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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 6285563, member: 27832&quot;]Okay, if I&#039;m being <i>invited</i> to tell old-guy stories, I&#039;m sure not going to refuse. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie11" alt=":rolleyes:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>I started collecting as a small child in the late 1960s or early 70s. My brother was six years older, with enough allowance money to occasionally buy a coin magazine, its back pages filled with <i>classified ads</i> -- that era&#039;s eBay. No final value fees, but you paid by the line or the word to run the ad. That made them <i>concise</i> -- &quot;BU 1955-S dimes, 50cSFV + SASE to &lt;postal address&gt;&quot;. Send him 50 cents face value of silver coin and a self-addressed stamped envelope, and he&#039;d mail you a BU 1955-S dime. I don&#039;t remember what the actual abbreviation was for &quot;silver face value&quot;, but I certainly remember SASE.</p><p><br /></p><p>Other hobbies intervened through the 70s and 80s; I completely missed the 1979-80 silver/gold spike until it was all over.</p><p><br /></p><p>I got my first email account in fall of 1980 when I went off to college, but it could only send messages to other people on the same system. By 1983 or so, I was able to send and receive over <i>an</i> internet (a collection of networks), but the address I used had to say what route the message should take, and it was... complicated. As I recall, we used <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP" rel="nofollow">UUCP</a> to get through the campus network to a machine that would gateway onto <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSNET" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSNET" rel="nofollow">CSNET</a>, which could then convey the message to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET" rel="nofollow">BITNET</a>. I think the CSNET gateway called up once per day, so there&#039;d be up to a 1-day wait for your message to go out, and then at least another day for any reply to come back -- assuming it was possible to reply along that path, which was by no means guaranteed. Sending photos? That was still science fiction. (I do remember visiting the school&#039;s Image Processing Lab a time or two, and watching as it laboriously worked to sharpen a high-resolution 256x256 black-and-white image...)</p><p><br /></p><p>By the time I got back into the hobby, eBay and PayPal and Google were well-established, so things weren&#039;t all that different. We&#039;ll see how much things change by the time I finally do succumb to the lure of ancients...[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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