I'm 24, female, live in Pittsburgh, graduated from college, and have a job.

I am 32, also graduated from college, and also work for a living.

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CrawGator

A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. Douglas Adams Mostly Harmless

So I claim Geekier than thou status.

31. Graduated from college. Two master's degrees. Now piling it higher and deeper at the Air Force's request.

I'm old enough to remember when the BBC was mostly broadcast in black and white.

I remember my dad coming home from the university with boxes of computer punch cards. I remember connecting our school's only terminal to the district mainframe through an accoustic coupler. I remember typing school papers on a manual typewriter. Thank goodness my dad decided to buy an Apple ][+ before I started high school.

Anyway, I seem to have, once again, inadvertantly made a simple post into a long one. To sum up, I'm 19 and an Aquarius, which means I'll be 20 before the end of the month. I'm currently unemployed and I live in the southwest lower corner of Michigan in a little town no one has heard of.

I played the precursor to Zork on my dad's network at his work (Rogue? Don't entirely remember, just remember it was text-based. Maybe Rogue was the name of the dungeon game where all the critters were letters,,,). He used to bring home reams of that big-ass green and white computer paper with the perforated edges for us to draw on.

Had nearly every last Atari 2600 game!

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Originally posted by Zwilnik:
I'm 34 and my parents *had* a BETA system (for about 2 months).

I'm old enough to remember when the BBC was mostly broadcast in black and white.

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I'll be 41 tomorrow; I saw Gilligan's Island, Star Trek and most of the shows you may have grown up on when they premered.

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Originally posted by DaraSue:
my parents had one of those early-80s video disk players that used a stylus (somebody please tell me you remember those things, because I'm starting to think I hallucinated it...)

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Originally posted by +Andrew:
I never would have believed such a thing, but a quick Google search indicates that several such technologies did exist.

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Ye gods, you really can find anything on the internet. All this time, people have looked at me like I was from Mars whenever I told anybody about it, and here there's practically a whole video-geek subculture dedicated to the damn things.

"The company has forecast that the video disc business could grow to $7.5 billion by the end of the 10th year."

well, except I don't live in Pittsburgh, and I'm still working on the college thing.

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Originally posted by Zwilnik:
'Adventure' was the grandaddy of Zork and Rogue (as you guessed) was the hack and slash dungeon game with the letters (it randomly generated the dungeons and so was the great great great grandaddy of Diablo)

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Originally posted by DaraSue:
,,,,,,my parents had one of those early-80s video disk players that used a stylus (somebody please tell me you remember those things, because I'm starting to think I hallucinated it...)

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No, yer mostly sane. Those played the big-ass gold frisbees!

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Originally posted by EddieKatz:
because I'm tired of feeling like I'm visiting a site frequented almost entirely by people who aren't old enough to know what the difference was between BETA and VHS,

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One of the reasons I like GeekCulture so much is because of the low density of noxious kiddies (and it's an attitude not an age), so I don't get this feeling. But, well, I, ahh, just had my birthday (31.12) and it's the ummm, 38th time I've done that. There, I've said it. Now, what did you do with my teeth, you young whippersnappers.

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Originally posted by Demosthenes:
sixteen, junior in high school

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Same here (we got you beat Eponine ) and i know exactly what you're talking about with goth elites. the people who saw Bauhaus in Concert, and when Siouxsie was still "running with the punks" etc.

First VCR was a big honkin' VHS top-loader, all manual. It took about two fingers' worth of muscle to push the Play button (especially if you're a little kid); fortunately, the Play button was big enough that you could put two fingers on it. It had a manual tracking knob, which I dearly miss on many newer models.

First President I remember at all was Carter. First real awareness of politics/issues was when some US citizens were held hostage in Iran for over a year. One of them was from our town.

My parents had vinyl and 8-tracks. I remember that someone (perhaps my parents, but more likely a grandparent) had some records that played at 78 RPM. One of the turntables we had could play at 16 RPM, and listening to normal 33+1/3 RPM records at 16 RPM was really entertaining.

I never worked directly with punch cards or paper tape, but I programmed COBOL for a college course on a mainframe with a terminal that was incapable of running a full screen editor.[1] I used some sort of line editor which was a little less powerful than ed(1), but of course it wasn't on a Unix system. But I was a bit younger than the normal college student at the time.[2] Also, we were graded (partly) on how many times we had to compile the program before turning it in -- the 132-column greenbar print-outs had that number on the first page.

I remember disco, and break dancing (but not bell bottoms). I saw Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture in their first runs, as well as The Black Hole, TRON and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial.

I've used a slide rule before, but never seriously. I had an orange and black 4-function calculator with LED display that I absolutely adored.

For the lazy: I was born in 1970.

[1]It also had terminals with a full screen editor on them, but the full screen editor was slooow, and those terminals were always in high demand. Some of the other students in the lab I told me about the idle line-editor-only terminals on the other side, and taught me the basic commands. While waiting for the print-outs, there were even some text mode games. The one I remember was called something like "Kingdom of Ur"; it was a sort of primitive simulation in which you had to decide how many acres of grain to plant, how many bushels of grain to feed your people, etc.

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Originally posted by quantumfluff:
Old enough to
- know that real men used reel-to-reel videotape rather than those new-fangled cassette things.
- know how to make a control card for a keypunch machine
- know why delete is ASCII 127 rather than < 32 like the other control characters
- have used the ARPAnet rather than the Internet.
- have data on 9-track tapes and feel sad when I read about their final passing

So I claim Geekier than thou status.

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All this pretty much applies to me as well, though as to recording TV shows I say, "what, no kinescope?"

I once owned a television with a channel 1 on it (though I got it from someone's trash).

I remember when JFK was assasinated and I was in the 4th or 5th grade at the time.

I also remember going out at night to watch the Echo satellite pass over.

I make no claim to being geekier than anybody.

In my undergrad (& early postgrad days) the whole university used an IBM 370/165 with 4Megs of core (real core -- none of this RAM stuff and no virtual memory).

Sorry I don't recall too much about Beta though, didn't get my first VCR till the mid-90's.

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Originally posted by MacManKrisK:
I'm currently unemployed and I live in the southwest lower corner of Michigan in a little town no one has heard of.

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