensibilities.
 
theprestige said:
And of course in the 80s there was no established online repository of popular culture memes. There was no Wikipedia. There was no Urban Dictionary. There were no social media echo chambers elevating and amplifying ideas across a broad swath of the public. There was the infrastructure of the Internet, sure, but there was nothing like the Web we know and love. Even in the mid-90s, the web was a pale shadow of what it is today, not nearly the repository of common knowledge and accessible factoids we now take for granted.

The argument that the Internet existed in the 1980s, and therefore this subculture must have known about that subculture and shared their special jargon is laughable. The fact that this argument is actually being made is one of the things that leads me to believe some people would in fact accept any excuse to disqualify Kavanaugh. (Another piece of evidence has been Craig4's assertion, posted without any objection here, that no (legal) trick is too dirty or too low to keep Kavanaugh off the bench.)
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I'm with you on this. I was a CS major beginning in 1986. I didn't have email until grad school. The internet back in those days was a novelty.

Didn't encounter the Web until 1993. With Mosaic.
 
LSSBB said:
Based on stats showing about 18% home ownership of computers in around then, plus upper quartile homes having 18% higher chance of having one around then, it looks like a 20% chance.
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No, not really. Having a computer back then was not at all the same as having internet access.

I was a geek. I had access to a TRS-80 back in the day. I didn't get access to the internet until grad school.
 
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