Typing CD keys was such a feeling when it was for a brand new game you can't wait to play, pure despair if you mistyped something and it didn't accept but then you corrected the error, biggest sense of relief of my childhood
My first typing was a game into C64 using machine code. Game magazines at that time dedicated a few pages with lines of hex numbers for games. After typing 4 pages you had a game.
Unfortunately, I‘ve got my data tape recorder two month later for xmas. And mom was nervous about keeping the power on for days. I entered those numbers quite some times. Load„*“,8,1
The joy of typing binary from a magazine into a hex editor :) we did it as two people, one reading, one typing, but I believe we only ever completed one of the smaller listings.
I remember when I first saw floppies and how amazing it was to load things instantly instead of waiting minutes for a game to load from a cassette tape.
Lol you rich kids and your cassette drives. I cut my teeth on my friend's VIC-20 which didn't have a hard disk or a tape drive (they were available but my friend's parents couldn't afford one). If we wanted to play a game, we had to type it in in BASIC every time.
My ZX Spectrum clone didn't have a "tape drive", it had a cable that you could use to connect any tape player to it. We didn't have a specialized tape player for it, we attached the same one we played music on.
I can't remember if the tape drive came with a TRS-80, but I do remember using the tape drive port to get sound from games like pacman. Basically it was hack to use the save to cassette to make sounds for the computer.
This game contains programming which produces sound effects that leave the computer through the AUX plug in the cassette cable. To hear the sound follow these instructions: First, load in the game. Remove the tape from the recorder if you loaded the game from cassette. Insert the large grey plug on the cassette cable into the AUX jack on the recorder. Insert an earphone into the jack labeled EAR on the recorder. Pop open the cassette door on the top of the recorder and reach in and hold in the interlock switch that is located in the left rear corner. Now press Record & Play together and then release the interlock switch. Sound should now come through the earphone.
ahh yes, the good old bunch of games on a disk. my grandpa went so hard that he had a printed catalog of which games were on which number-stickered disk
If you get old enough everyone's parents used to work for a big tech company. My mother who can barely operate her phone, used to work for a company that manufactured microchips.
Pong is still arguably a balanced, and therefore good game. Especially if you were playing the Atari or Texas Instruments versions, since those may have been some of the last mainstream video games that didn't cheat in favor of anyone. Neither the player or the computer was favored, which became the norm for most video games rather quickly thereafter.
That’s funny, me too! I switched to Mandrake or Mandriva. I liked Ubuntu (Kubuntu specifically), and never had any crash issues, but I wound up going to gNewSense and then Trisquel when those came out.
Finally, now I don't need to have to call a number to get my XP activated, I can just use this.
For those not in the know, XP's activation requirements are so harsh that your computer just gets disabled completely after the 30 day grace period if you don't activate at all. I live in a place where people really don't tend to buy operating systems, so this was a gigantic letdown.
You know what? Fuck Windows XP. There. I said it. And I'm taking the downvotes without remorse.
I think it's allowed to hate anti-customer practices and have good memories of an actually somewhat user-friendly OS that just worked for many people in many other regards.
I hate Windows. I will always fondly remember XP and Win 7. Windows 7 should've been the last Windows.
So I am not mad at you. You shall be forgiven, and I am even going to turn the other cheek and give you an upvote. It's what Windows XP would've wanted me to do, too, I am sure of it.
Ahhh, the good old copy of windows xp that was stolen from Microsoft a month before release and spread it's beautiful self all around the world, I had that code memorised for a long while, I called it the fuck code.
Unethical life pro trip. If you are installing windows xp through 7 and need a license key, just search on eBay for "Laptop Parts Only" and find an auction where someone was nice enough to post one.
I’m trying to get my 89 year old dad to set aside the tapes of the first games I programmed on our Commodore 64 in like 1983 when he moves this year. I really want them.
I remember reading a conspiracy theory that this key was purposely put in by a liberal employee who believed everything should be free and that’s why the first 5 digits are FCKGW - fuck George w - and that it was the volume license for Lockheed Martin or something
It’s not true but interestingly this key was leaked before windows xp even came out, like a month before, and it’s suspected to be a VLK from dell
It's also just laziness and time on my part. I have a couple of ancient systems in my basement that I haven't started in years that I think still have a floppy drive but it would take work for me to start up and sort out, then figure out how to transfer everything over.
And I haven't motivated myself for that considering it would all be for about 10MB of data?
It's amazing when you think about it. Thirty years when I made those floppies, it was like gold and I felt like I was holding an immense amount of data in a 1.5 MB floppy disk. And it wasn't easy to move the data around and it took an obvious amount of time to see the data being transferred.
Now we snap a photo with an average smartphone to generate a 20 megapixel image onto a 4 MB file in the blink of an eye .... every day ... all the time ... hundreds, thousands of times without any effort at all.
Hey, how's it going? I managed to do about 40 disks this week (still a fraction of my hoard), though most of them had errors and I'm not sure if my method is the best way to image corrupted disks, to allow for future error correction.
It's not like all of them were important personal stuff. I just figured it was easy enough to save everything now and look into what's on them later. I'd just been doing dd conv=noerror but I need to see if there's a better way.
Some of my disks were still error-free, so there's hope for yours!
Shit now I feel like this is a leaked photo of mine because I swear I had a windows XP cd like this and also with a very similar code written on it and even the handwriting is close to mine
I can remember installing Windows 95 with floppy disks, that was slow. XP was great because you could finally do minor things and it not require a reboot.
I recently cleaned out some boxes of random stuff I had in one of my wardrobes and found several discs like this, some with Ubuntu 5-8.04, random drivers and other fun stuff. Huge nostalgia trip going through them. I also found this CD my dad gave me when I was 20 and had just started smoking weed:
(the title is in Swedish and means "a chill disc")
Sadly lost him in December last year, RIP dad. I normally don't smoke anymore but I'm gonna get a small piece of hash and smoke it while playing this in memory of him.
Oh wow you just reminded me I did too at one point. Wild to think back on that part of my life, I've barely touched windows in over 10 years but man at one point so much of my brain was filled with windows related junk
I memorised this key, mainly due to LAN parties, since someone would always have some issue that needed them to reinstall Wndows. To this day i can recite it in full at any time. Also my library card number from when i was 12 (in case i forgot my card at home).
I actually had a Windows 98 CD at one point. Copied/ pitated, of course. The keys that I had were kinda stolen from the IT department that I was working for, at the time.
Only kinda stolen. The company was required to have a ridiculous amount of OEM keys. There were only 200 people working at CR back then, that needed Windows 98 rather than Windows NT, and of course there were the 8 Linux/Unix guys that IT mostly ignored, except for their connection to the intranet.
IT could buy 100 keys, or 250 keys. There was no option to buy two groups of 100 keys back in 1998. So we had about 56 keys just laying around that a few of us in IT just kinda took. We also took a total of 300 Windows NT licences, but I kinda doubt that any of managed to even give away a license of WNT.
Somehow upgrading from MS-DOS 3.30 to 5.0 was alright, but 6.22 seemed like a lot of clutter.
QEMM386 was the shit.
My 8088 got the coprocessor upgrade at some point
I'm Geoworks old. With the C64 on the side
I was so good and so careful with my printing when I had to write cd keys down. Nothing like burning something off of your summer vacation friend and then having them go back to the city and you're off by... something.
The CD Key written on the CD was a very famous infinite license key that pretty much everyone who had a pirated copy of windows was using. You also used to need to reformat more often for a clean wipe of your computer, so many people got used to entering this specific key.
Yeah American TVs never seem to have them. I'm not sure why.
They were awful actually, they were far larger than they needed to be and they were very much like USB in that you needed to turn them over three times in order to insert them. It's not even as if the picture quality was even any better than composite so I don't know why we bothered.
I think it was based on the 1960s VTR connector on studio equipment, or Cinch-Jones connectors from WWII. Quite large, yes. I think the connector could carry composite as well as RGB signals, and have various pass through modes.
Original copies? WTF? I mean, I had this version too, but I never ever saw the originals my disks were a copy of.
Here in former Yugoslavia, we got one original copy that got distributed to (probably) the whole country. Old times were so fun.
lol same. I thought the originals were a myth.
Now I want to brag with my CPM3.0 floppies for the C128... But parents sold the computer when I wasn't looking :(
:’(
That was stupid, posting your license key. Now I can use it too, thanks.
Another commenter posted, you can just get it from Wikipedia
Its been blacklisted by Microsoft for 20 years
Fucking Microsoft! Always ruining my plans!
I think that's the same key I had memorized when I worked for a sketchy PC repair place as a teen.
Typing CD keys was such a feeling when it was for a brand new game you can't wait to play, pure despair if you mistyped something and it didn't accept but then you corrected the error, biggest sense of relief of my childhood
My first typing was a game into C64 using machine code. Game magazines at that time dedicated a few pages with lines of hex numbers for games. After typing 4 pages you had a game.
Unfortunately, I‘ve got my data tape recorder two month later for xmas. And mom was nervous about keeping the power on for days. I entered those numbers quite some times. Load„*“,8,1
That's some hardcore 'cd key' typing lol
The joy of typing binary from a magazine into a hex editor :) we did it as two people, one reading, one typing, but I believe we only ever completed one of the smaller listings.
I'll leave this here -- it was maddening, but so satisfying and magical to have a running program after seemingly endless typing: https://archive.org/details/1990-11-compute-magazine/page/0-34/mode/1up?view=theater
I'm this old
I remember when I first saw floppies and how amazing it was to load things instantly instead of waiting minutes for a game to load from a cassette tape.
Lol you rich kids and your cassette drives. I cut my teeth on my friend's VIC-20 which didn't have a hard disk or a tape drive (they were available but my friend's parents couldn't afford one). If we wanted to play a game, we had to type it in in BASIC every time.
My ZX Spectrum clone didn't have a "tape drive", it had a cable that you could use to connect any tape player to it. We didn't have a specialized tape player for it, we attached the same one we played music on.
I can't remember if the tape drive came with a TRS-80, but I do remember using the tape drive port to get sound from games like pacman. Basically it was hack to use the save to cassette to make sounds for the computer.
I had the pleasure of working with 8” floppy drives with the Social Security Administration.
ahh yes, the good old bunch of games on a disk. my grandpa went so hard that he had a printed catalog of which games were on which number-stickered disk
This is so old, so old that Memorex is where my dad worked back in the day. I'm also old. Goddamnit.
Did your dad ever find out if it was real, or if it was Memorex?
Maybe it's Maybeline!
If you get old enough everyone's parents used to work for a big tech company. My mother who can barely operate her phone, used to work for a company that manufactured microchips.
My mother used to work for a company that made magnetic core memory.
That's the kind of memory that predates semiconductors and it was assembled by hand using gold wire and tiny ferrite rings.
She does know how to use a PC and has a tablet, though 😀
Holy shit… I’m Pitfall old too. What a shit game.
You shut your pretty little whore mouth! I loved Pitfall!
.......but also I was 4, and as we all know, kids are stupid.
When I was four I loved pong.
I read this while I was power walking to the bus stop. I read it as:
I had SO MANY questions. None of which I wanted answered.
Pong is still arguably a balanced, and therefore good game. Especially if you were playing the Atari or Texas Instruments versions, since those may have been some of the last mainstream video games that didn't cheat in favor of anyone. Neither the player or the computer was favored, which became the norm for most video games rather quickly thereafter.
Both. A nerd new nerds. The Ti friends had that shoot ‘em up gunslinger game… it was basically pong with a hat and guns.
Non No Falsch Nee
all of those work in German.
LOAD "*",8,1 . I was there, too shakes cane and ruffles grey hairs (It was a wonderful era. The current generation doesn't know what they missed.)
Fucking Geos man..... I remember doing homework on its word processor...
.
I miss when they just sent free CDs.
Damn, I think I once asked for their version 8 CD, was amazed at it!
Windows XP is what made me switch to Linux.
Ubuntu is what made me stick with ANY distro as long as it was not Ubuntu. Most crashy breaky thing ever.
That’s funny, me too! I switched to Mandrake or Mandriva. I liked Ubuntu (Kubuntu specifically), and never had any crash issues, but I wound up going to gNewSense and then Trisquel when those came out.
what's the license number for Ubuntu?
*FCKGW
Here it is friend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfELJU1mRMg
I had the same key on my XP disc.
What the hell? That’s the same combination as my luggage!
That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
Say, remind me later to change the combination on my luggage...
How do you know my WiFi password???
I was thinking the same thing! I swear I've used this key.
You 100% did, it was the most used winxp key out there, it always works until Microsoft fucked it.
Finally, now I don't need to have to call a number to get my XP activated, I can just use this.
For those not in the know, XP's activation requirements are so harsh that your computer just gets disabled completely after the 30 day grace period if you don't activate at all. I live in a place where people really don't tend to buy operating systems, so this was a gigantic letdown.
You know what? Fuck Windows XP. There. I said it. And I'm taking the downvotes without remorse.
I think it's allowed to hate anti-customer practices and have good memories of an actually somewhat user-friendly OS that just worked for many people in many other regards.
I hate Windows. I will always fondly remember XP and Win 7. Windows 7 should've been the last Windows.
So I am not mad at you. You shall be forgiven, and I am even going to turn the other cheek and give you an upvote. It's what Windows XP would've wanted me to do, too, I am sure of it.
Your opinion shall forever be respected.
Windows 7 was the first and last version that I didn't immediately (and lastingly) despise. Something something stopped clocks etc.
This is the internet. You can say "fuck GW", it's fine
I think people say "fuck Games Workshop" even on reddit
I was thinking “Fuck George W”
I thought it was people arguing about BASIC-A vs GW-BASIC.
Oh, that didn't stand for GoneWild ?
Ahhh, the good old copy of windows xp that was stolen from Microsoft a month before release and spread it's beautiful self all around the world, I had that code memorised for a long while, I called it the fuck code.
Floppy disk with Win 3.11
Yes, I have also installed windows from a very small stack of floppies. Windows 3.1
Also; You are at a crossroads, there are roads to the north, south and east. There is a dwarf, the dwarf throws an axe at you. The axe misses
3.1 was my first OS too. JezzBall and Chip's Challenge went hard.
The key that's so commonly used, it's in Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_licensing
This is the oldest I currently have pictures of.
why did you keep it? didn't you use it for anything?
At one point in my life I had the XP VLK for my university memorized. Now all I remember is the end: BGDBB.
Hey, that's MY activation key!
SP2 enters the chat........
Sup peeps. I'm stable af.
OS/2 enters the chat.
Eldritch demonic screams in the background
Pay no attention to the daemons I've had to restrain, please.
You could write to Microsoft and they would mail you a CD with SP2 on it for free.
My dude, you shouldn't post the key in open 🫣
Unethical life pro trip. If you are installing windows xp through 7 and need a license key, just search on eBay for "Laptop Parts Only" and find an auction where someone was nice enough to post one.
I can smell this photo
Ah yes, the ozone-plastic top notes with an undertone of Doritos and Mt. Dew. And is that a slight hint of cheap beer?
I've seen far more copies like this than original XP discs. It was the style at that time!
This old.
Almost had this memorized but had a friend I could call who had done so.
I’m trying to get my 89 year old dad to set aside the tapes of the first games I programmed on our Commodore 64 in like 1983 when he moves this year. I really want them.
Early mud stuff. I’ll post it if he finds it.
If you do post them, let me know. I'll spin up an emulator and give them a try!
I will! Just so you know, I was 12, so I cant vouch for the quality of writing or gameplay, lol.
Should have left "Win XP" out. We know FCKGW. ☺️
I remember reading a conspiracy theory that this key was purposely put in by a liberal employee who believed everything should be free and that’s why the first 5 digits are FCKGW - fuck George w - and that it was the volume license for Lockheed Martin or something
It’s not true but interestingly this key was leaked before windows xp even came out, like a month before, and it’s suspected to be a VLK from dell
Nowadays they’d probably say leftist
Older than this. I stopped before XP.
How do you stop, please teach me master.
I installed Ubuntu, and never looked back. I'd recommend trying it, and I hope it fits you too.
98
Does it count that I am 20 and have spindles of blank old CD/DVD?
You have spindles of spindles? That counts, yes.
Fixed.
And how many of them are scratched to death?
This was taken a few years back. They are all ona USB drive now.
My PC didn't support boot from CD, so I had to use about 6 WinXP floppies just to load the necessary drives to install from the CD. Good times
I think we also had the Win 95 and 98 installallers somewhere although I learned how to do it when upgrading from 98 to ME
Ama bout to score me a free copy of XP 😏
I was thinking the album yes fragile. Check it out on on youtube. The song roundabout if nothing else.
The kids have heard that one, it's the credits song on season 1 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventures.
Rick Beato thinks it's great too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFisOTDzGuE
Not exactly Workbench 1.3 disk 1 is it?
Came here to post just that :D
that is so cute.. less than 1gb
missed that day
Please. You're talking to a man here who ripped his entire CD collection into iTunes ... and then backed his library up on 1.44 MB floppies.
I have certain programs that were ripped from my father's 7.5" floppies. They have gone through 3.5" floppies, to CDs, to thumb drives.
The Data shall Remain.
If it is on a thumb drive then probably not lol, these things are more fragile than a Redditor
Real Gs had Windows XP Black Edition burned to a CD. This appears to be vanilla XP.
Well, I should have Magic User Interface CD for Amiga 3.1 in somewhere. Didn’t find it right now.
I'm worried about a bunch of 3.5" floppies I have that I used to store a bunch of personal documents and journal writing from high school.
I haven't seen any of these documents for years because it's been a long time since I had a system with a floppy drive.
Maybe it's time you switched over to ZIP drive?
It's like a floppy disk but the next big thing.
USB floppy drives aren't expensive.
It's also just laziness and time on my part. I have a couple of ancient systems in my basement that I haven't started in years that I think still have a floppy drive but it would take work for me to start up and sort out, then figure out how to transfer everything over.
And I haven't motivated myself for that considering it would all be for about 10MB of data?
It's amazing when you think about it. Thirty years when I made those floppies, it was like gold and I felt like I was holding an immense amount of data in a 1.5 MB floppy disk. And it wasn't easy to move the data around and it took an obvious amount of time to see the data being transferred.
Now we snap a photo with an average smartphone to generate a 20 megapixel image onto a 4 MB file in the blink of an eye .... every day ... all the time ... hundreds, thousands of times without any effort at all.
Do it next weekend.
order the drive today
gather up the discs on wednesday
test the drive on thursday
By your own admission, 10 MB of data could be a shit-ton of stuff that sounds important to you. Just get it done.
And to not be a hypocrite, I'll get going on my own similar project I've been putting off for years, haha. Do we have a deal?
Great, thanks! Full disclosure: this is how long mine has been on my to-do list.
I'm finally setting myself a due-date: later this week. Check in with me, bud, I'll check in with you!
Hey, how's it going? I managed to do about 40 disks this week (still a fraction of my hoard), though most of them had errors and I'm not sure if my method is the best way to image corrupted disks, to allow for future error correction.
Holy shit ...... now you've got me panicking
40 disks! ... I'm was only worried about two or three disks for myself ... now you've got me wondering how to get this done
I don't know if I should thank you or curse you ... thanks?
It's not like all of them were important personal stuff. I just figured it was easy enough to save everything now and look into what's on them later. I'd just been doing
dd conv=noerrorbut I need to see if there's a better way.Some of my disks were still error-free, so there's hope for yours!
MF, i had the same, same disc, same key lmao
Shit now I feel like this is a leaked photo of mine because I swear I had a windows XP cd like this and also with a very similar code written on it and even the handwriting is close to mine
Dude same here. Like same handwriting, same placement of the key. It's strikingly familiar.
laughs in C64 BASIC
The fact I recognise that key.
(Also my husband agrees with me that looks eerily like my handwriting and is the kind of disk i used OP are you in Australia...)
I can remember installing Windows 95 with floppy disks, that was slow. XP was great because you could finally do minor things and it not require a reboot.
I still have 46 disks of Office floating around somewhere
I’ll take my huge stack of Windows 3.1 floppies and see myself out.
Leaked an installation key? Microsoft is gonna send a helicopter to raid you....
At least 35. Maybe closer to 40.
I was going to disagree with you because I had a copy of Windows XP on the disc in my drawer, but then I remembered that I am 35 so thanks for that.
Me: This, but Office 2000.
Even still have a copy of 98
I recently cleaned out some boxes of random stuff I had in one of my wardrobes and found several discs like this, some with Ubuntu 5-8.04, random drivers and other fun stuff. Huge nostalgia trip going through them. I also found this CD my dad gave me when I was 20 and had just started smoking weed:
(the title is in Swedish and means "a chill disc")
Sadly lost him in December last year, RIP dad. I normally don't smoke anymore but I'm gonna get a small piece of hash and smoke it while playing this in memory of him.
No.
I memorized that key from pure usage. Good times.
Oh wow you just reminded me I did too at one point. Wild to think back on that part of my life, I've barely touched windows in over 10 years but man at one point so much of my brain was filled with windows related junk
I memorised this key, mainly due to LAN parties, since someone would always have some issue that needed them to reinstall Wndows. To this day i can recite it in full at any time. Also my library card number from when i was 12 (in case i forgot my card at home).
I actually had a Windows 98 CD at one point. Copied/ pitated, of course. The keys that I had were kinda stolen from the IT department that I was working for, at the time.
Only kinda stolen. The company was required to have a ridiculous amount of OEM keys. There were only 200 people working at CR back then, that needed Windows 98 rather than Windows NT, and of course there were the 8 Linux/Unix guys that IT mostly ignored, except for their connection to the intranet.
IT could buy 100 keys, or 250 keys. There was no option to buy two groups of 100 keys back in 1998. So we had about 56 keys just laying around that a few of us in IT just kinda took. We also took a total of 300 Windows NT licences, but I kinda doubt that any of managed to even give away a license of WNT.
Press play, FF, together. Count the gaps.
Oh...
University keys are available online.
before this one, I had a Windows 2000 Professional one with the local education department's VL key
Not real. The Bs and 8s are clearly different.
Somehow upgrading from MS-DOS 3.30 to 5.0 was alright, but 6.22 seemed like a lot of clutter. QEMM386 was the shit. My 8088 got the coprocessor upgrade at some point I'm Geoworks old. With the C64 on the side
damn now my XP serial is public for everyone, I thank you NOT!
I was so good and so careful with my printing when I had to write cd keys down. Nothing like burning something off of your summer vacation friend and then having them go back to the city and you're off by... something.
Is the implication that this was for someone who was a kid growing up then? Or just that this was a prominent memory of an older teen? Something else?
The CD Key written on the CD was a very famous infinite license key that pretty much everyone who had a pirated copy of windows was using. You also used to need to reformat more often for a clean wipe of your computer, so many people got used to entering this specific key.
I appreciate your answer very much, I was just trying to understand the age part of the meme.
So do they hate GW or do they want to have sexual intercourse with them?
lollers I was just going through my stuff and agonizing if I should chuck my XP stuff.
I feel the same way about my Composite to SCART adaptor cable
I have one, and I'm in North America... I saw it at a thrift store and recognized it, not something I expected to see at a Goodwill.
Yeah American TVs never seem to have them. I'm not sure why.
They were awful actually, they were far larger than they needed to be and they were very much like USB in that you needed to turn them over three times in order to insert them. It's not even as if the picture quality was even any better than composite so I don't know why we bothered.
I think it was based on the 1960s VTR connector on studio equipment, or Cinch-Jones connectors from WWII. Quite large, yes. I think the connector could carry composite as well as RGB signals, and have various pass through modes.
Well you're a huge nerd!
Winxp on a 700mb cd..
Trust me when I say that Windows 98, and even Windows 95 got burned to a ton of CDs.
Still have mine too
MS-DOS 3 on 5 1/4" floppies.
Thx for the key shithead
Have fun with XP? Not sure Microsoft even cares anymore
They didn't even care back then, they sure as fuck don't care now.
Lol dumbass, that specific key was the single most used winxp key ever.