The good old days weren’t so good. I don’t think people realize what it was like.

I got my first modem a few years later, and modems at the time were flaky hardware only BARELY supported by single-tasking systems that had never been designed to handle any signal arriving anywhere at a time they did not choose. If your computer didn’t respond fast enough to interrupts, a modem could crash it. If you were running anything that didn’t suspend and resume its business correctly (and most things didn’t because they’d never had to before) or anything that was coded to use the same interrupt, the modem would crash it. If the software on your end ever started taking too long to execute per input character, the modem would fill up the short hardware buffer faster than your software could empty it, and crash it. If you transmitted characters faster than the software running on the remote system could handle them, you’d crash the remote system. There were no error correcting protocols because none of us had the compute power to run them fast enough to avoid a crash at the speeds the modems ran.

That’s why I always laugh when I hear people say things like “Security should’ve been built in from the beginning! That was the mistake!”

Motherfucker, no. Just no. The computers we had back then were so very slow. So slow that you can’t even imagine. I could type significantly faster than my first modem could echo back the characters. I could barely run the one application that I wanted to at the time. There was no CPU or memory for security or for even the application working half the time. If we’d built security in from the beginning, there never would’ve been home computers, BBSes or the internet.

Some games and programs I loaded from cassette tapes (SYSTEM [press enter] – ATOM [press enter] – then press “play” on the cassette deck, wait, then press / then enter) loaded so slowly that I’d start it up, go outside to play for a while, and then 30 minutes later come back — and it still wouldn’t be done.

I think most people under 35ish have no idea just how stupendously slow, balky and resource-limited early home computers were. Then, they seemed like miracles

Now, I can’t believe we ever used them.