21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) Read Online Free PDF Page A

impractical and bizarre paper. Long perforated rolls, rather like a giant’s toilet roll, with holes punched at regular intervals running parallel along each side. You had to feed the holes onto some prongs and then hand-crank the thing along until it was in place, and then wait 20 minutes while a device a bit like Grandstand ’s vidiprinter spewed out vaguely readable text.
    Compare a printout from a Commodore 64 to the flashy colour stuff we get today. This is all in recent memory, people; we really have come this far.
    If you ever had to deal with this stuff, you will never forget it. But I doubt that you miss it.
     
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Dial-up Modems
    With the advent of broadband internet connections and wireless connectivity, one relatively recent technological development is rapidly becoming endangered.
    Less than ten years ago, if you had a home internet connection, then it would almost certainly have been dial-up. By which I mean that your computer modem would use your telephone line to call up your internet provider and connect to the service.
    This little box of mysterious flashing lights and wires would let you know it was doing its job by relaying the sounds of the phone call through your computer:
[dial tone]
[sound of a phone ringing]
blleeeep burgh krpphgspreeksplangkerlungkerlungkerlung
[pause]
bleepsping plonk plonkkerchang dank dank ding
[ad lib to fade]
    By the end of which you would, six or seven times out of ten, be connected to the internet. But, boy, would it be slow. Dial-up internet connections were typically 56 kilobits per second, which is 12½ times slower than the slowest broadband connection. To put that in perspective, a film that would take you 30 minutes to download via broadband today would have taken over six hours on dial-up.
    And then there is the fact that it used your actual phone line. Unless you were savvy enough to have more than one line coming into the house, going online meant nobody else could use the phone. This sparked cries of, ‘Get off the bloody phone, I need to send some emails!’ or ‘Get off the bloody internet, I need to call my mother!’

    So it is a good thing that we have moved on. It really is. But those of us who heard them shall never forget those squeally plinky plonky noises.
     
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BASIC
    BASIC (the acronym stood for ‘Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code’) was the most common and popular computer programming language during the rise of the home computer in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was simple and clunky, but effective, and, most importantly, quite easy to learn. When schools started teaching Computer Studies around that time, the lessons centred around programming in BASIC.
    The language relied upon a range of instructions, many of which were written in longhand and would have made sense to even the most computer-illiterate user. For example, here is a BASIC program that most people will be able to work out.
10 PRINT “21st Century Dodos”
20 GOTO 10
RUN
    If you were to type those lines into your Vic 20 or ZX Spectrum, your screen would be filled with the title of this book over and over again. What fun.
    You could, of course, tackle more complex programs, and some of the most popular text adventure games of the time were entirely written in BASIC. However, for more serious gaming you needed specialised code, and as home computing became more about managing fictional football teams and running around tombs with unfeasibly breasted women, and less about two oblongs playing tennis, BASIC became a thing of the past.
    At least, it did in its original guise. Ever evolving, BASIC has morphed and changed and can still be seen in the form of Microsoft Visual Basic, which remains a popular language for programmers.Well, I say popular; it drives a lot of them mad, but it is still around. Not quite extinct yet.
     
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Compact Discs
    Can you remember when compact discs were the future? When the presenter on