[crumbles into dust]
This was cutting edge tech... I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs...
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This was cutting edge tech... I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs...
I'm exactly that old.
Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we're all thinking of:
Wasn't that called the optiplex, or something similar? Pretty sure I had one myself.
I had an Optipex from that era too. It was "horizontal" but could also stand vertically. It was the business model.
This one, but beige:
The image is the
PrecisionDimension model which was the consumer version of it.You’re real close to the “capacitor of death” models there. GX270s failed like a motherfucker.
We could swap those boards out and in like a fucking NASCAR pit crew.
Between the capacitor plague and the tin whiskers from the phaseout of lead, hardware from that era failed constantly.
We somehow avoided that, luckily.
I had the pleasure of getting sold a cheap power supply though. It was rather fascinating to learn that, indeed, even burning hardware can still provide sufficient power to play games (for a few seconds).
We use to flip the light gray flap all shift in computer lab in middle school. When we got bored with that, we figured out how to pop out the Dell logo and flip it upside down
We did this too lol.
The one in the pic says Dimension 2400 on it.
Yeah, I mean to say Dimension and typed Precision. My bad.
That or the ol' tan cased dinosaurs.
The gray Dell helped me through many-a "100 Games!" disc...
Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise
I think we had that one.
I maintain dozens of the black & silver Optiplexes, they're used in Raw Thrills arcade games like The Fast and the Furious, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Guitar Hero Arcade... They are workhorses; usually clean it and recap the power supply (which are kind of a bitch to disassemble) and they're good for another few years.
I still run into the blue/grey ones like your picture, but not in use. Usually stored in the basement of a bar.
My personal collection includes a couple of first-generation Optiplexes, the beige GX1. Dell is a bigger part of my life than I ever imagined or hoped. 😅
This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes
Naw. I'm this fucking old:
Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!
The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.
When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.
Exactly. On the long run, we settled down on what we called a common calibration, a setting that allowed all of us locals to exchange tapes without constant tweaking.
For real? My tweaking days ended when floppy came out for the C64.
Maybe the C64 datasette never got the upgrade?
Boy, that was before I could afford a C64 with the money I made with my first computer.
The tape drive has a hole on the top for adjusting the azimuth, but one of my friends basically just removed the top cover entirely for easier access to the screw. I did that too for some particularly tricky tapes.
Another of my friends had basically an unearthly knack of adjusting this stuff. Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it'd work. Which makes no sense.
This was all a kind of mysterious part of the Commodore 64 culture to me. Because I had a floppy drive and that's what I obviously preferred to use.
Me too! For some reason I was the only guy in school who could do that. Fun times. 😊
In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.
I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.
I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.
Ooh, I didn't have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.
Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.
Don't you use a flathead for that?
A flathead is still a screwdriver, is it not?
It was a Philips screw IIRC. You can also use a flathead screwdriver on them but you shouldn’t IMHO.
Then I misunderstood and was thinking of a different adjustment of the head. The one I was thinking about us when you wedge the screwdriver behind the head and bend it otwards a little for better contact. For that you need a flat tool.
I'm old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn't coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.
I wonder how many will realize it's not just a cassette tape to listen to music...
The TI/99 also had cassettes
You used a screwdriver to store 73 kB?
It's a sonic screwdriver.
I'm this old:
I mean, they are half right. The music industry is eating itself. Back catalog is outperforming new releases year after year because new music is dead.
Hi! I'm a musician with new music that is not dead! Check it out: www.thassodar.com
Bonus: 99% of them are instrumental, and the ones that aren't don't have any actual lyrics and are only on SoundCloud.
New music is thriving. There is more music of almost every style and genre imaginable being released today than ever before. What's dead is traditional music distribution channels and marketing avenues like radio, and the popular means of promoting music now reward the most dogshit meme-able content. But if you seek out music yourself, the modern era is a paradise of incredible music; don't blame music itself for the failures of the industry to reward good within it.
New music is surviving. Of course it will survive. Music is an expression of our humanity.
Thriving? I think not. When was the last time you went to a bar and people just starting singing and playing folk music? When was the last time you even heard of that happening? Once it wasn't weird, it was normal.
Music is dead because it has been elevated to something that is performed by the few and consumed by the many, instead of something that we all live together.
"Haute cuisine is dead! When was the last time you walked into a restaurant and saw aspic on the menu? When was the last time you heard of somebody serving aspic? Once aspics weren't weird, they were the hottest fashion!"
^ That's you.
Trying to define the relevancy and lifeline of music as a whole based on the popularity of pub folk music is crazy.
More people are making music today than ever before, as barriers monetary, technological, and knowledge-based only continue to lower with time. I have no idea how you've managed to draw the opposite conclusion.
New music is doing fantastic, it's record companies that are dying. Most artists just self-publish these days.
A question for people who have never used a cassette. What do you think the pencil is for?
To mark the spot on the tape where your favorite song starts.
Hehe
The pencil fits in the hole. You can use that to move the tape. If it’s too loose, the tape player can draw it out and you have a mess to fix. To clean that mess up you also need the pencil to wind the tape from outside the cassette back into it.
Those of us who can remember used those to save programs. It could take an hour or more if you had a large enough tape save a single file.
A lot of people did: home, portable, car. But a lot of people had also left them behind for ordinary CDs, CDs full of MP3s and dedicated MP3 players like Rios and iPods.
Me as well Some of the things I first downloaded went onto cassette tape.
I recorded songs off the radio to cassette
i witnessed the creation of the mp3 format!
RealAudio
oh yeah that piece of crap i haven't missed ^^
There was nothing at all wrong with...
It was better than WAV; a nice bridge over to MP3.
.ra files taught me why proprietary is a bad word.
And rmvb files were all the rage. Those sweet video files with only 32MB... Peak compression. What the world was before h264 and before youtube existed was amazing.
Don't forget good ol DivX
Ohhh yeah, the golden age, xvid, divx, mp3, wmv, rmvb, quicktime videos, installing codec packs in windows...
I have a cd somewhere with the second matrix movie in 2 parts with a shitty resolution full of pixels and barely able to see with a magnifying glass, but watched it like that.
Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer's amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).
My computer’s mobo was so shitty, it played .midi files badly. I was shocked when I went to a mate’s and the same midis sounded like the song they’re actually supposed to be.
I bought a Gravis Ultrasound soundcard for its superior MIDI bank and management.
Once we got a Sound Blaster Audigy 4, I was soooo happy.
And then backing them onto zip disks. Good times.
Bro, Zip disks were for the porn you downloaded from WinMX.
Well, yes... In hidden folders cause I was a l33t h4kz0r in my youth. But that's just between me and you.
I put mine in a .zip file and renamed the file extension to .dll and stuck it in the system32 folder haha. Hide file extensions when done and make the file hidden. Blammo!
Mod files
YES! I loved XM Tracker back in the days
Can you tell us anything about the professors?
Everytime I see limewire I feel left out.
Where are my Kaaza hommies at??
Napster!
What's crazy is that none of the other P2P apps that came after ever had as nice of an interface as Napster. I guess that's cause Napster compiled Mac and Windows native apps while most other P2P apps were Java jars.
Here!
Kazaa, Kazaa light, WinMX, DC++. I used them all.
Where are my eMule fuckers at?
That donkey was the goat.
Emule/Edonkey
Yup
No SoulSeek fans here?
That's the modern napster IMO.
Just a shame it's hard to automate.
How did the progression go? Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire?
I mean sure, if you just want to skip Bearshare
And Audiogalaxy. And WinMX.
EDIT: And DCC bots on IRC.
gnutella, surely!!
I like how Justin Frankel created something to help you get stuff to really whip the llama's ass with :)
Where did DC++ fit in?
My user name stands for KaZaA Lite User 9.
Slsk (Soulseek) was far superior. It was the best for getting full albums and leaked stuff. If you found someone with a fast connection and thick library it was like gold.
Shoutout to everyone that got Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead album with “Mike Jones” randomly played in the background.
Slsk is still around today and people swear by it.
Because it's pretty much under the radar of the industry and you can find all kind of music there. Is nice.
Im Not even 40. Leave me alone.
I'm quite a bit older than this...
Yeah, I was going to bring up Turbo buttons, but then realised that the Commodore Vic 20 in my bedroom predates that by quite some margin 😇
I’m plastic Kawasaki keyboard on top of the C64 keyboard old.
😂
Vic 20 -> C=64 -> few 386/486 units -> AMD K6-2 and a ton of stuff after that. And maybe something in between.
And now I'm writing this in my garage computer which I picked up from a e-waste pile at work few years back and it has more computing power than pretty much all the systems combined I had before being 18 years old. And when we (as a family) got our first "mobile" phone it was hardwired to a car electronics since they took 'a bit' more power than the supercomputers we carry in our pockets today (obviously Li-ion batteries were not a thing either, but that old Motorola NMT450 took a crapload of power by todays standards).
It's been a wild ride so far. My grandparents were on top of the technology when they got the first landline phone around the neighborhood (I'm living in a rural area so it was not a new invention back then by any stretch) and now I can just yell to a entity in my palm to show me pictures from another planet or a high definition live video from Earth orbit.
And still I'm somehow trying to teach basic tehcnology concepts to both my parents and my kids. It's bizarre to try and explain about benefits of touch typing to a 16 year old who thinks it's pretty much impossible for anyone to type out an essay at school containing 2000 words in an hour (33wpm)...
Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn't use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?
I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can't specifically recall whether ±R/RW).
I remember this being a DVD thing. By the time I got a dvd burner though mine supported both.
The RW issue with CDs was that a lot of older players couldn’t read them.
I damaged the laser on a PS2 by using a DVD-RW. They’re harder to read than a normal disc apparently, so it wore the laser down pretty quick
Can you believe my original ps1 is still rocking hard with zero adjustments?
My ps2 is currently dead, but it was because I used thicker wire than necessary when modding it a thousand years ago and I need to just heat up the solder a bit.
That console is a nightmare to disassemble/reassemble though and it’s been down for around 15 years. I’ll fix it one day.
I have an NES that just needs a simple fix. I keep saying that I’m going to get to it too.
And just saying, if it’s the 72 pin connector, you don’t need a new one. Just pop yours out and bend the pins back out. It’s very very easy, honest to God there’s no reason to get a new one. I have new ones in my closet, probably 20 of them, but I’ve never really needed to use any of them.
If you don’t want to fool with that PM me your address and I’ll send you one.
Oh man they’re so so so easy to fix.
My childhood NES had a capacitor go out recently and the color was off. It still worked it was just ugly.
I have like 10 of them so I just swapped my case, but for some silly reason it’s like I don’t feel connected to the “spirit” of the machine because of it.
I’m going to have to order new capacitors and you just reminded me.
Get that thing fixed. It’s so so easy.
There were no CD+Rs
My recollection is very hazy, it was such a technological blip.
Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓
🗑️💿🚮💔
I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.
Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.
2001, Dre's album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre's new album five bucks right here.
He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.
I don't even know what you are talking about. I am young, very young. I enjoy rizzing in the toilets and skibiding everyday bro. So fresh. 🤙
pls don't leave me with the boomers...
No, the boomers had punch cards. That's an entire other level.
I remember the moment I realised my fancy new Walkman could read data CD-Rs and I could fit all my mp3s into one 700mb disc. I felt insane, majestic, limitless.
Then you'd get a copy protected disc that wouldn't play at all in the disc man, but you could copy it to a CD-R and that'd play just fine. To disable the copy protection you just hold shift while the cd tray closes.
I ended up even buying some rewritable mini discs because they were so much smaller and still good enough space for some mp3 files.
I didn't find out about mini discs until years later. Best I knew was the lost technology of CD-RW
the computer isn't beige enough.
I'm older.
Let's just leave it at that
I grew up with these.
Not exactly this one, but I remember the old PC had 5.25 and 3.5", and the power was a big red switch, felt like you were juicing up the grid.
Ya the switch to the right back. Like house breaker when you switched it on
Quit bragging.
More like dating myself.
Really. I guess you really are young. My turn
Play any Alpiner?
My turn:
wait, are these older than 1984(my first computer)?!???
Commodore64 gang represent!
I remember watching my mom sit and type code for games from magazines. If she made a mistake you’d know it. “MOTHERFUCKER!!!!” rang through the entire place.
Floppy drive. Fancy.
That monitor was really underrated. I used it for decades for game consoles, VCRs, etc. after the C64 went obsolete.
Hey, hey, you gotta tag that as NSFW. So sexy
where's your cassette drive
We're as far away from the 90s as the 90s were from the 60s.
Ugh..
Yup, and eventually I got a disk drive with LIGHTSCRIBE and just put the album art on the burned CD. I felt like hot shit.
You fucking were, that's some fancy ass equipment right there.
It’s funny, I finally got one of those and used it once.
Limewire? How about DC++ and eMule?
Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus to add a few names to the hat.
Ah, I forget about Kazaa and Kazaa Lite.
Bearshare gang, represent!
Living the golden age. Fuck yeah. Kazaa was the life. Personally I was a heavy eMule user.
Yep, Napster was the first I remember. It got sued too, by Lars Ulrich of Metallica. I also remember Limp Bizkit and some others doing a Napster tour to give a middle finger to the artists making a big deal about piracy.
I still feel the pain of downloading something and the connection breaking at 90% because the other person logged off. There also wasn't any way to resume.
Don't forget soulseek.
Soulseek is still going believe it or not. Fantastic service.
Even worse: how about M.U.L.E.?
Love it, except when my M.U.L.E. goes haywire.
I remember my first written CD. You put the CD into a transfer case and slide it into a large box. Shortly after, the empty transfer case comes back out. You have already prepared your CD image, not as a project or file, no, you had to prepare it as an image on its own partition, on a disk that did not host anything else.
Then you shutdown your computer, and reboot it basically into the burn program, which then tries to move the data fast enough from the disk partition to the CD burner. The speed, of course, was 1x, so this write operation could last an hour and a quarter.
Then, your computer reboots back into the OS. You put the empty transfer case into the writer, and after some time, it comes back out with the media. And now you can finally put in into a reader and read it and compare it to the data on that partition. Knock on wood, or whatever. Because about half the writes failed, and the media cost a fortune.
I let you front runners play with 1x and got a 2x with support for CD-RW, and because of it's buffer it only trashed the expensive CD-R's like 1/4 of the time. And I could use the computer a little if I dared!
These people are like 25-30, that’s not old yet I hope
I used to pirate games and store them here when I was a kid to play on my commodore 128
Going from a radio shack trs-80 model 3 to those desktops was great.
Except mine didn't have floppy drives. I only had a cassette player for storage.
That is what we had in computer science when I was in high school. The guy teaching it was really sharp. He also taught physics. He used to get mad at me for porting video games from those magazines that came with programs printed out in them. It would always be programs for c64 or some other home computer. By the end of my first year there were copies of my ported games floating around everywhere. I was the only person up til that time that every had more than a hundred percent in one of his classes. So much so he took the bonus questions off his test. It was really nice to be the best at something for once.
My hot take: kids should have to learn computers on a TRS-80 now.
But, copying games onto it from magazines was the way back then. It's how we learned.
Limewire was the shit. But I'm so old I started with Napster
I'm old enough to remember when that was the fancy new thing the kids were doing.
Me too, either old enough or poor enough. I had nothing but tapes and records until I seen a kid with a Discman at school and I HAD TO HAVE ONE. My mom got me one for Christmas finally and I had already traded up for every Nirvana CD, just had them there waiting.
I jumped to burning CDs as quickly as I could because I always wanted to be one step ahead with tech.
It’s crazy how far behind I am now. I always buy used phones, haven’t updated anything in my pc since 2014ish, still rocking a 2009 Mac Pro for music production.
I have, eh, how do you say? Got old? :(
Technology has really slowed down a lot since that time. There is less public investment and corporations sure as shit aren't going to finance all their own R&D. So why bother?
There's no virtue in needlessly cycling through new devices all the time just to satisfy one's own emotions.
I'm old enough to remember when computers didn't even require a hard drive, they could just boot right into Basic from ROM.
whipers ominously
Double decker tape recorders.
Apple IIe - those were the good ol days.
KERNEL OK
Old enough to remember using a 3½” floppy disk to boot my first PC and mess around with GW/Q-BASIC and play DOS games.
The disks were strongly perfumed (I guess the guy I bought my pirated games from liked to do that for some reason), and I still remember that aroma.
Those were pretty hard for floppies. Mine were 5.35" and cassette tape before that. But I was in high school at the time, so I probably need to respect my elder.
I had one of the biggest usb pen drives at the time with a huge 128MB of space. It was very small too, which was nice. At same time for college it was needed to have a floppy disk to save some homework.
It was great to go to college at a time when Napster and IRC rooms were in prime time, combined with a T1 fiber connection and University IT was too primitive to do anything to monitor or stop the behavior.
Ah lime wire, get a song and three random viruses for free
Yes, fuck you
Yes! Yes!
I remember feeling like such a badass when I got a CD player that could read MP3 files burned to a disc. I'd have an entire band's discography burned to a single disc and felt like some sort of musical library with my binder full of MP3 CDs.
Mp3 were a revolution. There was also the format wars with wmv on the table.
The only thing this meme is missing are the Wendy's napkins in the glovebox of my 1991 Pontiac Sunbird that I give my ex-girlfriend to blot her eyes after this latest mix cd is finally the one to blow her fucking mind
I’m monochrome cga screen old. Commodore VIC 20, Philips MSX, Video 2000 old.
Shiiit I had to block people at work from running bearshare and limewire
We didn't really have the right equipment for it. It was early enough in Windows that I couldn't adequately secure the developers from running crap on their workstations.
I eventually managed to get our antivirus to flag the DLLs for the applications as viruses, that caused a little bit of an uproar.
My first mix tapes were cassettes recorded from the radio.
With a boombox sitting across from a radio?
I have no idea how I tolerated that with my cheap Koss portable cassette player. I was just happy to have the songs though haha.
That one time I got an executable online that made girls strip on my desktop was great. Of course, the spyware and virus crap that was secretly behind it was not. I think that was the first time I did a full reinstall of Windows for the first time. Good times.
Burning CD's, ripping CD's with programs to remove the protection and save songs as MP3...
Anyone remembers cracks? You would replace a couple of files in the game folder and you could run a game without the CD, or a pirated version. These days with the online crap that is much more difficult. Or the serial number generators for some games or software because some genius found out how the software checked the number?
...I'm older.
...Oregon Trail older, motherfucker.
I remember getting a ton of mp3 with kazaa which was shut down, replaced by limewire.
Then all my mp3 disappeared from my pentium replaced by a copyright rar file.
I hope they paid for winrar...
My go to:
Does nobody remember Bearshare?
Oh, aye. Bounced through all those programs.
Learned about computer viruses and protection the hard way.
Lol I forgot all about it till just now! I had an almost out of body trip into memory. Shitty living room, shitty weed, off brand cigarettes, one of those flat screen CRT monstrosities that was top of the line at the time. Downloading what we hoped was family guy 2kb a min. The good ol days.
Napster was there before Kazaa, it was just a string of services popping up after others got shut down. Good times!
Lime wire?
Try newsgroups
This isn't very old lol. That computer could be from 2010 and CD's and Sharpies were used then. Also, LimeWire was functional until like late 2010.
People in the thread are talking about limewire, but I think they are missing the bigger reference here.
Downloading games, burning them onto CD-Rs and then using a Sharpie to make the inner tracks of the disc unreadable as they contained the copy protection.
My only confusion is that I swear it was Playstation and not PC that worked like this.
You don't know old until you've had to change the IRQ for your sound card because wolf3d.exe's settings were different than swotl.exe.
Zip drive!🙋♂️
I'm hooking two vhs players together to commit piracy old.
Old enough to have a 286 as a first PC. But more on topic, I remember a time before Limewire and Bearshare. A time before Napster. MP3s were downloaded from IRC or from websites found with AltaVista or WebCrawler.
To play those MP3s? Winamp wasn't out yet. Fraunhofer Winplay3 was your only option. It had to be cracked and pirated as well. Want to multitask while playing an MP3? How about your music cutting out instead?
Pre-home internet I remember running a line-in to my soundblaster card from a clock radio and recording Tool's Sober to my HDD.
The wav file took up a good chunk of the HDD. After a good amount of funking around with encoding it was barely comprehensible and still took up too much room. Was exciting and felt like a glimpse of the future.
People need to relax. This isn't even old. What's wrong with getting older anyway?
Dusty old bones. Frog Bog, Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack, Truckin and B-17 Bomber
I still have my 2005-2008 era Sony Vaiao in the garage at my parents house. If it booted up, I'd probably still have limewire running.
I need to wear a knee brace or use a cane, and I'm not even exaggerating.
I still use my 2010 Vaio. If they still made them, it's definitely what I would have gone for when I upgraded.
So, shortly after checking aboard the first fast-attack submarine I served on, in April 1991, the boat was locked down one evening, when the engineer couldn't find his Zenith SuperSport 286e computer. Suspecting someone stole it, the boat was locked down and searched - for 3 hours. Everyone was really angry... It's 2025 and I remember it well.
Anyway, after 3 hours or so, at the Captains insistence, the ENG, doing paperwork in his stateroom, let someone else in, to look for his computer. There it was, sitting plain as day, on his bunk, where his pillow should have been. The ENG said he didn't notice it, as he thought it was his pillow...gross, considering everyone else's pillowcase was white.
The Captain immediately lifted the lockdown, and all the off-duty people went home. The anger lingered though, and the Engineer seemed to have a dark cloud over his head. He was fired a few months later, and I've always wondered if it had something to do with that computer - I was just too new to know anything about the guy, and I didn't work in engineering.
Why must you do this to me. I'm already having a shit day and now you remind me that I was there when CDs replaced floppy. god dammit.
Kid, I have windows 3.1 on goddamn floppies.
I visited my childhood home which is now falling in. I probably shouldn’t have gone in there but I’m glad I did.
On the side where the roof hasn’t yet collapsed I looked into the downstairs closet by my last bedroom and the only item sitting in there, pinched between the wood of the floor and the wall, was a single floppy from the Windows 3.1 set.
I didn’t sleep for a week because of the state that place is in. :(
Were you also there when the floppy replaced the datasette? 😊
I was there when I upgraded from nothing (I.e. having to retype a software every time) to tape recorder. No other media change after that felt ever so good.
Nah floppy was the earliest days storage that I legit interacted with in my life. I have held a datasette and older stuff but they were not still being used. Just stuff found in storage and the like.
Kids, I played Leisure Suit Larry on a Macintosh II
Don’t hurt me like this.
I had so many burned CDs with games and music... This was back when ADSL internet was the hot new thing with incredible download speeds of 30kb/s
Try punch cards.
I was only a few years from the end of those at the local university.
Tell your kids we used to burn cd for entertainment, then proceed to take a torch to the cd.
To be fair I've done that too haha.
I still do this, minus limewire because it doesn't exist
My first pirated copy of windows was 3.1.
Where are the speakers, that warned you about incoming calls?
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EVEN OLDER!
Yar har fiddle de dee!
Being a pirate is alright with me!
Laughs in IRC.
Giggles in BBS.
Two day downloads because kermit was the only download protocol that working with the endpoint due to noise in the connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)
What was a I downloading? A bmp of a topless Samantha Fox.
Edit: I decided to take stroll down memory lane and have discovered that there were two Samantha foxes one was in pornos and the one I'm remembering was a page three girl in the UK. The page I found had them as the same person even though they look nothing alike.
Tech culture is around 10 years late here in India. So I can say I have worked with above tools. But CD Roms are now thing of past. Pen Drives, HDD and SDD are now tool of the game now.
The good old days of getting music from IRC or MP3 download websites found with Altavista.com
Just to play them back with WinPlay3 on a computer that used 100% CPU just to play back a file and dropped audio frames anyway.
Well... Yes. But I never used limewire because our Internet was so shit it'd take 25 minutes just to load in a Web page entirely made of just text.
Did none of you bitches fucking use tape-recorders?
Oh yes. And it was a big, big upgrade from having to retype everything each time.
Daaaaamn, you got me there. lol
Don't talk about age... My back hurts and I remember booting dos to run win.com if you wanted windows. Most of the stuff ran fine directly from dos without the added shell.
Okay okay but why sharpies? You can still buy and use those today, did you know?
Back in The Day, you'd write on CDRs with sharpie so you knew what each one contained.
Not just that, you'd hold the button so your portable CD player wouldn't recognize the door was open while playing, and you'd write on the disc as it was playing and get perfect circles on a variety of colors. That was how you have people sweet mixes.
I’m so mad I didn’t think of this 20 years ago.
Me too. Would have been so rad. I could have used my PlayStation which would always spin so I could boot with GameShark.
Yea cos you couldn't use a normal pen or it'd scratch the disc.
I understand that of course, what I don't get is that it's still there even though it hasn't changed one bit since. Maybe I'm overthinking it
Don't you know? Kids these days only know something twerk something eat hot chips something be bisexual etc..
I forget the brand but there was one you could etch a design on the cover of the CD with the burner. Futuristic tech at the time.
I'm this old.
Older actually. My first portable music format was 8track
I remember doing that...
last year (besides limewire, I needed some CDs to copy to minidiscs)
1st computer I used was an Apple ][e in first grade. Figured out how to make Spirographs with logo.
8088 era is in da house.
I had a portable hard drive. I think I still have it somewhere.
Wrong Dell.
Older sister's emo phase. Mom's Honda Passport. 'I Write Sins' blasting through cheap car stereos. Mandatory trips to the mall. Those were the days.
Careful giving out clues to your age on public forums...
But yeah I'm roughly cdr old.
laughs in IRC, magnetic disks, and a 486
I don't come here to be assaulted Pug 😤
Also, just black? lmfao
Heh. Y'all remember Lincoln Logs in front of the family radio set? 🦗
I am older even…
My computer now is very close to that era of Dell.
Ooof. 700mb discs
700mb was insane back then. I had a 6gb hard drive.
My mom and my girlfriend bought me an 80gb hard drive for my birthday and I couldn’t believe I had so much storage.
I still have it because I don’t want to lose what’s on it, but that ship probably sailed. It had mechanical failure about 20 years ago at this point.
Hard drives are fairly easy to recover. I've used such a service myself before in the early 2000s.
I had a new fresh computer with 20GB of drive and was insane how much could fit that bad boy. My other friend had a pc with 2GB drive and we needed to sometimes decide which game to play to uninstall one and install another. Sometimes it was Sims, other Roller Coaster tycoon 2. At least Red Alert Command and Conquer 2 could also fit. On my computer I could have Tomb Rider 2 installed and GTA 3 and Vice City and although it struggled at least it fit.
Same, I have an HDD from 2012 which has my childhood memories. First thing I'm gonna do is to get it fixed from a reputed service when I start earning.
My first computer ran on 5 1/4" floppy disks.
This, but I used a CD-RW as my scratch disk. Was it good? No. Did it matter with dialup? Not really.
I remember my old car stereo that would run mp3 files off of a CD, shit was so tight! Didn't need to transcribe the music as audio tracks so you could fit so much more Linkin Park tracks on a CD than ever before, god those were the days
1996 called: 2X Plextor SCSI-2 wide internal CDR with Caddy, 5 pack Ricoh 2X CDR and an Adaptec single port pci SCSI-2 card bundle for $599. What a deal to store all my porn!
Punk kids. Back in my day we had Tandy and Applesoft BASIC. We had line numbers and it fucking hurt when they took that away with goddamn function declarations.
Lil' bitch, I'm a 16KB expansion cartridge in my Vic-20 years old.
Older, I used to rip CDs onto tapes using a cassette deck
How did the Sharpie get dragged into this? I still need to use one of those for work.
Anyway, i fit the description. Win.com, Soundblaster IRQ, Audiogalaxy, BBS, etc. It seemed like it was more fun back then. Marketing ruined everything. 🤷♂️
If you aren't this old I don't think you can be called old yet
I didn't think I was old until this post... I'm like the youngest millennial you could be.
People that age will see this and say "hell yeah"
I remember lightscribe and thinking it was going to replace my need for sharpies but it was just a gimmick and while cool not very useful given the cost of disks
No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.
Wow, lime... Those times
I made one the other day, though I bought the music from HDTracks instead of "acquiring" it from Limewire or Kazaa. Burned it to a CD because the bus I drive has a CD player but no SD card slot or anything.
Barely but yeah
I'm so old I remember when disks were floppy, came in the 7" size, and were an awesome replacement for punch cards.
Still haven't beat Zork tho...
bruh 💀 my grandpa had me burning CDs for him forever
Hell, my daughter used limewire.
This is a direct attack. Defederate this motherfucker!
Ouch. I'm used to "do you feel old" posts being relatable, but the black theme on the computer tower and the 700mb disc hurt me. I remember feeling sci-fi as fuck when I finally got rid of my old off-white/beige tower for a black tower, and scoffing at the idea of removable media holding more than a few mb of data.
We still have Sharpie.
🤣...
Downloading 128kbit mp3 and then converting them to wav and burn on CD. It's all same same right 👍?
I can still sorta remember as a kid, sitting down at a chunky old Dell PC running Windows XP, while my dad inserted a CD for some Go Diago go computer game.
We still have that old computer. We tried to throw Linux on it to see if we could use it for something but I think it's truly beyond saving.
I still use CDs at work....
im literally 15, youre acting like CDs are antique vor smth
That's how I serenaded my SO
You'll never guys what I'm currently doing....
I am not old enough that I was doing this myself but I am old enough that I remember my dad doing it both for himself as well as for me so I could load music onto my mp3 player. My dad had a huge shelf of CDs. Some bought and some burnt
Pfff, this but with a 300 baud modem, 5 1/4'' floppies, and chiptunes.
Acutally yes, but at the time I wasn't able to afford all the equipment. By the time I was, I spent about 3-5 more years in this mode before CDs started to crumble