Old fogeys take notice

If you're like me, you can drill down in this historical list of North American BBS numbers to the region where you spent your adolescence, search for dates in the 1980s, and get instant nostalgia vibes. They even list the one that my friend Alan set up for his church, and the one that was run by the creepy counter guy at the Radio Shack and went from a warez board with draconian upload/download ratio limits to all Christian chat one day without warning.

Texas Instruments Silent 700

This (or some identical-appearing descendant) was my very first mode of contact with a computer. It's remarkably portable for 1969-vintage information technology, I'd say-- much lighter than an IBM Selectric typewriter, let alone a GE Terminet.

In the mid-seventies, my father would come home after a long day hacking the Honeywell mainframes at the office and hack some more after dinner with his Silent 700, through that 300 baud acoustic coupler (we got a second phone line for the purpose). I had no idea that every kid's dad didn't use a computer all the time. I was living ten or twenty years in the future and didn't know it. There were a few games on the system; it had Original Adventure, tic-tac-toe and Hunt the Wumpus.

Around 1977 or '78 we had a program of once-a-week enrichment courses in school, and I took one on BASIC programming in which we learned everything on paper, since we had no actual computers. At the end of the course, somebody wheeled in a Commodore PET 2001 on a cart and we took turns typing in our little programs and running them. I made a typo and got a syntax error, and then it was somebody else's turn. That evening, my dad dialed in with his terminal and let me run my program on the engineering Honeywells.