Looking through my file cabinet, I found one of my father’s credit card statements from 1985, with a charge for 315.45 for a Volksmodem 1200. This was an external generic modem that you could buy adapter cables for to connect it to different computers. I hooked mine up to our Apple iic. I had to pay my father back for putting it on his Mastercard, and I can’t believe how much I was willing to pay to get on the local warez bbs’s. :)
heh, I must be younger than you. I remember pinching pennies to buy a big bad 9600 baud Hayes external modem at that age.
If you really want to to feel the nostalgia, I recommend taking some pictures from an adult website and converting them to blurry low-resolution gifs. Ahhh, the good old days.
/insert “Bah, I remember black and white GeoPaint nudies!”
I remember carefully tracking my Compuserve and long distance usage so I didn’t blow my budget & anger my parents. Now in the era of cheap broadband, I’m not sure if those are pleasant memories after all.
I still remember having to spend a load of saved money to pay for the costs incured due to my Internet usage back in the bad days of 98. I can only imagine the torture of the BBS day bills.
I remember not tracking my usage and getting slammed with a huge Q-Link bill.
At 15 I bought:
Comic books.
Games for my Atari 800.
D&D miniatures.
Traveller books.
Vinyl records by people like Peter Gabriel, Genesis, and Emerson Lake & Palmer.
Oh god. I [b]still[/b] haven’t paid my parents the $200+ CompuServ bill I ran up in one month during the summer of 1995.
Shit, even my Spanish teacher found out about it and wouldn’t let me live it down!
1995? You deserve mocking for running up a bill in that era of online plenty! :D I’m talking 1982 - a first-generation C64 and 300 baud modem. And get off my lawn!
1995? You deserve mocking for running up a bill in that era of online plenty! :D I’m talking 1982 - a first-generation C64 and 300 baud modem. And get off my lawn![/quote]
LOL I was consistently ringing up 300 dollar a month bills playing Gemstone III and NWN on AOL in 1994. And I was 30 - I should have known better!
I was much older than fifteen, but my most ludicrous tech purchase was spending something like $250 for an 80387 floating point coprocessor just so I could play Falcon 3.0’s high fidelity flight model.
Gads, I bought one of those, too. I went to 4MB of RAM at the same time, and the total upgrade cost was about $650 as I recall. The only thing I remember speeding up significantly was El Fish. I think I’ll go hang my head in shame.
Yeah yeah. You’re waving your considerably older dick about. :)
Yep. I did the exact same thing. Bought a Cyrix math coprocessor for Falcon 3.0. LOL!
I still remember my first absurd modem purchase ($175 to buy a 2400 baud modem – quite an upgrade from 1200 baud!)
However, the most absurd modem purchase has to be my Practical Peripherals External Full Tower 14.4 modem (with LED display). Here’s a pic from an ebay auction:
That modem set me back $350 dollars back when it first came out, and I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Nothing was cooler than watching as the modem connected … handshaking … negotiating 14400 … connected at 14400. Now it’s for sale for $5.99 in an auction, and no one will bid on it.
Although I love my 56k USR Courier modem (which originally retailed for about $300 and I picked up for $15 at a garage sale a few years back) which I use pretty much exclusively for faxing, it’s not nearly as cool as that old Practical Peripherals beast.