The PC and Internet Revolution in Rural America | Hacker News Reader

The PC and Internet Revolution in Rural America

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36 pointsecliptik45 comments

This account is very similar to my own including the start date, except we had a c64 (with disk drive). Even once we had a modem, virtually every BBS was long distance. It wasn't until I was well into highschool that the Internet was accessible out there. CD based encyclopedias were mostly sparse subsets of paper ones with some movies included. Knowledge was still hard to find and dated. Biyearly trips to the nearest city let me get some computer books, and since I couldn't connect out, I dove in and learned x86 assembler and the low level details of PC architecture. In retrospect, it was a very unique moment to be involved in computing and it produces a rather unique viewpoint.

I've noticed this trend among my fellow 80s kids - connecting out was either expensive or impossible for many so they dove deeper into the details of how their computer worked.

I have found that being able to stay on task and dig into these things has become a lot more difficult as I get older - part of that is probably age but part of it is that I have a World of Distraction available just a click away, and the pull of cheap dopamine is strong.

Part of it is also the vastly greater complexity of axi buses and svi2 buses and trusted compute modules that load stuff for the processor... Yeah I can't even follow the boot procedure of a modern computer. The arm cores in a usb3 controller have more juice than the computers I bhad back then.

During some period intrastate long distance (i.e. outside of your immediate local calling area) could actually be more expensive than a call to another state/area code. As I recall, at one point, I actually got a phone plan that let me call 40 or 50 miles into a subscription BBS into a nearby city so my telephone costs weren't exorbitant. (Still used various software that let me go in and out quickly and do most of my reading and writing offline.)

This story really hits home. I started a little earlier but rural Maine was just as isolated. My first computer at home was a TRS-80 Model 1 we got in 1979. It had a cassette deck for storing programs. I spent many hours hand entering game and utility source code from Byte magazine.

I got my first IBM compatible while in college around 1985, 640 K and DUAL floppies. It was from a startup PC maker named PCs Limited, started by a college drop out named Michael Dell. Two floppy disks provided infinite opportunities. A 300 baud modem connected me to the campus mainframe.

Years later for work I remember having a 28.8K (then 56K) modem to connect to work on nights and weekends to do support work and access the companies T-1 line.

Strangely enough, by the time cable was run to my parents home in that rural Maine town it was more cost effective to run fiber than copper, so my parents got fiber to the house.

I found this fascinating. Although a very different experience, it brought back memories of first getting online as a student in the UK in the 90s and what a miracle that seemed and how genuinely world changing it was.

This is a nitpick, but early PC BIOS with C/H/S addressing could address up to 504 MB (1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors) just fine. There was nothing stopping you from using a 32 MB drive, like the article implies.

What you did often run in to is that early BIOSes would only support fixed disk types, and not arbitrary C/H/S values. In some cases this would prevent you from using the full capacity of your hard drive when upgrading. 32 MB was a common early size, though, and would generally be covered by the standard disk types.

32MB was a DOS limitation, i think. FAT12/FAT16 filesystem perhaps? DOS 3.0 days iirc.

Dos before 3.0 used FAT12, limited to 16 MB, DOS 3.0 introduced FAT16 (though in a reduced 14 bit version) that extended size to 32 MB, DOS 4.0 had "real" 16 bit FAT16:

https://hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-drives-capacity-limits...

These were limits to the partition/volume size, however.

Woah. This site displays text across the width of my monitor.

I feel so alive and dirty now and want to violate other internet protocol.

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