Growing Today from 1994

My wife brought home a Growing Today magazine from 1994. She bought it for $.50 in the local Op Shop. It is very interesting reading it.

The already talk about global warming and latest scientific research which shows that planting trees might help to slow it down.

But one thing I noticed which is interesting. There is not one internet web page address or email address in the whole magazine. Isn't this strange? [] This fact made me realise again, how much we live with this technology. How normal it meanwhile is to have an email address.

BTW, Dr.Clive Dalton was part of the mag. It is the only name I recognized.

Cheers

Peter

In the middle of 1994 I was in the IT business, and as Microsoft dealers, we were provided with a "June 1994 Preview Release" of Windows 95. It included a thing called "The Microsoft Network" which was the forerunner to today's MSN.

Access to this network was free until they released Windows 95, and thereafter, they started charging for it.

So I made good use of it -- via my 28.8k dialup modem -- and explored every page that was available. Imagine how long it would take to do that on today's internet

Eventually, I ran out of interesting pages to look at on the Microsoft Network, so in 1995 I joined CompuServe which cost NZ$28 per hour in those days. So I didn't use it as much, but it was tax deductible as a business expense, so when the need arose, I used it.

After a while, CompuServe introduced an "Internet Gateway" which let you access the wider internet, but still at a price in excess of $10 per hour. It wasn't until other ISPs such as IHUG and Voyager launched, that we were able to access the internet for less than $10 per hour. Flat-rate ISPs didn't start until 1999, so for several years, it was very expensive to access the internet, meaning that few non-business people could justify the cost.

Some Scandinavian countries have now enshrined Internet Access as a basic human right, according to their laws. How times have changed in the past 16 years [^]

What can be even funnier in old editions of GT is websites that are numbers and dots

I worked for TVNZ and I remember us getting the internet in 1994 and just loving it, but being terrified of viruses and "Trojans" so we hardly ever used it.

By the end of 1994 I had discovered a TV programme called Babylon 5 ([]closest sci fi nut) and there was an entire website devoted to it, including things called "spoilers". It was SO exciting!

I was also into F1 at the time (can you tell I lived in town at this point?), and within months there were amazing websites on that.

I used to love searching through Yahoo by its menus, remember that?

Peter, I remember when I was a child which was quite some time ago[] I loved to read in a huge very well read book by Reader's Digest. It had maps, graphs, charts, lots of interesting stuff about this one planet we all share and I think it was published in the early 1960s. There was a chart about projected temperature rises if the emission of greenhouse gasses increased at the same rate as during the 1950s. It had graphs about the number of people who would live on this planet in decades to come, how much land would have to be planted with potatoes to feed them all, how much land would have to be available to feed them all with pork meat and so forth.

While I don't remember the figures it was scary and still is.

I've got a complete collection of Growing Today magazines since 1993

GrantK;327869 wrote: In the middle of 1994 I was in the IT business, and as Microsoft dealers

Hmmm, I always thought there was something fishy about you GK , now I see it was the mark of the [M$] beast [}]

Back in '94 IIRC I was running NCSA Mosaic on a Unix platform connected to the 'real' Internet, I was also responsible for a bunch of Macs as well as doing dubious things with Phil Karn's NOS , admittedly on a DOS box. By then I'd been involved with networking, of various types, for some years and can well recall when the 'net was completely non-graphical and the wonder when Mosaic was revealed for the first time. There were some other attempts at browsers earlier I think but Mosaic was the one I used and remember the best.

One day when it matters even less I'll talk about those dubious things I mentioned [], they go back a bit further than '94 of course, but it was exciting to be involved in this 'new' Interweb stuff around those years [8D]

Anyway, major thread drift, I too have some early GT's, an excellent source of information, and had noted with interest the few email addresses etc. I was fortunate to get mine (GT's) from Tardme some time ago. I think they were 5 bucks for 20 or so and are excellent value reading.

P.

Phaedrus;328009 wrote: Hmmm, I always thought there was something fishy about you GK , now I see it was the mark of the [M$] beast [}]

Haha, I like your devious sense of humour P

Now we have even more of the Mark of M$ beast emblazoned upon our visage because one of our sons is working for M$ at the mother ship in Redmond no less...

Armed with a Master's Degree in Software Engineering from Auckland Uni, he is on the fast track for US citizenship.

Phaedrus;328009 wrote: Back in '94 IIRC I was running NCSA Mosaic ...

Now that's interesting because when I invoked the "Internet Gateway" from within the CompuServe browser, it "shelled out" to a program called Spyglass Mosaic

Probably very similar to what you were using I should imagine.

Anyway ... major thread drift as you say []

Apologies to PeterNZ

GrantK;328010 wrote:
Now that's interesting because when I invoked the "Internet Gateway" from within the CompuServe browser, it "shelled out" to a program called Spyglass Mosaic

Probably very similar to what you were using I should imagine.

Had to follow up briefly with this info from that Mosaic link:

"Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer"

So yes (sigh) Redmond obviously had you in its sights in more ways than one!

P.

I am not ashamed to commit it: I am a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (Did the certification because it is abbreviated to MCPD and I always had the dream to one day enter the open plan office and yell out "MCPD, drop your mouse! Step away from the keyboard" Sadly I never got the chance ). I also admit I work for HP doing Microsoft development (By the way,I think you have a spelling problem. There is no $ character in Microsoft! [])

I am at an age meanwhile where I don't care anymore. I am too old to get into a fight over Linux,Microsoft and/or Mac. All I care about is money and lots of it. And I care about my home office contract. And I must say, I am fairly happy.

Anyway, I started with Bulletin Boards using a 2400 bps modem. Then got AOL which was big back in Germany. And then dial up internet.

Cheers

Peter

PeterNZ;328021 wrote: I always had the dream to one day enter the open plan office and yell out "MCPD, drop your mouse! Step away from the keyboard"

Peter, we can have a quiet talk about this little problem off-air if you like . It's quite all right I'm sure you're completely normal....ish and with 27yrs of therapy (at $222/hr) we'll have you nicely regressing back to your childhood so we can address its obvious deficiencies .

Anyway it's interesting to see all us geek-types on here, not sure that that's not telling us something - perhaps about the stress of it all such that we need to commune with nature again or something. Anyway you did better than me, my first foray into digital comms was 45baud TTY. That slowly progressed to 300/300 then 1200/75, 1200/1200 for a long time before I got to 2400. Actually (digging around in an old box) I am currently holding a rather battered NetComm 1234 which upon inspection looks like a 24/24 modem. Not sure why I still have it or if it still goes but it's probably from a similar era to those GT's of yours

P.

I know we are really drifting away now from the original post.But hey, it is my post and I can do with it whatever I like. [^]

I still have two hard drives somewhere. One is a 40 MByte which is as big as a brick and the other one is a 105 MByte which replaced the 40 MByte. I still remember when I got the 105 MByte one I though I will never fill it up! [8D]

I am currently having a 500 Gbyte plus a 1 TeraByte HD in my Computer! [xx(] And the memory in my laptop is 100 times bigger than the 40 MByte HD. And I have a SD card in my digi cam as big as a stamp which takes 100 times more data than the 40 MByte HD.Crazy!

Cheers

Peter

Phaedrus;328029 wrote: Anyway you did better than me, my first foray into digital comms was 45baud TTY. That slowly progressed to 300/300 then 1200/75, 1200/1200 for a long time before I got to 2400.

My first Modem was a 1200, but some of the time I used it at 1200/75 for VideoTex (I think they called it). You could get news headlines and financial market updates via this service.

Our business was one of the first to get National Bank DirectLink installed which worked at 1200/1200 via a DOS program.

In mid 1990, I got started with bulletin boards and then discovered Usenet via a gateway that a local BBS used to provide. Shortly after that, we moved house, and then the 91/92 recession hit, so I was very busy running our business pretty much single-handed during 1993 and didn't get back into "recreational" comms until mid 1994.

Internet access today is something I take for granted, and don't give it much of a thought unless I don't have it. Every so often though, it is nice to go somewhere on holiday; turn all comms devices off, and enjoy the splendid sense of isolation for a while [^]

Ok, I have no idea what you guys are talking about so I'm going to drift the thread a bit further, back to my Apple IIE with its DOS monitor and it's AWESOME games (Aztec, loved that game!), and its incredibly annoying habit of saving things to the desktop rather than a file, leading me to multiple breakdowns thinking I had lost school homework.

When we went to Windows my boss threatened to resign, refused to do the training course and said the whole company would go under with this new-fangled s**t. I taught him how to play solitaire and within a week he was a convert

Even further back...Dick Smith TRS-80 with games loaded via an ordinary cassette tape - and monitor was an old black and white telly [}]

Dad and I used to spend many happy hours in the basement dictating/typing in programmes from geek mags to make silly little apps work. Great fun, esp when you missed a semi colon and the whole thing crashed and then you had to go back through and find the typo in several hundred lines of text!

tigger;328069 wrote: Dad and I used to spend many happy hours in the basement dictating/typing in programmes from geek mags to make silly little apps work. Great fun, esp when you missed a semi colon and the whole thing crashed and then you had to go back through and find the typo in several hundred lines of text!

Ahhhh the joys of almost every machine supporting BASIC from the on-board firmware. Bootup was instant but loading from a cassette was anything but; finding the right place on the tape, and then waiting while it loaded...

Things were so simple then weren't they?

As a kid I remember being really jealous of a friend who had that ping pong game that you put on the telly. Not sure who the hell did it but we thought it was just awesome!

Now when i look at the game my kids play on PS3...wow I would have been totally blown away if they had them back then lol