Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Motel West, alive and kicking......

Ahhh, names like General Chaos, Midnight Cavalier (and getting to call him Midnight Chevette again) right here on my blog. Heard from (other than here) Sir Duke, White Lioness, Herb Doom, Frank Zelba and of course DB Rat. Names I haven't heard, let alone read on a computer screen, for years. Makes me wonder what Your Concience, Ed Broadbent, Dr. Faust, Michael Binkley, The Apex, Nosferatu !, Oliver Wendell Jones and the rest are up to.
I found an old IBM 386 laying around the school last winter and set it up in my classroom. Has Windows 3.1, but also had DOS Wordperfect 5.1 - which is the only way I can get the old dot matrix printer to work. I was teaching a computer tech class at the time, and part of the curriculum was a little bit of history. So, I get the computer printing up some papers for me and of course the kids ask "What is that noise?" Which lead straight into the workings of the old IBM with 256 KB memory, a 20 MB harddrive and Windoes 3.1. Most of them don't remember anything before Windows 98, and that's ancient. Almost died when I told them that I hadn't made a mistake and it was in fact 256 KB and 20 MB, not MB and Gigs. It put things into perspective when a student held up this thing that was the size of a really thin lighter and pointed out it had 100 times the memory of that hard drive. So I decided to really freak them out and describe the experience of downloading a message from the BBS with a 300 baud modem. Jaws hit the keyboards as I described watching the letters come through one by one, almost like someone was typing it right there in front of me. When one of them asked "how long did it take for a picture to come through?" I just laughed.

7 comments:

TM.Cavalier said...

And don't forget Mr. Coffee -- he'll always be a member of the Motel West. In loving memory of MJB.

Midnight Cavalier

Max Sartin said...

No one who ever met Mr. Coffee could forget him. But since I was pondering what all those people were up to, I kinda left him out because, well, as far as this plane of existance is concerned, I know what he's up to. But thank you for mentioning him, he was a big part of what made The Motel West, and HQ for that matter, what it was. A moment of silence in honor of our fallen comrade ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. thanks.

TM.Cavalier said...

Hey, lets not leave this on a downer -- We all know he wouldn't have wanted it that way - was always about the party. Besides, he was the one (or was that you?) that wanted to have a Keg'er to celebrate someone going out on an LDS Mission...

TM.Cavalier

Max Sartin said...

Sounds like something he would have come up with, but I'm sure I got on board pretty quickly.

A Paperback Writer said...

I had a computer programming class at the U back in the day..... We worked on computers with a whopping 32 K of memory. The average watch has more memory than that now. In fact, I have a $4.00 calculator with roughly 32K memory.

Anonymous said...

I see now, this is slowly becoming the rival of the Motel West Gang... Waiting for Sir Duke to show up in a towel, or just passed out on the couch after a little drinking... Hmmmm, life in the PAST lane...

General Chaos

Anonymous said...

hmmm... sorry, that was supposed to be "rivival" not "rival". amazing how much difference two letters make in a meaning..
General Chaos