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"I have learned so much thanks to the searchable articles on the FHB website. I can confidently say that I expect to be a life-long subscriber." - M.K.
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Brainy Talented Woman by the way
*Break Time Wimps
*Born To WonderBetween Two (or, three, or twenty, or twenty-three) WomenBetter Than WhiskeyBeat The Wife (hey, don't look at me like that, he's the one who asked)Break The Wank (?)
*Before The Weekend.Oh, by the way, I think all this stuff is in the CB'ers Lingo Handbook, by the way.Breaker Breaker Good Buddy.
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View Image © 1999-2000"The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it." Aristotle
*Teddyolboy,Don't believe anything in the content of the above posts. These responders are being very unprofessional in their replys.You asked a simple question, you should get a simple answer.BTW is an abbreviation created in response to a post, started about a year and a half ago by a woman named Hope, who lives in upstate New York. Seems she was looking for carpenters to hire, and she posted a thread, to my best recall, as "ADK CARPENTERS WANTED". If you search the archives, you can examine the contents of that thread.None of us regular posters at the time knew what an ADK carpenter was, and in the confusion that followed, a variety of new three letter abbreviations were born in Breaktime, BTW, being one of them.By the way, I don't believe it really means anything in particular. It just became something to add to an expression, or a sentence, as an in-joke; a way of saying hello to the "charter people" who happened to be around at that time, and participated in that thread.
*Yeah, think of it as our secret handshake. By the way Ken, you just go on and give away all our little secrets.
*Oh, and by the way, the more you use BTW, the more you'll look and sound like you've been here for years. BTW!!!
*Rich,You're right. I definitely broke confidence with long standing Breaktimers and beg for forgiveness from all.
*<>FWIW, ROFL (For What Its Worth, Rolling on the Floor, Laughing)I have no idea when BTW started, but it was firmly in place when I first went on line in '92.On-line activity was expensive then; places like Compuserve and AOL charged by the minute, long distance phone bills mounted up for most bulletin boards; people developed many acronyms to save on-line charges.They're also pretty handy for those of us whose typing skills leave a lot to be desired.There are lexicons at various places on the web, any good search engine should turn them up.Bob
*Thanks BTW fellas. I'm going to use BTW every chance I get. Boy, I feel like an old timer already. By the way Bob Walker, if that's your real name, I think you're making that up about ROFL and FWIW. I mean (huh, huh) I've been surfing the web almost 3 days and havn't seen them used anywhere yet. And for what it's worth, in 92 the internet wasn't on i computers yet.BTW everybody ;)
*The World Wide Web was "invented" in 1991, the internet itself dates back to the 60's.<>In 1992, I joined Compuserve, and also hung out at a number of bulletin boards online. Mail lists ( an early part of the ineternet) were also around then, as well as a bunch of ftp sites, and other stuff, I'm sure.See, also, http://www.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html for a history/time line of the internetBob
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View Image © 1999-2000"But, some people without brains do an awful lot of talking. . ." The ScareCrow
*I think Al Gore invented the internet.
*No, that's just a rumor. Gore actually started the Love Boat.
*Bob Walker, Great link. It appears the AARP actually invented the internet. You gotta watch the senior crowd, they're apt to surprise you.BTW, In the history of the internet document, BTW was used in Q4 under FAQ.WWHT? (Who would have thought)
*nope
*I followed that link and it must be lie because it didn't say Al Gore invented it and he always tells the truth because he is a respectful person that sticks to his beliefs and means what he says! (puke)IMO, BTW started when I was in ACS in '87.-Rob
*I invented the Internet and started BTW (Brainy Talented Woman)
*Hey Tedd:Just as an FYI, the internet was around long before '92. Back around '90 when I was in college (that's not a clue to my age - it was night school!) "surfing" consisted of FTPing to various sites and getting directory listings of really cool files! (snore) What was new in the 90s was the WWW with it's URLs, hyper text (HTML & HTTP) and and gui interfaces that allowed you to point and click your way around the net. I think Mosaic was one of the first. For anyone who is interested check out this History of the Internet.
*B.T.W.......They win all the wet tee shirt contests.
*So Jerry, other than myself do you think anyone else figured that one out? Or are they just afraid to come forward?
*well then, who the heck is "JRS"?
*Jim, I thought we got this all straightened out at Petefest.I'm the real JRS!See... I can even produce a picture.
*BOW Below the waterline
*BTW Below the waterline
*Beatin' The Weanie?
*It was in '92 that I built my first computer. Before that I had to whittle them out of wood.
*Speaking of computers, did you ever hear of the "Cosmac Elf"? It was the world's first micro computer (you are using one now, micro computer, that is).I remember reading about that one in Popular Electronics Magazine back in 1979. It used the, then, revolutionary "computer on a chip" technology introduced by RCA. Your Pentium II or III, or whatever they are up to now, dates itself back to that RCA 1802 chip. It had 256 bytes (small "b") of RAM. (!)Built one of those things for myself in '80 and the box WAS whittled out of wood!It was not good for much, but sure was neat to look at.Thanks for reminding me about that, Vern!memories, la da da da-da-da-da da....
*I don't want to take fond memories away from you. But the Altair 8800 is widely considered the first PC. It was introduced in 1975, using the Intel 8080 processor. It was also featured in the Jan;. 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, but the computer pictured was a mock up, as a real computer was unavailable. It had 1 KB of memory when first sold in April that year. The first commercially viable (debatable) PC was the Apple II, which debuted in 1977.
*pita.... (CRS so some a dis may be wrong..)wasn't the first commecialy useful one the TRS80 sold mostly thru RadioShack.....my first one was a TI99.. what a piece of useless sh*t that was......i bet i dumped about a grand into it with all the assy's and i still couldn't even play pong..then the Commodore 64.... skipped the apple route...the one that first made me money was my Osborne with twin floppys and a 5 inch screen... portable too..that was a CPM machine...then i had some DOS thing.. and another CPM.. finally hit the big time about '85 with an AT-type NEC and color monitor......i bet i took every wrong turn there was including DR5... MS DOS 7.... and my biggest fiasco... O/S2...still resisting MS every chance i get...but running Win2000 Pro now....but, we are more productive .... aren't we ?aren't we ?
*Well, I don't know that I'd call a TRaSh 80 "useful". Like I said, the Apple II thing is debatable. It was introduced in '77, so it was out there before the TRS80 (1980), but I don't think ANY micro really was popular until the IBM PC. All the others before IBM were more 'GeeWhiz' contraptions, and not entirely useful. The exception possibly being Apple II - my one HS computer class still featured that beast in 1991. (Boy, have I come a long way...)As for more productive, I don't think that'll happen until I get that Gigahertz chip I've been drooling over. ;)Tough decision... Is my spare money for tools or is my spare money for computers? Hmm - not so tough, I don't have spare money!
*pita.... the cpm machines before the PC were real business machines....they all had the big-3:spreadsheet ---Supercalcwordprocessor---Wordstarand data base........duh... what the hell was that one ? oh yeah... D-Base III....then the unholy alliance...ibm and MS created MS-DOS.. and its been a microsoft world ever since...with many better systems blown away by MS marketing and ((networking)))
*Yeah, CPMs were real, but in terms of wide recognition/availability IBM was it. Stuff before that worked, and worked well, but was mostly hobbyist stuff - even the 'serious' business users, and there weren't too many of them. As to the Unholy Alliance, IBM and MS had no part in creating MS-DOS. Bill Gates and Paul Allen bought DOS, and resold it to IBM under the MS banner. That's when one of the seals to Hell was broken. Not sure which seal, though. But I shouldn't say that - I make my living doing custom Windows (Visual Basic) programming.
*Mike:<>I still have an O/S2 box running 24x7, it's basically my fax machine now, although I use it for some other stuff as well. The last time I rebooted it was January 1996! (I have a DOS6 box which also rarely needs rebooting, although its around mainly as a bookend, these days, but did 24x7 for several years.) My 2 Win95 and 1 Win98 boxes need to be rebooted several times a day. My limited experience with Linux is pretty good, but I don't have a dedicated box for it.People complain about lawyers making stuff complex to generate work for themselves, IMHO IT types who slect MSWindows as the OS of choice set the standard thereBob
*Complain all you want, but know that Win95 and Win98 are for amatuers. I'm on a WinNT box. Win2000 is just the next release of WinNT. The only time it crashes is when I play Quake...
*in the end .. all my stuff is software driven...i loved o/s2 but had to dump it when ibm stopped supporting it.. and no one would write software for it...same thing with cpm and dos....they were certainly superior to win 3.1 still holding out with Corel suite.. and word perfect.. but my daughter has deserted to the enemy..made me buy her Win Office Pro.. because of Power Point & publisher..my big power user is Chief Architect.. and it loves the Win2000 Pro...
*You guys got something faster/better than my TI99? How much they cost? Can I convert my library of tape cassetts?
*I got the dates wrong didn't I? ("I've a good memory, but its short!") It must have been '75 or '76, then.Mr. Pita, you're right about the Altair 8800, it did pre-date the Elf, but there was some debate about whether to call it a true micro-computer because, like the other mini-computers at that time, shared its jobs over more than one processing chip. The only thing unique about the Elf (and what Apple soon followed with) was a single chip that did all of the computing. All the other stuff in the box was for I/O, power supply and whatnot.I still remember gazing at the picture of the Altair that you mentioned, on the cover of Popular Electronics that year! (it had LEDs, toggle switches and the cool look that just said "computer", like something out of a movie, but I was just a kid).Man, what a lot has changed over these few years, hasn't it?My memory is still quite rusty on this, but I have a book at home somewhere, published about 14 years ago, on the history of computing, that mentioned the Altair and the Elf, discussing this very point ("which was truly the first micro-computer") and the author's conclusion was: Elf, based on the 'single chip' theory. Now I will have to go find that book and make sure because a whole lot of water has run over my dam since then......
*Well, if you wanna stick with TI, I got my TI-85 for about $100. It's got 32K memory, you can program it, and it's faster than your 99 - it's even pocket-sized. Sorry, no tape conversion available - it's only a calculator, fer cryin' out loud!
*..i had that ti calc with the magnetic programmable cards...took a two day course in using it at U of Hartford... programmed it to do heat loss calcs ..my first elec. expenditure was $69 for a 4 function desk calculator..about as big as a telephone set....and then all the engineers were running around with their HP's.. and the reverse polish notation..i never did figure that one out....
*Mike:<> Stop in at WPWin's WordPerfect Universe forum, great board for the WP Office suite: http://wpwin.com/ubbcgi/Ultimate.cgiBob
*thanks bob.. i went over and registered
*
Born To be Wild?
Better to Wonder?