A small piece of homebrew history to remind us...

[arover]

That everyone has to start somewhere. Note: Due to link redirects from HBT, it won't jump directly to the thread, so copy and paste this if you want to be scrolled down automatically:

http://hbd.org/hbd/archive/1192.html#1192-6

Found this on Reddit, thought I'd share with HBT.

 

[SKMO]

Conspicuously absent were subject lines: "Do I have an Infection", "I Think I ruined my Beer", "Do I need a secondary fermenter" etc.

 

[Revvy]

Oh my god....How funny...and then the next post is about Zima. LOL!

 

[Shooter]

I wonder if the OP ever figured out what the problem was?!!?

 

[Flomaster]

From: "Palmer.John" <palmer#d#john at ssdgwy.mdc.com>
Subject: My First Batch

Hello Bruce (and all you other Bruces; "Crack Two")

I made my first batch of Homebrew a month ago, and it is yucky. It was a kit
beer from our local brew shop, Fun Fermentations in Orange Ca, and was supposed
to be an American Lite beer. The batch seemed to have a cidery smell and taste
the day I bolttled, (took me forever to get the at #&$#*! siphon to work) and
after a month of aging, it doesn't taste any better. The beer has great color,
a nice head, but the flavor is reminiscent of swamp water cider vinegar.
Does anyone have a clue? Had a similar batch? I am wondering if my
fermentation temperature was too high, it was often in the upper 70's in the
house, probably 78. Yes, it was an ale yeast. BTW, I had a bottle of Paulener
Salvator the other day, and it had some of the same flavor tones as my beer.
Was that bottle of Salvator too long on the shelf at the store ie. light
damaged? Is that why it tasted like mine, or is mine actually good? (nah) And
another thing, Has anyone ever noticed the laxative qualities of homebrew in
general or is this another symptom of my first batch?
John Palmer
PS. I am really bummed that the Beer Hunter won't be on the Discovery Channel
again, I only have a couple episodes taped, and have been waiting to get the
others.

-=jason=-

 

[passedpawn]

3 posts down is one from Jack Schmidling. I have a JSP mill he made (Jack Schmidling Productions). Funny.

 

[509inc]

Am I reading this correctly? Is that John Palmer the "brew god" asking for help?

If so thats awesome. Its like a view into the past. I'd like to see the first ancient stone tablet that refers to brewing.

 

[arover]

Oh my god....How funny...and then the next post is about Zima. LOL!

I had to look up what Zima was. Shows how young I am.

Seriously though, look at how much we've grown as a community as well as the state of homebrew and craft beer today- it's stronger than ever! Or it appears to be anyways.

 

[Revvy]

3 posts down is one from Jack Schmidling. I have a JSP mill he made (Jack Schmidling Productions). Funny.

I was wondering if that was THE Schmidling,

 

[A4J]

this is awesome!!!

 

[Airborneguy]

Wow, good find! I barely remember those boards. Remember the sound your dial-up made as it connected?

 

[Revvy]

Wow, good find! I barely remember those boards. Remember the sound your dial-up made as it connected?

Dude, this was my first computer I had access to back in Jr.High
(if you could call it that)

You used punch cards to store data, wrote programs in basic. It smelled of oil and that cheap rough brown re-cycled paper. You dropped a phone into the modem coupler and you could play some version of star trek with folks across the school district.

Those were the days... Of what a baud rate of 45?

 

[Airborneguy]

I wonder what questions John Palmer was asking on that computer?

 

[iaefebs]

Those were the days... Of what a baud rate of 45?

[/I]


I remember 9.6 days then 14.8 blew it away, then 28 came along, but didn't last because we got 52 (45) quickly. Well a lot of people got stuck at 28 for awhile.

 

[passedpawn]

[/I]


I remember 9.6 days then 14.8 blew it away, then 28 came along, but didn't last because we got 52 (45) quickly. Well a lot of people got stuck at 28 for awhile.

OMG 9600 baud was a future. 1200 baud was the ****z. Those were the days of the BBS. The original hayes supported 300 bps.

I was writing code well before that though. I wrote Infocom-like games (text ones) on a mainframe. 70's.

I also remember college and the card punches. Make sure to number your cards in case you drop them! (trivia: Holerith cards / IBM cards were the size of the orignial US dollar, which was larger than the current dollar).

Sorry. We now return to our regularly scheduled program...

 

[passedpawn]

Dude, this was my first computer I had access to back in Jr.High
(if you could call it that)

You used punch cards to store data, wrote programs in basic. It smelled of oil and that cheap rough brown re-cycled paper. You dropped a phone into the modem coupler and you could play some version of star trek with folks across the school district.

Those were the days... Of what a baud rate of 45?

Revvy, that brings back some memories. Teletype. I used to shoot photon torpedos on one of those things too.

 

[whiskey_pickle]

Not sure if I am "that" old but the first computer I remember was my friends TRS-80 and some cassette tapes that would let us " program" Dungeons of Daggorath!

 

[Trouble_Brewing]

Our high school had one of those punch-card things for it's programing class. Probably why I never became a programmer as it was too labor intensive. I was hanging out on BBS's a lot in those days. Only one peson could log in at a time so you had to set your modem to redial for hours to get logged in. 300 baud modem. If you were downloading programs you could easily read the text as it scrolled by. Yes, in those days you could not transfer binary, so you had to use text encoding. When 1200 baud modems came out I saved for months to buy one. It was mind-blowing fast at that time...The biggest board in town was run on a 10Mb hard drive, which seemed absolutely enormous since 5 1/4" floppy drives were just becoming the norm. I can't even remember what they held, maybe 128K?

 

[Airborneguy]

Not sure if I am "that" old but the first computer I remember was my friends TRS-80 and some cassette tapes that would let us " program" Dungeons of Daggorath!

My school had TRS-80's. I remember using them in 2nd grade. That was 1986. A few years later someone donated a bunch of IBM desktops that really weren't much more advanced.

 

[Airborneguy]

I can't even remember what they held, maybe 128K?

I think they were 512k.

 

[Rivenin]

^^^^^ i'm going with airborne guy, IIRC they were 1/2 the size of a 1/2 sized floppy disc lol

 

[passedpawn]

I think they were 512k.

Weren't there single sided and double sided? I think the later disks also had DD and High-Density. That was some wackiness back then. I even had an 8" floppy from a corporate mainframe drive.

 

[Misplaced_Canuck]

5 1/4" were 360K per side.
3 1/2" were 720K at first, then high density came at 1.44MB
8" (mostly used on mainframe, and the TRS80) held 1.2MB

M_C

 

[BoxofRain]

Found this on Reddit

 

[SumnerH]

5 1/4" were 360K per side.
3 1/2" were 720K at first, then high density came at 1.44MB
8" (mostly used on mainframe, and the TRS80) held 1.2MB

M_C

They could all be formatted in many different ways.

Single-sided, single density 5 1/4" disks were 35-track, 110KB disks when Shugart debuted them in the 1970s; 40 tracks became more common later on (the Apple II used 35-track SSSD 5 1/4" disks when introduced, but switched to 40 track SSSD disk with a 140KB capacity in later versions of the OS).

The IBM PC in the early years used the SSSD 40-track 360KB formatting.

5 1/4" disks also commonly came in high-density 1.2 MB (double-sided) for the PC in later years.

8" and 3 1/2" drives likewise have complex histories.

 

[Misplaced_Canuck]

I was referring to the most common (IBM) formatting ...

M_C

They could all be formatted in many different ways.

Single-sided, single density 5 1/4" disks were 35-track, 110KB disks when Shugart debuted them in the 1970s; 40 tracks became more common later on (the Apple II used 35-track SSSD 5 1/4" disks when introduced, but switched to 40 track SSSD disk with a 140KB capacity in later versions of the OS).

The IBM PC in the early years used the SSSD 40-track 360KB formatting.

5 1/4" disks also commonly came in high-density 1.2 MB (double-sided) for the PC in later years.

8" and 3 1/2" drives likewise have complex histories.

 

[azscoob]

Wow, this takes me back to my childhood....

 

[agroff383]

awesome post, and reading and seeing about old computers is entertaining. what was once some badass equipment we can joke about now.

 

[eibbor]

I remember hole punching my 5 1/4 inch floppies to make them double sided...

 

[Trouble_Brewing]

My dad used to actually be a programmer back in the 60's and used those punch cards. He got out of computers in the early 70's and did touch them again for many years. When I was in HS I bought my first computer, a C-64. I can remember vividly how blown away he was that this "little box" held a whole 64K of memory! The rate of change still scrambles my mind. My current phone came with 4Gb micro SD card, about the size of a fingernail, and they make them in something like 16 or 32Gb now.

 

[passedpawn]

My dad used to actually be a programmer back in the 60's and used those punch cards. He got out of computers in the early 70's and did touch them again for many years. When I was in HS I bought my first computer, a C-64. I can remember vividly how blown away he was that this "little box" held a whole 64K of memory! The rate of change still scrambles my mind. My current phone came with 4Gb micro SD card, about the size of a fingernail, and they make them in something like 16 or 32Gb now.

Funny. 64k. I had the VIC-20, also a commodore computer. 3.8k. I wrote a blackjack game on that thing, with 3.8k. Inconceivable in todays standards. I also used punch cards in college. You'd key in your program on those cards, then hand them to El Nerdo behind the glass. He'd return the results of your program on a giant piece of tractor-fed fanfold paper. It's all surreal now, as you point out, with 1Ghz processor in cell phones.

 

[SumnerH]

The rate of change still scrambles my mind. My current phone came with 4Gb micro SD card, about the size of a fingernail, and they make them in something like 16 or 32Gb now.

128GB SD cards:
http://www.myce.com/news/lexar-unveils-the-worlds-largest-sd-card-128gb-sdxc-model-38445/

Amazon has plenty of 64GB SDs.

 

[Golddiggie]

Consider how far technology, in computers, has come since their infancy durin WWII... With processors having multiple cores, with hyperthreading (that actually works properly) you can have a single workstation class system with more power than almost every computer in the world, just a couple of decades ago (if that long ago).

Hell, a typical cell phone has more processing power in it than the space shuttle (been that way for more than a few years too)...

I remember the first computer we got as a family... An old Toshiba T100 configuration... It had the very floppy floppy drive (5-1/4") with a cassette player for 'backup'... I think it was a 64k system too, although it's so long ago it's hard to remember the details. The next one we got was an 80/86 (86MHz in 'turbo mode')... :rockin: Thinking about those old systems from my youth, compared with my workstation running dual E5345 Xeon's, with 16GB of RAM and 2.25TB of storage, makes you realize how far things really have come. I think our first computer had a hard drive with a few MB in it... Back then, they couldn't see the need for more... Now, you have TB and even PB for storage sizes...

 

[Golddiggie]

128GB SD cards:
http://www.myce.com/news/lexar-unveils-the-worlds-largest-sd-card-128gb-sdxc-model-38445/

Amazon has plenty of 64GB SDs.

Problem is, phones typically use the micro-SD cards... At 133x, they're too slow for my digital camera (1Ds Mark III) to be of any decent use. I go for high speed, over huge capacity. As long as I can get a couple of hundred shots on a set of cards, I'm happy. I do shoot to both an SD and CF card at the same time (large JPG to the SD, RAW to the CF)...

Digital cameras is another area where technology has exploded... Look back at what was available around 2000/2001 compared to now...

 

[passedpawn]

So, John Palmer. 18 years ago. Says wowee, making beer is hard, mine's infected. Now, he's written the bible on it (IMO).

Where will YOU be in your brewing career in 18 years.

 

[Golddiggie]

So, John Palmer. 18 years ago. Says wowee, making beer is hard, mine's infected. Now, he's written the bible on it (IMO).

Where will YOU be in your brewing career in 18 years.

Ask me again in 17.75 years...

Now, if you ask where do I WANT to be... That's a different story. :rockin:

 

[davesrose]

Besides the trip down computer memory lane...I think it's also funny that the post mentioned video taping an episode! :cross: I just recently got rid of my VCR because I'd rather stay all digital now, and last time I tried a videotape on a big HDTV...it looked dreadful!

 

[FrFtr28]

Small world. There's a post on there from my current boss asking about opening a homebrew shop. Looks like that idea never panned out for him.