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.
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:
I guess you mean "English"?
I made a seriously innocent comment, but boy what a trigger for the defending forces of "American" exceptionalism. That was, is, and will be a tremendous self-reinforcing justification for everything the United States are entitled to do.
That is what is called a synekdoche, where a part refers to the whole or the whole refers to it's part. A good word to know as a quick reply when someone starts trying to debate the meaning of word.
To be totally clear, the synecdoche is between the word "America" [part] and the full phrase "the United States of America" [whole]. It would not be natural to refer to the country by the name of the continent.
You are trying to explain what a synecdoche is to someone who's trained in literature and the classics, reads Latin and ancient greek (with rusty proficiency) and writes for a living. Yet you spell it wrong and show that you don't have quite clear how it works. But sure, go ahead. Enlighten us.
There's this country, and its full, formal name is "The United States of America". But that's kind of long for use all the time, so most people, in most of the world, shorten it to "America". You seem to want us to use "United States" instead, because you seem to think that 1) it's your business to tell everyone else what they should shorten the name to, and 2) calling it "America" is unfair to the rest of the Americas. But surely calling it "United States" is unfair to the United States of Mexico? And if you can't call it that either, all that's left is "of", and that would be unfair to the Dominion of Canada. So we're going to keep calling it "America", because that's what we've always called it, and because your alternative doesn't work either.
Can we get off your hobby horse now, and go back to talking about the article?
America pretty much means the USA. While it could refer to North America or South America alone, it usually means the USA.
North America is the continent that includes Canada and Mexico. South America is the continent that includes Chile, Brazil, etc. (Im not exactly sure how Central America fits in).
And the Americas refers to all of them put together.
But just America itself will usually mean the USA.
The people chanting “Death to America” didn’t mean Chile.
And I’m pretty sure they weren’t major consumers of American culture.
And Americans don’t commonly chant “America” any moment they get. They famously, and obnoxiously, chant U.S.A. every time they can.
The U.S. has been the most prominent nation in the region for generations, and most importantly, it’s the only country in the entire region that has the word America in it’s name.
People have reasons to talk about countries far more than continents, and reasons to talk about the USA more than most other countries.
The fact that America is commonly accepted as shorthand for the United States of America when there is no other country in the world with the word America is hardly cultural imperialism.
It’s an insult to people and nations that have actually suffered from imperialism to brand this as “cultural imperialism”.
The reason why we talk about USA way more than other countries are not what you seem to think.
Try getting on a news feed for a day and check the river of news, often very important, that are NOT reported in the USA because they're not important.
I have a serious problem with the obsession we have in Europe for example with American politics.
We live under this assumption that what happens in the USA shapes what happens everywhere else but that is only true to a much more limited extent than what coverage and media attention might suggest.
In fact for Europe I believe that what happens in China for example is right now way more important and impactful.
Not to mention Africa (check what's happening rn in Niger, for example).
Look the problem is simple. Every country is self-centered to an extent about its own topics, issues, and problems. USA is the only country that's absolutely and utterly convinced that when it comes to its own issues, than everyone else is not talking about anything else but that.
And this makes it right?
What next, do you want to convince me that the World Series is actually a global baseball championship and not a national one?
Huh. I guess when any other country on either continent uses the word America in their name, it might become ambiguous. Until then, America in the context of a country is perfectly clear?
No. You don’t control my use of language. “America” is a perfectly fine synechdoche for United States of America. As the dominant economic and military power of the past century, the use of “America” to refer to USA is an organic vernacular that cropped up all around the world. It didn’t just come from Americans.
Go cope somewhere else. I’ll keep saying America. Tired of cry-bully whiners trying to tell everyone else how to speak.
YOU are the one trying to impose speech on ME. Who’s the imperialist? Americans refer to their country as America. Non-Americans refer to the US as America. This all happened organically. You cry about it on the behalf of less-relevant countries sharing the same continent and try to change how people talk.
(E.g. BBC's story of "America Goes to War" doesn't mean Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica are also going to war. BBC is talking about the USA.)
>America is a geographic area with a North, South, and Central.
That is true but you're not taking into account 2 different usages of "America":
- (1) "America" the geography, the continent,
- (2) "America" the country : e.g. Hawaii is in America even though it's an island in the Pacific Ocean instead of the American continent.
Likewise, why do people who mention "Asia" are talking about China/Japan/Taiwan and exclude Russia?!? Because that's a different usage of "Asia" that doesn't perfectly map to geography of Asian continent.
Including travelling the length of the Americas, and stories from South America.
The point being that the BBC and other countries only use the term after qualifying that they specifically mean the USofA or other parts of the Americas.
> Hawaii is in America even though it's in the Pacific Ocean instead of the American continent.
Who says that though?
I'm 60, well educated and would say that Hawaii is a state of the USofA, as I've done all my life and as the majority of people I know would do so.
> Likewise, why do people who mention "Asia" are talking about China/Japan/Taiwan and exclude Russia?!?
Depends upon the people and the context of the discussion - I was in the asian portion of Russia when I was ground truthing soviet era maps against the "new" global WGS84 datum.
Poltically Russia tends to be associatied with Europe | East Europe | other variations due to Moscow being the capital.
If you're in Vietnam you're often dealing with Russians out of Vladivostok on the edge of the sea of Japan.
>The point being that the BBC and other countries only use the term after qualifying that they specifically mean the USofA or other parts of the Americas.
That is the opposite of what actually happens. Outside of the USA, when people on the street refer to "America" with no prefix of "North-"/"South-"/"Central-", they're talking about the USA without even qualifying that they're equating "no-prefix-America" = "USA". That's just what most non-Americans do. If you go to India and ask a random stranger, "Would you like to visit America?", it's already assumed that the question is about the USA.
>Who says that though?
People living in Hawaii naturally say that. In Hawaii, it's natural in casual conversation to say "living in America" rather than "living in the USA". Example of "As Hawaii residents, we have both the privilege of living in America, with all the perks of not actually living in the continental states." -- from:
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/hawaii/privileges-hi/
Good to know that a British news publication determines the vernacular for everyone around the world. I’ll be sure to refer to bbc.com’s regional delineations before insensitively referring to any part of the world in a manner that may hurt your feelings. Thanks for the tip!
Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just speak freely with reasonable, organic language that isn’t dictated by cry bullies and false authorities.
You don’t get to tell me how to speak. Sorry if that pains you.
I'm not in or from the UK, I have travelled in three quarters of the 190+ countries about the world.
> You don’t get to tell me how to speak. Sorry if that pains you.
Speak as you wish, it pains me not.
However, when you say 1+1=5 or that the rest of the world uses the same seppoisms that you do then I quite rightly regard you as more than a little ignorant.
It has nothing to do with ignorance. It’s a perfectly reasonable shortening of USA, which is why everyone, from everywhere, uses it.
People against its use are invariably anti-US, or massively insecure about their less-influential country in the Americas, or are just jerks looking to exert power over others via compelled speech. You seem like you’re all three. We’re gonna keep saying “America”, dweeb.
