take a stack of them, fluff them up and put them in the card reader everything was cool until you dropped a handful of them
My first "internet" computer was an Acer pentium 75 mhz, 1 gig hard drive, 14.4k modem, with 8 megabytes of ram. Cost me $1,800 bucks and didnt even come with a monitor. Came with a free disk for AOL 2.0. (That shit ended up costing me $300 over 2 months because they used to charge $1.95 per hour or something like that for internet access back then.) They used to give 10 hours free, then charge you per hour. The computer I have now is a quad core 2.6 ghz, 1 terabyte hard drive, 4 gigs ram. Cost about $900.
Give me the markets back in the days of the 14.4 modems...I wouldn't even care that I'd have to go back to dial-up. Seriously, those were the days...
In pre-internet days, and even in early internet days c. 1996, you had to shop around for quote providers and pay fees just to get real time quotes. If you had a day job that was not trading, you couldn't just rent a Quotron or a Bunker Ramo. I was considering a hand held device, I think it was called Quotrek, that I could carry to work with me where I worked as a shipping clerk, but the $300 per month fee was too steep for my shipping clerk wages. Then I found an internet service called Interquote and for $20 a month I could get 200 real time quotes per day. So if I wanted real time quotes for 5 stocks, I could only refresh my screen 40 times. They had another service for $60 a month which was unlimited streaming and it was formatted just like an excel spreadsheet. Real time quotes were so novel at the time that the most posted comment in the AOL Motley Fool chat room was, "does anybody have real time?" and whoever had real time would post up real time quotes in the chat room. Motley Fool's highest reccomended stock in 96 was Iomega, and it was crashing so they opened up a chat room dedicated solely to Iomega, and soon they had two rooms dedicated to Iomega. I remember that nobody seemed to be blaming the Gardeners for their bad call, people were blaming Iomega. My local newspaper had a service called UT Stox, which was a delayed quote system over the telephone. I would call it from work and punch in my ticker symbol and a computer voice would give me the delayed price and volume. After I got my own real time quotes I never used UT Stox again, so I don't know when it ceased operating. I still have the same stock brokerage account today that I opened up in 1996 with Scottsdale Securities, which is now Scottrade. They always had an ad in the stock tables of the local newspaper with a comparison of their commisions to other discount brokers. They gave me a brochure that I still have today. The commissions for 100 shares of a stock under $20 per share was $32, for Schwab it was $47, for Fidelity it was $47 and for Merrill it was $50. As the stock price and number of shares went up, so did the commissions, but for most trades it was $32 across the board. There is an exploding star at the top of the commission table that says "TRADE 1,000 SHARES FOR $72". I remember how excited I was to get my US Robotics 36.6K external modem in 1996. Soon after that the 56K Flex modem came out and everyone was impressed with the blazing speed. LOL.