Yeah, the ubiquity of it made it even more attractive to advertisers. Even more attractive when everything went from being individual forums to Facebook groups or subreddits.
People who used it could submit websites to it, tag them. Then htting the button on the plugin would take you to a random website from your selected interests. Like/dislike/report as needed.
I remember when my mum used to say "Don't bother your dad, he's on the internet" like it was this big important thing. Not "He's checking his email", or anything more specific, the simple act of being on the internet was actually of note.
"Surfing the web" is one of my favourite phrases in that it's completely meaningless now despite there being far more of it happening than when the phrase was created
I remember when I was 10 going to radio shack and watching a guy who worked there type in programs in basic on a ts-80 computer. Thought it was cool. There was no Internet then.
And that reminds me of an old DOS game called “Rocky’s Boots”. You were a raccoon who had to build logic gate circuits to get out of some sort of maze.
Back when my friend got AOL for the first time, I came over and we sent an e-mail to the While House urging Bill Clinton to protect the environment.
I'm not insecure about my age, though. On the contrary, people younger than me should be insecure about theirs. No one born in the 21st century can ever really reach adulthood, IMO.
I think the first time I played it, I used my brother's computer on which he had already installed it, probably through floppies.
I don't remember how I installed it on subsequent computers ... But I have written programs in BASIC and transported them on floppies, including for college courses.
yeah, and that a significant portion of users had their own little websites and/or blogs. I spent ages browsing those tiny iframe sites built with fancy Photoshop brushes and incomprehensible navigation menus.
I actually got into web design by making a Pokemon fansite with animated gifs on every page xD
I remember being 10 and we'd head over to the one kid who had a computer's house, ask their mom if it was okay to use the internet (her phone would be unavailable during this time), and somehow we'd manage to find Newgrounds. We'd spend hours watching videos of stickfigures killing each other to the LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR song.
Or videos where Pokemon violently killed one another.
So much racism. I think the rational was that it was 'fine' because they were making fun of 'the bad ones' and not regular minorities (Thanks Chris Rock)
I threw house parties every other week for years when I was just post college. There ended up being three rooms almost every time: People watching weird movies in the living room, people cooking and drinking in the kitchen, and people group surfing the internet in the computer room. It was amazing.
I don't know what end of 20's you're at, but I'm in my late 20's. I have 3 younger siblings. The oldest of my siblings also did this, but the younger two did not. The third sibling would watch Youtube and stuff with friends on like a XBox, but not just browsing the web or playing flash games. By the time my youngest sibling was about that age, all of their friends had some form of internet connected device on their own. Whenever their friends would come over, they'd watch movies or play board games or other "in person activities", but not browse the web together.
Remember when nobody had any computers and we would just go over to each others houses and get kicked out by their parents because there was nothing to so we'd ride our bikes around on roads that were too busy and go places we shouldn't be?
I saw a yt vid I can't find right now of someone doing a comparison between sound blaster and this other high end speaker (also available at the time) that I didn't even know existed, and now cant remember the name of. Apparently a lot of those dos games had really deep music scores that those of us with just sound blaster never got to hear.
CD-ROM with lots of shareware programs. First two levels of Doom, before I got it from somewhere else. Had a few original bought games but most was pirated. Before LAN parties, you came to a friends house with your computer, monitor, everything, and connected via serial cable and parallel cable - first mentioned to play games, second one to copy files.
I remember looking for porn for the first time at a buddies house and we couldn't even figure it out. It never dawned on us to type "porn" into the search engine. Just two 13 year olds going "type in girls, damn, ok, try babes. Nothing? What about chicks?"
Old enough to remember a world that smelled like an ashtray. Old enough to have played sonic 1 on a Japanese cart on release. Old enough to remember the wild west days of the web, before it became a corporate wasteland.
Yep, this exactly. You could even read news and weather on it. Some channels had the ability to send an SMS and it would show up in a teletext chat! I checked every channel if it had teletext and CartoonNetwork had amazing pixel art on it.
When I was ten I'd go over to my friend's place to watch The Banana Splits or go jump my BMX off dirt ramps, or steal slightly out of date chocolate milk from the back of the local milk factory. I was in my mid-twenties and second marriage before the internet came around. Now that's old.
In the early '80s we used to hang out at my one friend's house and play games on his TRS-80 which we affectionately called the "Trash 80". We were all in high school except Monty who was 23 and enormously obese. Monty had a real job as a programmer somewhere and one afternoon he sat down at the Trash 80 and wrote a very plausible hi-res version of Space Invaders from scratch in about half an hour. At the time it meant nothing to me, but now after a 30 year career as a programmer myself I understand just how impressive that actually was.
Monty wired up his car's alternator to the ignition switch and he would leave his keys in the switch, hoping that somebody would attempt to steal his car and die. Not knowing about this, one of our friends ran out to his car after a D&D session, started it up and drove around the parking lot. Monty was so disappointed that nothing happened. I kinda miss the '80s.
Ughhhh my friends would come over to watch me play club penguin. Then we would walk to their house and watch them play club penguin. When we older we called each other while playing together. Also Halo CE was awesome in 4v4 multiplayer spit on a 1080 TV, 4 IRL people playing against 4 randos. One time I was hasty and picked "Hang em High" when it was my friends choice, I then asked "wanna play Hang em High?" It felt the natural pick lol
The nice had a HUGE phone bill. Memory is falling me here on the cash amount but I want to say it was over a grand. The statement was half an inch thick.
Remember when you were ten and went to a friend’s place who had a Commodore 64 and they just got a new game on a floppy from his uncle’s friend. And the game was just an animation of a pixelated naked cartoon lady who took a piss on to the ground. And you’d laugh your ass off for the rest of the day. Remember? No?
Silly story, my first gf would do this with her best friend all the time. Insisted I came with but between my parents and school it took a bit, which was fine by me because I had internet at home and a little laptop as opposes to a clunky desktop. Finally did join them, turns out they went over to her bestie's and watched porn together. Teen me kicked himself for not getting in on that sooner, adult me woners if that was a red flag.
Yahoo used to have a music video section. The videos would load fine on a cable connection but 56K took forever at potato quality. Had to go to a friend's house with better internet to watch any videos. Load up a video, leave home hoping the internet doesn't disconnect, go to a friend's house to watch a few, and then head back home to see if the video mostly loaded before timing out. The parents at home were okay with leaving the internet running because it stopped telemarketer calls which were rampant at the time.
Cat used to sleep on top of the CRT and got a rude awakening after we upgraded the monitor. Hopped right over the LCD. Computers used to be useful in ways that have been engineered out.
Friend's family had WebTV before my family even had dial-up. My mom was too worried about the internet having porn and I was already dreaming of getting porn on the TV. Eventually she consented to internet on the living room PC so she could monitor it and that dumb bitch didn't notice the lan cable we routed up the stairs. Every teenager was a network admin in those days. I learned to encrypt hard drives as soon as PC's were powerful enough to handle the performance hit of encryption.
I was watching an old episode of Columbo and realized how old it was when a lady used a teletype to retrieve information on a employee. I was born in the 80ies and always had old computers in the 90ies so I learned to use BASIC and DOS, but anything that doesn't have a screen seems like it's from centuries ago to me.
My first computer (not counting my sisters' aging ZX Spectrum+) was something called a Nikita PC Vivaz/PC Kid. It was essentially a famiclone with keyboard and mouse, in the shape of a tower PC.
It had quite a few programs like a word processor, spreadsheets, phone book, notes, a drawing application, some BASIC variant, and various games. It was obviously quite limited in what you could do with a 4KB of battery-backed RAM "disk" shared by all applications. It also had a slot for Famicom cartridges to play regular FC/NES titles with gamepads.
I remember my friends telling me it "wasn't a computer" because it had no monitor (the display was a regular TV), and it didn't "have Windows".
This was in 1998, and I still cringe to this day.
(My first x86 machine was a 200MHz Pentium MMX tower with IIRC 16MB of RAM and 1GB disk, in 2004)
Edit: also, I didn't experience the information superhighway until IIRC 2005, in the Uni's library
I remember my brother's ZX Spectrum with what we called a chewing gum keyboard.
He had games! And decades later most of these games are still around, only the graphics improve.
I didn’t experience the information superhighway until IIRC 2005, in the Uni’s library
That's late. I remember dialing into the connection I got via uni in the early nineties. Damn I really dated myself now. Well, it's the normal amount.
My sisters' was the more modern 48K "Plus" version, with hard plastic keycaps and somewhat extended keyboard (separate arrow/delete/graphics shift/etc keys). Unfortunately I lost it somewhere in my storage room, and don't think it would even turn on at this point 😕
Yeah, there were some gems there. I'm particularly fond of Sir Fred, R-Type, Nodes of Yesod, and Atic Atac, and regularly fire up FUSE to play them 😁
When I was 10 I'd go over to my friend's house to play Alley Cat and Shinobi. His dad had an IBM PC. Otherwise we played on my Commodore VIC-20, or went to play the arcade games at the local corner store.
I had a friend with a VIC-20 but it didn't have a tape drive. We would play games on it, but we had to type the code for the games into it by hand first, every time we wanted to play. It's wild how normal that seemed.
I had a big book full of games too which my dad bought me and I typed them in. Taught me how to code. But yeah at least I could save it to the tape drive!
When Neopets first came out, I used the entire month's data allowance in a day. From memory I think we only had 100MB. I wasn't allowed to use the internet with images turned on after that. Luckily by the time Runescape came out we had a much higher limit.
Back in 2010, one of the earliest games for the iPad was Scrabble. Each person needed their own iPhone to hold their tiles and they could flick them off their phone onto the board which was the iPad. It was mocked because nobody wanted to shell out $3000 for hardware to play a $25 board game.
I can't remember the name of it, but there was a toolkit for Objective-C back then that would let nearby devices connect to each other for doing games and stuff like this.
I spend the first 8 years of my life in China, we just had TV (it's like cable with a box thingy I think) that we had to pay for, and like we didn't have any other entertainment other than like childrens books or boardgames/cardgames that I'd only have my older brother to play with. Didn't even have friends I don't remember having any friends.
Then once we immigrated to the US. We didn't get internet at first, but we got library cards in the NYC Brooklyn public library, and like I got access to the library computers with internet and that's the first time I've really had access to the internet (around 2010), ans I had zero clue how to use it lol. I just want to play games at that time, not clue how to go on those websites...
And omg my cousins who went to the library with us (so I think my aunt, aka: those cousin's mother, was trying to show us around of "how stuff works" in the country) just refused to help me. They see me and like: "eww this peasant kid fresh off the boat doesn't even know how to use a computer", I felt so sad... I mean you had to wait in line using your library card to register at the kiosk thing, and you only get 30 minutes once its your turn, so I kinda just spend like... 15 minutes not know how to find games to play... then finally my aunt sort of forced my cousin to help me...
Fucking Tiffiany, what a bitch...
I feel like American-born kids just have this weird arrogance, and doesn't even treat people of their own ethnicity nicely, not even a relative.
But anyways... I basically jumped from zero internet to 2010s internet, no clue wtf is "golden age of internet" y'all talk about.
Then we got like a very cheap laptop that's shared between my older brother and me, but he took the admin account and only gave me a standard account, so I couldn't even install anything... :(
I remember we used to go to a nearby McDonalds for free wifi lmfao
Then we finally got internet... it was a company called "Optimum" and its like $50 a month, but we got the promotional first 2 years at $30 a month or something, and idk what the speed even was, probably very slow.
But my patents really only let me use the computer for like... 30 minutes a day... 😭
Its like DRUGS, why did you do that to me mama?
Okay she didn't want me to get addicted to this "drug" known as the internet. Didn't want us to "走火入魔" or whatever that means.
Sometimes she just take the modem when its the weekends and she left home for something so we can't play all day... :(
Sometimes take the laptop charging cable too :(
I was so sad... :(
And like then as we got older, mom would unplug the modem when we go to sleep so we can't use the internet at night... I mean yea I get it from a parentinv PoV lol, but like when i was that kid, I felt so sad :(
Edit: Also didn't get a smartphone (or any phone at all) till like 2015/2016...
Yeah, confirmed I am also this old, the normal amount.
I'm old enough to remember there are two kinds of taking turns.
Did you look at bobs?
After the image loaded line by line for about 15 minutes, indeed!
I had a 1.4MB floppy of gold, and I learned to silence the modem.
Yeah, the ubiquity of it made it even more attractive to advertisers. Even more attractive when everything went from being individual forums to Facebook groups or subreddits.
But then what would I do while out for a walk, be alone with my thoughts and observant of my surroundings??
Sent from my smartphone while out for a walk.
Used to be a plugin called StumbleUpon.
People who used it could submit websites to it, tag them. Then htting the button on the plugin would take you to a random website from your selected interests. Like/dislike/report as needed.
The internet used to be magnificent.
I used to love that so much
I found a site recently, called Cloudhiker that's a Stumbleupon Replacement
Wasn't there a button on Google that did that, too?
Not exactly, but there was an "I'm feeling lucky" button which was similar enough.
Web rings!
I've come across a still-living webcomics webring the other day, made me feel nostalgic :')
"I'm feeling lucky" or something like that?
I haven't uses google in so long, I thought that was still there. Oh well, all the fun stuff is gone
Sure Ask Jeeves did this too.
I'll Ask Jeeves before I ever ask ChatGPT
What about a Hot bot?
Edit: I went and checked and the old hotbot.com has been turned into an AI search. Eww
Lemmy is the same thing, but with scrolling, and comments.
Wasn't that just yesterday? God I'm old.
Damn good game. I can hear all the sound FX now.
someone reverse engineered it :) https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball
you can play it here: https://pinball.alula.me/
I remember when my mum used to say "Don't bother your dad, he's on the internet" like it was this big important thing. Not "He's checking his email", or anything more specific, the simple act of being on the internet was actually of note.
"Surfing the web" is one of my favourite phrases in that it's completely meaningless now despite there being far more of it happening than when the phrase was created
"Are you surfing the web, son?"
No, just Lemmy.
I feel like "doom scrolling" has replaced web surfing.
Also, don't pick up the phone because we only have one line
That's because he was looking at porn and jerking off.
Back then people might say something like, "I work with computers," because it actually narrowed things down.
I remember when I was 10 going to radio shack and watching a guy who worked there type in programs in basic on a ts-80 computer. Thought it was cool. There was no Internet then.
*TRS-80
That typo reminded me of the steam game TIS-100, where you write programs in assembly for a fictional multi core computer architecture
If you like programming and puzzles it’s hella fun. If you don’t I highly recommend you don’t buy it, you won’t have fun.
I already do that for money
Yes but this is fictional programming in assembly for no money.
I already do that for no money also
Fictional you say? Fuck it, I’m down.
Zachlikes are always wonderful.
one of the best games ive ever played. i also cannot recommend it
And that reminds me of an old DOS game called “Rocky’s Boots”. You were a raccoon who had to build logic gate circuits to get out of some sort of maze.
*Trash 80
There it is
Yes, woke up in the night and realized I forgot the r, thanks for correction.
You welcome
Back when my friend got AOL for the first time, I came over and we sent an e-mail to the While House urging Bill Clinton to protect the environment.
I'm not insecure about my age, though. On the contrary, people younger than me should be insecure about theirs. No one born in the 21st century can ever really reach adulthood, IMO.
My taekwondo trainer is younger than my driver's license. That kind of hurt.
I was new when the Internet was new (for consumers), but I remember introducing Warcraft II to a friend.
Zug zug.
Did you get the ones on the floppy or on the CD?
I think the first time I played it, I used my brother's computer on which he had already installed it, probably through floppies.
I don't remember how I installed it on subsequent computers ... But I have written programs in BASIC and transported them on floppies, including for college courses.
yes
I’m a medieval man 🎶
Lol are you one of those kids from The Kid's Guide to the Internet?
https://youtu.be/A81IwlDeV6c
I miss the old internet so much.
yeah, and that a significant portion of users had their own little websites and/or blogs. I spent ages browsing those tiny iframe sites built with fancy Photoshop brushes and incomprehensible navigation menus.
I actually got into web design by making a Pokemon fansite with animated gifs on every page xD
It's not the same but this reminds me of it:
https://theuselessweb.com/
Thanks for the link!
I remember being 10 and we'd head over to the one kid who had a computer's house, ask their mom if it was okay to use the internet (her phone would be unavailable during this time), and somehow we'd manage to find Newgrounds. We'd spend hours watching videos of stickfigures killing each other to the LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR song.
Or videos where Pokemon violently killed one another.
Stickdeath.com was wild, I loved it. I rewatched some recently and did not remember how racist they could be though.
So much racism. I think the rational was that it was 'fine' because they were making fun of 'the bad ones' and not regular minorities (Thanks Chris Rock)
Newgrounds was an amazing treasure trove of creativity and games.
I threw house parties every other week for years when I was just post college. There ended up being three rooms almost every time: People watching weird movies in the living room, people cooking and drinking in the kitchen, and people group surfing the internet in the computer room. It was amazing.
I’m only 35 and we did this as kids.
Only 35 lol
Rude haha
You’ll be 35 before you know it. At a certain point in adulthood, years start to fly by so fast.
I'm almost there. I accepted I was old when I joined a video game and heard "You sound like you're 30". I was infact, 30.
I'm under 30 and did this
We used to go to arcades even when we had no money just to watch other people play over their shoulders.
It was like Twitch, but sweaty and with more mullets.
I can smell this comment.
Watching the gods play Marvel vs Capcom 2 was peak mall rat experience
Hah. I'm old enough to watch the norms play Street Fighter II The World Warrior.
All my joints ache. Even the ones you didn't know were joints.
Aight im in my 20s and even I did this growing up, is that person just a fucking teenager or something?
I don't know what end of 20's you're at, but I'm in my late 20's. I have 3 younger siblings. The oldest of my siblings also did this, but the younger two did not. The third sibling would watch Youtube and stuff with friends on like a XBox, but not just browsing the web or playing flash games. By the time my youngest sibling was about that age, all of their friends had some form of internet connected device on their own. Whenever their friends would come over, they'd watch movies or play board games or other "in person activities", but not browse the web together.
ha except it was floppy disk computer games and not this highway thing.
Back in my day, they were called floppy disks for a reason.
5.25 or 8 inch?
I'm a modest man
You call that 8 inches?
SCNR
Mine was hard though
There was no hard disk.
Or datasette tapes because floppy readers were expensive.
or typing in the assembly from a magazine article! which never works lol
Remember when nobody had any computers and we would just go over to each others houses and get kicked out by their parents because there was nothing to so we'd ride our bikes around on roads that were too busy and go places we shouldn't be?
I do 😅 I guess we're the same amount old
Old enough that game consoles don't exist, but young enough to be protected by child labor laws.
I climbed a water tower at an abandoned warehouse and got attacked by wasps at the top. Good times!
Not a thing to do, but talk to you.
Ooow! Yeah!
Old internet was the shit. Netscape navigator on a crappy 56k or DSL line, AIM, Runescape Classic. What a time to be alive.
I got sucked into BBS games for a bit, like LORD and Usurper.
Lineage was my intro to MMOs.
I took for granted that the internet only existed in libraries and wealthy friends' houses
Who had a CD ROM drive and a sound blaster? Doom was a whole new dimension with it. It was real and very scary!
I saw a yt vid I can't find right now of someone doing a comparison between sound blaster and this other high end speaker (also available at the time) that I didn't even know existed, and now cant remember the name of. Apparently a lot of those dos games had really deep music scores that those of us with just sound blaster never got to hear.
Edit: I think this is what I saw https://youtu.be/wUtWbb8hAh8
I sank hundreds of late night hours and doubled my bladder size while being completely enthralled on that very setup. cd D:/, doom.exe
CD-ROM with lots of shareware programs. First two levels of Doom, before I got it from somewhere else. Had a few original bought games but most was pirated. Before LAN parties, you came to a friends house with your computer, monitor, everything, and connected via serial cable and parallel cable - first mentioned to play games, second one to copy files.
I remember looking for porn for the first time at a buddies house and we couldn't even figure it out. It never dawned on us to type "porn" into the search engine. Just two 13 year olds going "type in girls, damn, ok, try babes. Nothing? What about chicks?"
Old enough to remember a world that smelled like an ashtray. Old enough to have played sonic 1 on a Japanese cart on release. Old enough to remember the wild west days of the web, before it became a corporate wasteland.
I was following it just fine until the "experience the information superhighway" part.
My mate's ZX Spectrums had no "information superhighway" connection.
Used a 086 Amstrad to connect to BBS's
That was the proto-internet that I miss even now.
BBS were cute. However the costs and connection speeds were pretty brutal.
Information back alley trickle
Best we could manage was failing to get anywhere in a Dizzy game.
I remember being 10, and the closest thing to the Internet we had was when we got a VCR.
I'm from the UK and the closest thing to the Internet to me was teletext. I loved it. My parents were baffled as to what I was doing.
Yep, this exactly. You could even read news and weather on it. Some channels had the ability to send an SMS and it would show up in a teletext chat! I checked every channel if it had teletext and CartoonNetwork had amazing pixel art on it.
When I was ten I'd go over to my friend's place to watch The Banana Splits or go jump my BMX off dirt ramps, or steal slightly out of date chocolate milk from the back of the local milk factory. I was in my mid-twenties and second marriage before the internet came around. Now that's old.
Mid twenties.....
Second marriage....
Damn.
And how. Gladly I haven't been stupid enough to go for a third.
In the early '80s we used to hang out at my one friend's house and play games on his TRS-80 which we affectionately called the "Trash 80". We were all in high school except Monty who was 23 and enormously obese. Monty had a real job as a programmer somewhere and one afternoon he sat down at the Trash 80 and wrote a very plausible hi-res version of Space Invaders from scratch in about half an hour. At the time it meant nothing to me, but now after a 30 year career as a programmer myself I understand just how impressive that actually was.
Monty wired up his car's alternator to the ignition switch and he would leave his keys in the switch, hoping that somebody would attempt to steal his car and die. Not knowing about this, one of our friends ran out to his car after a D&D session, started it up and drove around the parking lot. Monty was so disappointed that nothing happened. I kinda miss the '80s.
Ughhhh my friends would come over to watch me play club penguin. Then we would walk to their house and watch them play club penguin. When we older we called each other while playing together. Also Halo CE was awesome in 4v4 multiplayer spit on a 1080 TV, 4 IRL people playing against 4 randos. One time I was hasty and picked "Hang em High" when it was my friends choice, I then asked "wanna play Hang em High?" It felt the natural pick lol
I can remember when texting came out. Y'all remember how the phone companies charged per minute and per text back in the day ?
The nice had a HUGE phone bill. Memory is falling me here on the cash amount but I want to say it was over a grand. The statement was half an inch thick.
IDK my BFF Jill?
Remember when you were ten and went to a friend’s place who had a Commodore 64 and they just got a new game on a floppy from his uncle’s friend. And the game was just an animation of a pixelated naked cartoon lady who took a piss on to the ground. And you’d laugh your ass off for the rest of the day. Remember? No?
Yes, but it was a cassette. Loading programs took ages, but we watched TNG on broadcast tv in the meantime.
Silly story, my first gf would do this with her best friend all the time. Insisted I came with but between my parents and school it took a bit, which was fine by me because I had internet at home and a little laptop as opposes to a clunky desktop. Finally did join them, turns out they went over to her bestie's and watched porn together. Teen me kicked himself for not getting in on that sooner, adult me woners if that was a red flag.
That was definitely a different time than was being described and you definitely were missing out and that was definitely a red flag
"All of the above"
Bruh, i still do it. Just get pizza and go to my friend and we eat while searching funny/interesting stuff.
Keep keepin' it real
I remember typing in code from a gaming magazine because there was no storage. You turn off your computer and it's gone.
Worst part was when your triple checked everything and it still wouldn't run only to get the corrections in the magazine next month.
Young enough to have experienced school going virtual due to covid
I’m in my 30s myself. People in their 30s are not old God damnit.
Now, where the fuck are my gout pills.
Just keep telling yourself you're not old and soon you'll be 45 and your back will hurt, ask me how I know...
Wait until you get to 50 and your knees start to give out.
This was a time before youtube.
Yahoo used to have a music video section. The videos would load fine on a cable connection but 56K took forever at potato quality. Had to go to a friend's house with better internet to watch any videos. Load up a video, leave home hoping the internet doesn't disconnect, go to a friend's house to watch a few, and then head back home to see if the video mostly loaded before timing out. The parents at home were okay with leaving the internet running because it stopped telemarketer calls which were rampant at the time.
Cat used to sleep on top of the CRT and got a rude awakening after we upgraded the monitor. Hopped right over the LCD. Computers used to be useful in ways that have been engineered out.
This is just the Millennial version of reaction video Tiktoks.
I remember a bunch of us going over to our neighbor's house to watch him play Sim ant.
I remember installing programs with several consecutive floppy disks on my dad's computer
I'm so decrepit I can remember a time when "computer" was a term that described a device you could control the software of, kiddo.
You still can.
I run Pop!_OS BTW
I'm on Arch. :)
Try-hard
That, and I prefer the package management over here.
apt-get a better package manager
We're going to have to agree to disagree on that one.
(But I'm glad to hear that what you like to use works well for you)
They're just jealous they don't get to watch an animation in the terminal emulator when they do a system update.
Waiting for dial up to kick in was better with company
Thanks Lemmy. I am feeling normal now.
I got my PC-less friend into UO, CS, EQ, WoW and a few other abbreviations.
*knock knock knock*
FBI, open up!
Friend's family had WebTV before my family even had dial-up. My mom was too worried about the internet having porn and I was already dreaming of getting porn on the TV. Eventually she consented to internet on the living room PC so she could monitor it and that dumb bitch didn't notice the lan cable we routed up the stairs. Every teenager was a network admin in those days. I learned to encrypt hard drives as soon as PC's were powerful enough to handle the performance hit of encryption.
Also (although potentially later) every teenager was a DJ with all those MP3s they got from napster.
And then PC repair technician for the limewire viruses.
I was watching an old episode of Columbo and realized how old it was when a lady used a teletype to retrieve information on a employee. I was born in the 80ies and always had old computers in the 90ies so I learned to use BASIC and DOS, but anything that doesn't have a screen seems like it's from centuries ago to me.
80ies and 90ies lol tf
When I was 10, there was no information superhighway. HTTP wasn't even around yet.
I was like "HTTP" has been around forever, sure it was out before I was ten...
Nope I was 12, ugh.
If we go by the 1.0 release, I was well into highschool, heh.
When I was 10, we didn't have a computer at home. If homework needed to be typed, I did it on a typewriter.
We had both but really only because of both my parents' jobs having been in tech since the late '70s and early '80s.
My first computer (not counting my sisters' aging ZX Spectrum+) was something called a Nikita PC Vivaz/PC Kid. It was essentially a famiclone with keyboard and mouse, in the shape of a tower PC.
It had quite a few programs like a word processor, spreadsheets, phone book, notes, a drawing application, some BASIC variant, and various games. It was obviously quite limited in what you could do with a 4KB of battery-backed RAM "disk" shared by all applications. It also had a slot for Famicom cartridges to play regular FC/NES titles with gamepads.
I remember my friends telling me it "wasn't a computer" because it had no monitor (the display was a regular TV), and it didn't "have Windows".
This was in 1998, and I still cringe to this day.
(My first x86 machine was a 200MHz Pentium MMX tower with IIRC 16MB of RAM and 1GB disk, in 2004)
Edit: also, I didn't experience the information superhighway until IIRC 2005, in the Uni's library
I remember my brother's ZX Spectrum with what we called a chewing gum keyboard.
He had games! And decades later most of these games are still around, only the graphics improve.
That's late. I remember dialing into the connection I got via uni in the early nineties. Damn I really dated myself now. Well, it's the normal amount.
My sisters' was the more modern 48K "Plus" version, with hard plastic keycaps and somewhat extended keyboard (separate arrow/delete/graphics shift/etc keys). Unfortunately I lost it somewhere in my storage room, and don't think it would even turn on at this point 😕
Yeah, there were some gems there. I'm particularly fond of Sir Fred, R-Type, Nodes of Yesod, and Atic Atac, and regularly fire up FUSE to play them 😁
When I was 10 I'd go over to my friend's house to play Alley Cat and Shinobi. His dad had an IBM PC. Otherwise we played on my Commodore VIC-20, or went to play the arcade games at the local corner store.
I had a friend with a VIC-20 but it didn't have a tape drive. We would play games on it, but we had to type the code for the games into it by hand first, every time we wanted to play. It's wild how normal that seemed.
I had a big book full of games too which my dad bought me and I typed them in. Taught me how to code. But yeah at least I could save it to the tape drive!
Good times.
Neopeys and taking turns playing RuneScape.
When Neopets first came out, I used the entire month's data allowance in a day. From memory I think we only had 100MB. I wasn't allowed to use the internet with images turned on after that. Luckily by the time Runescape came out we had a much higher limit.
Oof, I did that when I found a website that streamed Scrubs episodes in like 16p resolution
My mom was mad
Not me and the homies browsing deviantart together 😭
YouTube poop videos just hit better with friends at 10yo.
Mad that this was still happening only ~25 years ago
Then at ~15 years ago we suddenly all start getting smartphones
Back in 2010, one of the earliest games for the iPad was Scrabble. Each person needed their own iPhone to hold their tiles and they could flick them off their phone onto the board which was the iPad. It was mocked because nobody wanted to shell out $3000 for hardware to play a $25 board game.
I can't remember the name of it, but there was a toolkit for Objective-C back then that would let nearby devices connect to each other for doing games and stuff like this.
I spend the first 8 years of my life in China, we just had TV (it's like cable with a box thingy I think) that we had to pay for, and like we didn't have any other entertainment other than like childrens books or boardgames/cardgames that I'd only have my older brother to play with. Didn't even have friends I don't remember having any friends.
Then once we immigrated to the US. We didn't get internet at first, but we got library cards in the NYC Brooklyn public library, and like I got access to the library computers with internet and that's the first time I've really had access to the internet (around 2010), ans I had zero clue how to use it lol. I just want to play games at that time, not clue how to go on those websites...
And omg my cousins who went to the library with us (so I think my aunt, aka: those cousin's mother, was trying to show us around of "how stuff works" in the country) just refused to help me. They see me and like: "eww this peasant kid fresh off the boat doesn't even know how to use a computer", I felt so sad... I mean you had to wait in line using your library card to register at the kiosk thing, and you only get 30 minutes once its your turn, so I kinda just spend like... 15 minutes not know how to find games to play... then finally my aunt sort of forced my cousin to help me...
Fucking Tiffiany, what a bitch...
I feel like American-born kids just have this weird arrogance, and doesn't even treat people of their own ethnicity nicely, not even a relative.
But anyways... I basically jumped from zero internet to 2010s internet, no clue wtf is "golden age of internet" y'all talk about.
Then we got like a very cheap laptop that's shared between my older brother and me, but he took the admin account and only gave me a standard account, so I couldn't even install anything... :(
I remember we used to go to a nearby McDonalds for free wifi lmfao
Then we finally got internet... it was a company called "Optimum" and its like $50 a month, but we got the promotional first 2 years at $30 a month or something, and idk what the speed even was, probably very slow.
But my patents really only let me use the computer for like... 30 minutes a day... 😭
Its like DRUGS, why did you do that to me mama?
Okay she didn't want me to get addicted to this "drug" known as the internet. Didn't want us to "走火入魔" or whatever that means.
Sometimes she just take the modem when its the weekends and she left home for something so we can't play all day... :(
Sometimes take the laptop charging cable too :(
I was so sad... :(
And like then as we got older, mom would unplug the modem when we go to sleep so we can't use the internet at night... I mean yea I get it from a parentinv PoV lol, but like when i was that kid, I felt so sad :(
Edit: Also didn't get a smartphone (or any phone at all) till like 2015/2016...
Im that in between generation that grew up in the 80s and early 90s so I feel like captain America after being defrosted sometimes