Hi all,

I just recently bought and received a blu ray of War Games from Amazon.  Prices 
are cheap on some of the older titles.  This is one of the original hacker 
movies from the 80's.  Watched it tonight.  It was quite a retro trip down 
memory lane back to the computer tech of the 70's and 80's.  The blu ray has 
some special features that never were on the original dvd, so, if you've never 
seen the movie, I'd definitely recommend it.  If you have seen it, I'd 
recommend it again.  You gotta love this 40 year old tech:

ACOUSTIC modem couplers
8" FLOPPY disks
terminal / TEXT based DIAL UP computer connections which are SLOOOOW
300 MB removable DISK PACKS that are larger than most bread boxes
   and the drives the size of a mini fridge
rows of REEL TO REEL tape machines
PAY phones
POP TOPS that detach from the can, which David uses to hack a pay phone
micro CASSETTE recorder
really crummy synthesized COMPUTER VOICE
and, of course, the WOPR computer with it's thousands of NEON bulbs
not to mention the war room and missile silos 

Most younglings won't know what this stuff is.  They have no idea what (pain) 
they missed.  Having said that, I'm glad I've got the modern stuff to use now.  
I just figured I'd reminisce a bit, and I figured some of you could appreciate 
these references.  Within a few days, I plan to be watching the sequel, War 
Games, The Dead Code.  I recommend that too.

I guess I'm becoming an old fart.  It's hard to believe we're in the 10's 
decade now.  Pretty soon, when someone talks about the 20's, we'll have to ask 
which century they're referring to.

PS  I still have a telephone cable in my laptop bag just because I haven't 
removed it.  I haven't used it in years.  I don't think this laptop has a 
telephone port, but my older one does.  I don't think I'd know where to dial 
into the internet now even if I had a need to.

PPS  I was in Barnes and Noble today at Mall of Ga, which is serviced by 
attwifi.  I was wishing I could dial in to the net, as a 64 kbps connection 
would have probably been faster than what I was getting on a consistent basis.  
Running a vpn REALLY likes to see more bandwidth than that.

Sincerely,

Ron



--

Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
Please excuse my potential brevity if I'm typing on the touch screen.

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com

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