Oh guys, to me the era nowadays is not so much about particular software programs - it's about fond memories of many things blasting off all at once.
You probably know what happened by the end of 1989 in DDR, CZ+SK and elsewhere in the eastern bloc. E.g. our neighbors in PL had a bit of an advance start, but to us in CZ, 1989 was the year that the wall came down, with a practical change of govt. actually taking place in early 1990. That's also when the borders to the west have opened in practical terms / the iron curtain was ripped into pieces, western consumer goods and computer hardware started flooding in via various channels (official and not so official). In the summer of 1990 I was aged 14, I just finished the elementary school (at the time it lasted 8 years) and got smoothly accepted to a highschool (called Gymnazium in this part of the world). And, the highschool had a room or two with obscure eastern 8-bit computers, which were hardly any practical use, apart from a pacman clone and Basic. I believe in about 1990-1991, the school also got a room in the attic with about 10 shiny new PC's and a small server, networked using 10Base-2 Ethernet. The PC's were diskless 386SX at about 20 MHz, about 1 MB RAM, the brand was "Data Media Corporation" if memory serves. I have no clue how the school got hold of those - in retrospect, at the time in my country each of those PC's must've been worth an annual wage of my father (if not two or three). And, while I was not in the "programming" class, I had access "outside of the curriculum" - owing that to the liberal access regime (allowed by the headmaster), and a polite network admin / IT teacher on site. I really cannot thank them enough. I certainly remember a lot of games... speaking of fading echoes of the eighties, I figure Larry Leisure Suite would be about right :-) But perhaps the one fond memory is borrowing a book from the school's computer admin: a manual to Borland Turbo Assembler, and reading that from A to Z in a few days. This was the closest to an x86 ISA reference book that I could get at the time :-) Not that I achieved much in bare TASM, beyond the Hello world. There was no internet. There was a city library with a few relevant books. There were maybe two relevant monthly mags. The BBS stuff was initially inaccessible to us mere mortals. Hell a PSTN telephone line at home has only reached us in mid nineties I guess. Modems were not much practical use and very expensive. I had my first encounter with modems and some BBS sites in mid nineties (after "graduating" from the highschool) already in parallel with my first e-mail address at the university... I believe the uni ran e-mail in the LAN over Novell file sharing, the client was Pegasus (possibly managed by Mercury at the server). Apart from Pegasus in DOS, I recall using a Gopher client, and an early Mosaic HTTP browser on a few odd PC's that were beefy enough for Windows. Not that the web was much use at the time - until search engines appeared, Netscape came about and things started rolling. To us east of the iron curtain, the PC's have gushed in rather abruptly after 1990. Kids of my generation have skipped the 80's DOS, and the first practical Windows version around was 3.11. The first PC's in my eyesight were 286, and my first PC at home was a 386DX/40 in about 1991/1992, I believe it had a Biostar mobo = a Taiwanese clone. That's where the slope has really begun for me :-) Owing that to my parents BTW. The PC (and my typing skills) also had some use in my mom's small consultancy business at the time, so it was not a pure toy and has "paid for itself" within its lifetime. The programming class at the highschool (= not me) got some serious headstart into algorithms etc. The school engaged a teacher in his fifties I guess, a slim white-haired pro, apparently with proper education and relevant practice. All the school had at the time was Pascal with objects, but looking back I have to say that he taught the stuff the right way and he knew what he was doing. I recall that two of the best students coded a software app in Borland Pascal with Turbovision for creating daily/weekly teaching schedules for the school. A pretty advanced piece of software, considering use of objects / "dynamic data", the data model, and the algorithmic manipulation / application of constraints etc. Classes getting split 50%/50% for some subjects and whatnot... I don't recall the details, but I remember output on fanfold paper via an A3 dot matrix printer, using a fixed-width font with "line" characters for the table/boxes. What a time to be alive, even as a lone computer nerd in a "humanities" class... that's where my English originally comes from BTW. The "programming" class wasn't nearly as heavy in foreign languages. Apart from the computer nerdy side of things, the grip of Commies was gone almost overnight, overlapping with my later teenage years... The general unbounded liberty of the nineties isn't coming back, either. Due to the economic transformation in our country there was a fair bit of uncertainty, but the sky was the limit :-) Frank _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
