Back in 1994...

Technology moves fast and we embrace it. We use all kinds of gadgets every day and take it for granted but often we forget how we used to do stuff before.

So I thought I should put this in writing before it goes out of my memory.

1-
While I was living in Paris, I used to spend most of my nights browsing in Mosaic and downloading pictures over my dial-up modem at a bit rate of 14.400 kbps (actually that was on the box but it never reached that speed). Yes it was that fast ! I would find a pic, hit download and then go to bed hoping to get something appearing in my screen early morning.

2-
I signed up on Compuserve and was one the happy few (at least I like to think it that way) to have an email address. Needless to point that at that time CompuServe was by far the top name in online services. The funny thing was that the email addresses by then were so long with all kinds of alphanumeric characters that it would almost not fit in a business card.
I remember I was so proud that I ordered business cards just to show my email address printed on it. My biggest problem was that I just couldn't use it : I surely had an email but didn't have any friends who had one !

3-
One of my favorites : come back from school and find a voice message delivered in my laptop.
It was an Olivetti Philos 33, running a 386 Mhz, 4Mb RAM, a 9 (or was it 8) inch active matrix screen and a retractable mouse on the right side (left handed... sorry for you guys). It was connected to an external voice modem through the serial port, with BVRP software installed as an answering machine.