A Look Back to Where It All Began

[Myles B. Astor]

Ran across these old pictures on my hard drive of THE very first audiophile internet website circa mid to late '80s called TAN (The Audiophile Network). TAN was the brainchild of Guy Hickey (some may remember he designed of the Quatre Gain Cell amplifier reviewed around Issue 8 or so of TAS), this was the first site where audiophiles could communicate with each other via the computer set up in Guy's office. Many notable audiophiles, writers and future manufacturers frequented TAN including John Atkinson, John Curl, Chris Somnivigo, Jonathan Scull, Lonnie Brownell, Jud Barber, Jack English, Robert Reina, Les Edelberg, and many whose names I've now forgotten over the many years. (Actually years ago, John Atkinson sent me a disc containing all the conversations that ever happened on TAN and it's around somewhere!).

Logging into TAN was an expensive proposition in those days before the advent of the world wide web; one had to make a long distance call into Guy's computer and modems back then crawled along at 400 baud (in fact, I'll never forget how excited I got when 800 baud modems came out; of course back then, I was using a Mac 30SE with it's tiny monochrome screen but it was better than my colleagues who were still typing DOS commands into their computer!)

Perhaps my fondest memory of TAN was being online and typing a message and suddenly being cut off without explanation. Found out hours later that there had been an earthquake in California and all telephone lines had been cut.

Unfortunately Guy disappeared and sadly no one was ever been able to find him since. We've come a long way brothers and take a lot for granted!

Guy's office.

A West Coast meeting of TAN members.

 

[Mike]

Cool pics Myles!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Ritmo]

Myles - Thx for sharing.

 

[Zero]

Holy vintage, Batman!

Thanks for sharing. Tis' a bit of audio history that I knew nothing about.

 

[BlueFox]

Ran across these old pictures on my hard drive of THE very first audiophile internet website circa mid to late '80s called TAN (The Audiophile Network).

Logging into TAN was an expensive proposition in those days before the advent of the world wide web; one had to make a long distance call into Guy's computer and modems back then crawled along at 400 baud (in fact, I'll never forget how excited I got when 800 baud modems came out; of course back then, I was using a Mac 30SE with it's tiny monochrome screen but it was better than my colleagues who were still typing DOS commands into their computer!)

Interesting story. I was working at HP at the time of the 89 quake, and we were switching from Mil-Net to the Internet. I was constantly going to Cisco to get new firmware for their routers.

However, modem technology was more advanced then than how you remember. When I moved to CA in 76 my first job was with Vadic, later Racal-Vadic. Anyway, at that time Vadic invented the 1200 bps full-duplex modem. A year or so later, Bell came out with their version. This was a big invention since 300 bps was the norm at the time. Later, while a computer science student at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo I bought my own generic clone Hayes compatible 1200 bps modem in 86 for not much money to upgrade the 300 bps modem built-in to an RCA ASCII terminal I used to access the schools's computer lab. Don't tell anyone, but since I worked part-time with the campus IT department, I had my own private line to dial-in. That sure was better than waiting for a free terminal on campus, or getting a busy signal dialing-in.