Online masks and computer encounters
776th!!
What's staler than yesterday's overnight thread? Since nobody's reading anymore... :)
My first handles were on various dialup BBSs and I have no idea what they were. Went by my given name on CompuServe forums except on Religion Forum where I read the discussions reminded of Matthew 23:24, so I took the name =gnat=strainer= -- camel-swallower just would not sound right! That was my first regular online moniker, and I contributed a fair share of petty exegesis and broad hermeneutics!
I self-published mini-comics as Little Mindless Publications but later decided to go upscale so I changed it to Little Mindful Publications. When the Web finally came along, I therefore called my website Mindful Webworks. Since I'm just one of many, hence the moniker. Boring, huh?
Plugged in my Radio Shack Model I, Spring of 1978. Thinking RS was a solid brand, I passed over various other odd-looking fly-by-night hobby computers, including some thing called an Apple. The road not taken! Saw some old machines mentioned upthread, but did anybody get a computer earlier than that and I missed it?
Wind back the clock to Beloit College 1970. My roommate let slip his password, and I played around on the teletype-based terminals. Don't know what model that machine was, but it was punchcards and paper tape memory.
Wind back further, to the NY World's Fair, 1964. My first hacking (of a sort) was on the public terminals at the IBM exhibit. After playing every lame game on the machine, I thought, what's this key do? O-oh!! Heh heh. They didn't idiot-proof (12-year-old proof) very well!
Blame whichever of my folks bought me that little plastic model binary calculator toy from some science catalog. Let's see... Yup! Good old Google Images! There's a picture of it online! Destined to calculate!
The damn things still are stupid, though. Ask Eliza.