These were all taken from my own experiences. I’m sure that other folks have some good ones, too. Feel free to pile on by adding a comment down below. ;)

1) If you’ve ever had to do this:

or this:

Bonus points if you still remember what those old Hayes-compatible modem registers actually did. Deduct points if you have never actually used a modem, because the only thing you remember is broadband. Deduct additional points if the slowest modem you’ve ever used personally was a 9,600 baud modem.

2) You not only know what a FOSSIL driver does, but you also know that it stands for Fido Opus SEAdog Standard Interface Layer. You get bonus points if you actually know who Tom Jennings, Ray Gwinn, and David Nugent are. If you thought BNU was a better FOSSIL driver than X00, give yourself 5 extra points.

3) You remember how utterly earth-shatteringly cool it was to toggle back and forth between two tasks using DESQview.

4) You remember fighting tooth and nail to convince your boss that Visicalc would be a worthwhile tool to have laying around at the office. Bonus points if you know who Dan Bricklin is. Additional bonus points awarded if you were able to convince your boss successfully.

5) You remember how ticked off you were when your only CP/M boot disk went bad. Bonus points if you ever booted CP/M (or anything for that matter) from an 8-inch floppy disk. Deduct points if the only diskette size you’ve ever seen is a 3.5 inch floppy. For those of you that have never seen an 8 inch diskette (or god forbid, a 5 1/4 inch diskette), see the image below comparing them all. Nice, huh? :)

6) You remember how much of a quantum leap it was when you upgraded from XModem to YModem, then to ZModem. You get bonus points if you remember using Kermit or uucp from the command line. Additional points awarded if you know who Ward Christensen and Chuck Forsberg are.

7) If you considered performing Fidonet FREQs (File Requests) as an early version of P2P networking. Bonus points if you remember how long it took to download the latest version of Binkleyterm, Maximus, or Frontdoor via FREQ over a 2400 baud modem. Additional bonus points if hearing the names of Scott Dudley, Joaquim Homrighausen, Vince Perriello, Bob Hartman, and Andrew Milner make you smile.

8) If you remember how much devastatingly faster the “new” 1200 baud modems were (as compared to your old 300 baud unit). You get serious bonus points if you’ve ever used an acoustic coupler.

9) If you remember going through hell and high-water to get the COHERENT operating system running on an Intel 8088-based computer, only to be utterly frustrated when you realized that it didn’t have a native C compiler or a TCP/IP stack (that didn’t cost you extra, I mean). You get bonus points if you remember upgrading from COHERENT (or Xenix) to Minix. Additional bonus points if you’ve ever corresponded via e-mail with Andy Tannenbaum.

10) If you remember the old MFM, Winchester, and RLL format hard drives. You get bonus points if you remember that they weighed 25 pounds each, took 60 seconds to spin up, and only held 10MBs of data. Additional bonus points awarded if you’ve ever freed up stuck mechanical heads in a Winchester drive by repeatedly smacking it on the side with a thick-handled screwdriver (a nod there to my old pal, Kruges).

11) If you know the difference between a blue box, a beige box, and a red box. Bonus points awarded if you’ve ever used any of these (deduct 5 points if you were ever caught.) You get additional bonus points if you remember John “Captain Crunch” Draper.

12) You remember having to upgrade the UART chip in your serial ports from an 8250 to a 16450 or 16550A in order to prevent dropoffs.

13) You not only know what a “Duff’s Device” is, but you’ve used it in production code. Bonus points awarded if you’ve ever submitted code to the International Obufscated C Code Contest (IOCCC). Additional bonus points awarded if you enjoy sitting around in your spare time unravelling other people’s obfuscated C entries.

14) You have not only been to the GUE (Great Underground Empire), but you went back several times. You get bonus points if you actually know the meanings of the words “Zork” and “Frobozz”.

15) You’ve ever daisy chained several 1541 floppy drives together and ran a BBS. Bonus points if you ran a BBS from your Apple II and kept the cover off of it half the time.

16) You learned 6502 assembler programming from the master, Jim Butterfield.

17) Much to the dismay of your wife, you don’t have to heart to throw away your old Timex Sinclair, Commodore (PET, C116, C64, C128, or VIC-20), Kaypro, Texas Instruments (TI-99/4A), Heathkit, or Osborne. Bonus points for even knowing what these are anyway! Additional bonus points if you thought the 5 inch monitor built into the Osborne was “more than enough.”

18) If you ever hooked up an 8-port (serial) DigiBoard, and ran Wyse terminals all over your house so you could monitor your (UNIX, COHERENT, Xenix, SCO, Linux et al) system from most any room. Bonus points if you did this in an apartment and had to pay to repair the sheetrock from the damage caused by running those thick serial cables (especially those Digiboard “octopuss cables”) through the walls.

19) You vividly remember the day they took your favorite pinball machine away from the [bowling alley | arcade | pizza parlor ] and replaced it with Space Invaders, Pong, or Asteroids. Bonus points if you ever played the coin-op Space Invaders so much that you heard the ominous background sound of “dum dum dum dum” in your sleep. Deduct points if you paid money for the Buckner & Garcia album featuring “Pac Man Fever.”

20) You remember how huge the Sperry / Burroughs merger was (forming Unisys). Bonus points if you ever actually used a Sperry or a Burroughs system.

21) BONUS: You ever developed something comprised of at least 100,000 lines of Fortran, Assembler, COBOL, or C (not C++ or C#). Bonus points if your code was put into production somewhere and is still running. DEDUCT points if you ever programmed in LOGO, and thought it was the next big thing, or if you used Pascal and got all worked up about it.

22) BONUS: You ever mounted a magnetic tape reel in a mainframe data center while smoking a cigarette in your mouth, and juggling a hot cup of coffee.

Some fun links for you:

• Erik Klein’s Vintage Computer Site
• Heathkit Virtual Museum
• Obsolete Technology Website

Cheers.