yet another very high priced game .....

[WoodenSaucer]

My first modem was a commodore VicModem 300 baud in 1984. Thats 300 BITS a second, or just under 1/3 of 1 kilobyte. I swear glaciers moved fasater than this thing, but I could dial a BBS in California, and OMG that was just so cool!

I was lucky enough to start off with a 1200 baud modem for my C64. I was living in North Carolina at the time, and we had a few good BBSs around there. But my dad got us a subscription to Quantum Link, which was an online service dedicated to the C64. Interestingly enough, Q-Link later became AOL.

 

[danthegamer]

My God I havent heard Quantum Link in years! I had forgotten about them.

I got the 1200 a year later, I traded an old atari, or nintendo cartridge for it. It had been left at my friends house by his cousin who had visited from some faraway state. He had absolutely no use for it but I did. LOL

That same year I got an IBM/XT, it had a internal hays modem and a whopping 10MB hard drive. IIRC. and PC DOS 2.0.

It wernt tears of sadness at losing 64k RAM on my C64, it were tears of joy that a poor boy had a 5k dollar PC. LOL no I didnt steal it. That is a story for another day.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

My God I havent heard Quantum Link in years! I had forgotten about them.

I got the 1200 a year later, I traded an old atari, or nintendo cartridge for it. It had been left at my friends house by his cousin who had visited from some faraway state. He had absolutely no use for it but I did. LOL

That same year I got an IBM/XT, it had a internal hays modem and a whopping 10MB hard drive. IIRC. and PC DOS 2.0.

It wernt tears of sadness at losing 64k RAM on my C64, it were tears of joy that a poor boy had a 5k dollar PC. LOL no I didnt steal it. That is a story for another day.

I couldn't afford to move on from my C64 until the summer of 1995. That's when I finally entered the realm of IBM-compatible PCs with a Packard Bell that had a 75MHz Pentium, 8MB of RAM and a 540MB HDD. I was on top of the world when I got that. It came with Windows 3.11, the Packard Bell Navigator GUI, and a free upgrade to Windows 95 when it came out a couple of months later.

 

[Zloth]

1200bd is plenty! Heck, I was playing an MMO over GEnie with 1200bd (Air Warrior). Of course, it cost $6 per hour back in 1989, which is $13.76/hr in today's dollars. People can get a month's worth of play from a subscription service for that kind of money these days.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

1200bd is plenty! Heck, I was playing an MMO over GEnie with 1200bd (Air Warrior). Of course, it cost $6 per hour back in 1989, which is $13.76/hr in today's dollars. People can get a month's worth of play from a subscription service for that kind of money these days.

Yeah, things were expensive and addicting back then. I remember after getting my first Intel-based PC after my C64, it had a 14.4KBps modem, which I thought was unbelievable compared to my C64's 1200 baud. I got into using the AOL and Prodigy CDs that they sent with free hours. The only problem was that they didn't have any local phone numbers, so I was paying long distance for all of that. My first month, my phone bill was like $320.

 

[Zloth]

My first month, my phone bill was like $320.

I got stuck in something even worse! "Middle distance" phone calls! In the USA back in the early 90's, local calls were free, long distance calls costed money but there was some competition just starting to show up, but calls that were beyond local but not long enough to be long had no competition at all. So, it actually cost a lot more to make a call to a phone about 100 miles away than it cost to call a phone 1000 miles away! (Still cheaper than calling overseas, though.)

My Air Warrior days ended fast when I moved to a small town for a while. However, I was able to take part in GEnie's various forums. I would get all my responses done off-line, call in, very quickly post each one of them, pull in all the new posts, and log out. When reading, we would all have to take into account that the person responding might have seen any of the posts made in the last day or two!

P.S. No clue why I didn't just call a number that was further away.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I got stuck in something even worse! "Middle distance" phone calls! In the USA back in the early 90's, local calls were free, long distance calls costed money but there was some competition just starting to show up, but calls that were beyond local but not long enough to be long had no competition at all. So, it actually cost a lot more to make a call to a phone about 100 miles away than it cost to call a phone 1000 miles away! (Still cheaper than calling overseas, though.)

My Air Warrior days ended fast when I moved to a small town for a while. However, I was able to take part in GEnie's various forums. I would get all my responses done off-line, call in, very quickly post each one of them, pull in all the new posts, and log out. When reading, we would all have to take into account that the person responding might have seen any of the posts made in the last day or two!

P.S. No clue why I didn't just call a number that was further away.

That's crazy. I don't think my area had anything called middle distance.