Computer class in high school back then for me was treating them as glorified typewriters. I fooled around with some VBScript as that’s all we had available (I was very fortunate my grade school teacher taught us LOGO) and I managed to script kiddy my way into admin access for the internet filter for my friends so we could play stuff on Newgrounds. My career advisor told me to get a science degree because there was no future in computers, haha.
I remember essentially turning a BASIC prompt into a spinning, geometric rave decoration back in 5th grade, and thinking it was the coolest shit ever, but really… it was all about Math Blaster and The Oregon Trail in the years up to that point, and for several years later.
In the bios: it’s the booting software that’s separate from the OS. Most newer computers have ridiculously long menu’s and you have to be careful what you disable because of bit locker nonsense and whatnot.
The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.
This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.
Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn't feel near-useless without an Internet connection.
It's been said before but bears repeating: "The Internet was a place." It didn't follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren't supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.
People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.
People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.
I think that's what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.
Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide...
I miss youth and the sort of reckless abandon and constant sense of wonder. The easy friendships and stuff. The discovery of learning tech. The tech was cool and new and dramatic but our tech is def cooler now.
Things are pretty cool now too if you look for it. Sure there are problems but there have always been problems. I look for things to trigger my sense of wonder and it still feels amazing. Just harder to find cus I'm more experienced and well traveled or whatever.
I dunno I was a goofball kid working at tech then and I'm a goofball kid in a old body oggling tech now too :D
I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.
I too miss the day when the internet was for geeks and nerds, (and anyone who wasn't never left MySpace). Now everyone is online, and the novelty has been ruined. Not to mention how much more centralized the internet is now, compared to 20-30 years ago. Everyone visits the same five websites/apps now.
The barrier to entry was real, I had to figure out how to write a dialup script for my first PC to connect to the internet I purchased from the local high school. I didn't go there, that was just the only place in town with enough internet to resell.
It's good that everyone has access to information now. The impact it's had on visual arts and music really can't be overstated, it allows artists to reach their fans directly which is incredible. But it was a different place when everyones grandma wasn't reading Breitbart and repeating it on social media.
I agree the centralization of everyone on a handful of sites is an issue, it makes it too easy to manipulate and rig. I feel like social media was an incredible mistake but I don't know if we'll ever be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media
That's on you. Social media is not a necessity, it's actually pretty simple to avoid.
not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.
Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, and Bill Clinton predate social media.
Predate doesn't only mean that someone lived and died before something else. I predate combined Taco Bell/KFC/Pizza Huts Kentaco Huts, but I'm also still living. Like Bill.
The continuous improvement is what I remember the most! At least how I remember the internet of old, it was like a constant stream of something new, from random funny links of random sites, to big new major projects surfacing. It was cool
Anyone, could throw up a website and get hits, and feel like the world gave a damn. Remember when your site visit counter was THE coolest part of your little site??
Yeah, it was a pretty fun time, before the feeling that everything had to be owned by a mega corporation that would wring every drop off cash out of it.
I was responding to the days of the picture. I started with computers in high school the late 70s, and got my CS degree in 85. I spent a lot of time on the Internet before there was a worldwide web.
The worst are the spots that didn't build up as much, the large clumps would pop off as a whole. But even a small dot of gunk could make the ball slip or wobble.
oh man optical mice and lcds was the best thing ever for IT. I got everyone in my family optical mice one xmass when they got pretty cheap and when people just did not realize how much a quality of life improvement they were. I think I included a mouse pad that was a good surface in case they had a desk with little contrast. Then at work I was pushing conversion to lcd and sunsetting crts so hard.
The place I worked for had the contract for all school computers in our part of the state. After two years or so of buying huge numbers of mice because the teachers couldn't be bothered to keep the kids from stealing or throwing the balls from the mice we started using epoxy to glue in the balls. The teachers immediately started complaining about the kids complaining about it. I was out of that part of IT when Optical mice became more common but I'm sure it was a great relief to those that were still maintaining that pile.
I assume your talking you glued the plastic that held the ball in the mouse because at first read it sounds like you glued the ball and im like. Yeah I bet there would be complaints :)
We just glued the cover in place. It made cleaning them difficult but the guy that ran the company came up with a way to do it quickly in bulk. On the next contract they put provisions in on peripherals and the problem became the schools problem. They quickly determined they could do something about their students behavior.
Despite having a very nostalgic soft spot for my 16-bit and 8-bit home computers, these labs do nothing for me. I worked in so many as an technician at a uni and in various other tech support roles in my 20s that these generic cream boxes leave me kinda cold. Give me an Amiga, an ST or even a ZX Spectrum any day. Probably cos I'm old AF 🤣
I'll be honest I don't really miss a lab full of win95 shit boxes further crippled by net nanny. It was just a partial escape from the other abuses of middle and high school.
I used to write the software to refresh and update student labs like that. There's nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the entire lab reboot simultaneously .. and nothing quite as frustrating as seeing all of them fail at the same point in the boot process .. thanks to Microsoft.
I got to use my Netware 4.x admin certification a little while ago. A new customer was having a tangential problem that I overheard, they were still running Netware and couldn't figure out how to make it work. So I showed them some things and quickly admonished them to get anything newer.
I miss who I was in those days. Or more to the point, I miss not worrying about bills, the state of the world, the health and well-being of my family. I miss that my biggest concerns were around school exams and girls.
And yeah, I do miss the culture of the time, and the general attitude of hopefulness that seemed to pervade. But times change, life moves on, and as they say, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Yes. Websites were dead easy to make. I could fit all my music onto one floppy disk because I saved them as midis. There were no standards for sound or graphics cards so everything played different on different computers. You could access information without needing to sign up because emails were just emerging. You could get an email address with a name you wanted. Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia yet. Autodesk hadn't bought 3ds max yet. Animated gifs. Flying toaster screensavers. In fact, the screensavers had sound! Would give you a great attack if you left your speakers on.
I miss having enough friends that we could have a full 5v5 in CS without needing bots or the server open to the internet. Especislly true of high school, where I had CS and a few other games installed on the network (we had a networking class and our teacher was also the IT manager for the district and the 5 people in the class were given admin access for something and it was never revoked) so literally every PC on the network had access to it and you could be playing a game in any class, any period.
I'll never forget booting into an SSD for the first time on my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was absolutely mind-blowing how much faster it was. A few weeks later I upped the RAM to 16gb and it was like I was carrying a supercomputer.
Yeah, SSDs are one of the biggest innovations in computer speed in my memory. That, and actual good internet. I was raised with dial-up and HDDs, though I remember my dad coding (and playing things) with MS-DOS before I was old enough to understand it. I fully remember going to a game site and loading up a 2MB Adobe Flash game. I had time to go make a sandwich while it downloaded.
I had lots of games individually bookmarked, because it saved a lot of time compared to waiting like 30 seconds for each page to load. If I only bookmarked the site’s landing page, I would have to wait for the welcome page to load, then the Games section to load, then the first page of the Action Games genre to load, then the second page of the Action Games section to load, before I could finally get to my game. Even skipping those four or five pages and going directly to the game page could easily save a solid 2-3 minutes of waiting.
Between the 50Hz fluorescent tubes that were common at the time and the cheap shit monitors running at 60Hz, also common at the time, I had migraines 3-4 times a week.
Going to university in the late 90s/early 00s, when not everyone had home computers and especially not laptops. We had the computer lab in the basement where were could go to print out essays, do research, etc.
There was the library as well with a few computers on each floor, but those were always taken, and lab access came with our tuition anyway.
Other than that and a rather simple cellphone, we were device free. We still took notes by hand, copiously highlighted lines in ridiculously overpriced text books, met with friends at the coffee shop to study, and essentially kept technology compartmentalised.
To each their own I supposed. But I firmly believe you retain more knowledge, the more senses that you use when learning.
If I'm reading the material (sight), highlighting the notes (touch), and listenting to the prof (sound), I'm triggering more synapses and as a result hold more of the information in.
Letting an A.I. summarize it for you, or just recording in on a laptop voice-to-text while zoning out for the hour of that class, is completely useless because you don't actually learn anything except how to ask the computer for the answer.
Letting an A.I. summarize it for you, or just recording in on a laptop voice-to-text while zoning out for the hour of that class, is completely useless because you don't actually learn anything except how to ask the computer for the answer.
That's hella of an assumption of what i do(and other people do) lol;
I just don't want to write every note by hand (Dysgraphia and dysorthography don’t help) and have to use a public device to write my notes, schemes etc etc
I was using "you" in the royal-sense; as in "anyone" or "oneself". Didn't mean to imply that you specificially do that. I apologize if it came across that way.
We're the same age or thereabouts. I have very similar memories. I was lucky enough to get a PowerBook 1400c as a graduation gift from high school. Laptops were still something of a rarity with students, though.
Perhaps because of its relative heft, I don't remember carrying it around much, and certainly not to class. I lived in an older dorm that didn't have Ethernet, so we dialed up to the campus modem bank and either used school shell accounts or PPP for internet connectivity. I ran some PhoneNet and LocalTalk around the dorm to connect with a few other Mac users
I had a Nokia 5190 phone which got a lot of use playing Snake, but it wasn't a constant presence in my life.
High school's attractive to me, not necessarily because you have a good time, but because it's clear why you are miserable.
I would go for a redo if I could. I would know better not to trust the guidance councilors or school therapists. No compromises on the classes I really should have been in.
What I miss a lot more than the hardware was the straightforwardness of coding. In those days we largely just translated process logic into code, we didn't have to cobble together frameworks, packages, libraries and containers. The code itself took more work but we could do it without knowing as much as devs have to know now.
I miss the freedom. We would sneak out of class, play games, smoke weed, fuck. Sneak out of the house at 1am, cause hell, be back in bed for school. No ring cams, no cell phones. I didnt have all the bullshit of the world shoved in my face daily. Just hop on my bike, be back before night. I dont miss my circumstances though, my childhood was ruined by adults and social workers. I still remember the era fondly though. Life was good. I had friends and loves who I cared so deeply about. I didnt feel so strongly about anyone until I had kids. I dont think I ever will again.
We like to look at this era through rose tinned glasses. You had not a lot of processing power, not a lot of storage space, insecure code (and internet) everywhere, flimsy methods of portable storage and slow network transfer speeds. A lot of software was not mature enough for everyday use. Energy inefficient. Yet, we made it work.
It was in some ways romantic, computers were a cool thing, not a necessity for everyday life (yes, I'm counting phones as computers - fight me). That's what I miss the most. We weren't connected all the time and the software market space was unexplored and unexploited. It felt new and exciting, but it was flawed in so many ways. This counts both for pc's and the internet.
The mouse was the rolly ball kind, and you hoped that you were assigned a computer where it still worked properly, or you could arrive in time to grab one where the mouse still worked. Or, if your lunch period coincided with the lab class lunch period, you came in to swap mouses with the bully in the senior class.
Yeah, you could do the thing where you remove the ball and try to clean it, but that only works so much, and for so many times
I had to clean a hundred of them every quarter for a couple of years (work study was in the computer lab).
Since the build up was oils from people's hands you needed the right cleaners.
The balls got tossed into hot soapy water. Soak them for 10 minutes and they came out clean.
The rollers inside the mice were the worst. They required a Q-tip with some acetone or rubbing alcohol. For the really stubborn ones, I pulled out the naptha.
When I was at the age where computer class was being taught, I was already typing at a higher level. My parents had the entire Encyclopedia Britannica set and there were games on those discs that taught typing. I learned a lot at home because I wanted to long before the school started teaching it.
So me, grade 4 or 5, already typing at an accelerated level with my own middle-finger led typing technique I taught myself that worked perfectly for my (not yet disagnosed) ADHD-ass brain was literally forced, or I'd fail, to "home key learn" typing. So there's me, my index fingers on F and J, typing out "sad lad sad lass dad lad" when I could already type complete paragraphs on a keyboard.
I was lucky in the early 90s in that my dad had a PC for work. A 14.4 modem and random BBS's to dial up to, and I got an interesting first experience with computers. Our local library had UNIX PCs, so I had to learn random protocols like telnet and gopher to access anything. Once I got to middle school we had labs like this. I definitely miss the LAN café feel of that era.
Man, I remember being blown away after getting a 14.4 modem after dialing up with my 2400 from the family 286.... Data was instant, those ANSI greetings from the BBS were just there.
Yep. My first email address started with x.400, first BBS was Heartland Freenet, first newsreader was Usenet, 3600 baud modem at home, connecting through OCLC.
Here's a piece of the old knowledge: if you had a CRT monitor and a chair with rubber/insulated feet, you could lift your feet off the floor, spread one hand as wide as you could across the screen, turn the monitor off, and you could zap someone with an electric shock with your other hand.
You could also daisy-chain it across multiple people, so if you could rope 4-5 people into helping you then you could all hold hands and zap someone on the other side of the room if they weren't paying attention.
Ohh, did that as a kid with the CRT TV at home. I seriously charged up on it, and stealthily approached my older sisters husband, who was sleeping on the sofa. There was a visible arc and a crack! when I approached his ear.
I ran away, but he got me halfway down the driveway and tanned my ass...
Heck, the first monitor I had which could do that resolution I turned back down to 640x480 because the higher resolution made everything far too small!
Nowadays even 1920x1080 is feeling cramped at times because there's so much padding and chrome and bloat on every application there's hardly room left for content
I do not miss the high pitched background screech of CRTs. Monitors or TVs. The TVs from the late 90s that would show blank screen instead of static were the loudest.
I think that's how we learned though. Just learning to do things with a computer was basically Montessori for geeks haha.
When knowledgeable people were present to ask questions to, especially. I find computing itself really isn't properly conveyed in a "lesson 1,2,3" format.
Mid 90s. Our school built its first computer lab. The guy they hired to teach students how to use computers was probably in his mid-20s. He installed Doom on a few PCs, and the few of us who figured out there were games hung around near the end of the school day to see if he would allow us to play. He eventually let us when he was convinced we won't tell anyone.
I don't remember how I got involved, but I somehow convinced the school that I knew what I was doing and they let me (starting as a 16 year old student in 1997) create my own elective class where I spent one period every day working with that same 20 something computer lab guy. We built the lab together, just me and this dude who just barely graduated, alone for an hour a day. We put together Frankenstein machines with parts from old busted 286s and rarely a coveted 386. I learned to set up a Novell NetWare network and throw expansion slot cover plates like shuriken.
I still remember working in that lab when the Phantom Menace trailer released online and we downloaded the .mov file (and required QuickTime 3.0 player) to view it in stunning 480x216. That's sub 240p. It looked fucking amazing.
I'm feeling old, because our computer "lab" was a bunch of apple 2s, which predates this scene, which they just sat us infront of when there was free time and fucked off and didnt teach us a goddamn thing.. So all I remember is sitting infront of a green glowing screen randomly hitting buttons on a keyboard doing fuckall nothing.
Yeah, my first computer lab was similar, full of old Apple 2s, lot of Oregon Trail and Mavis Beacon teaches typing. Wild that kids don't take or have typing classes any longer. I can't say I miss it perse, but it was great to have access to a computer when we couldn't afford one at home.
I miss the computer being at work and not at my house. When you left work for the day, you left work. Now we all have laptops and are expected to be able to work anytime, anywhere.
Anybody else remember the 30lb “portable” Compaqs?
I should clarify that we had a few computers, but only in college. (Am old.) That picture up there reminds me of when my first firm finally got PC's. No mice, all keyboard. Before that they were IBM word processors with the 10 inch dual floppy drives that looked like toasters.
I can SMELL this room. Like ink toner, burnt dust, ozone, and slightly cooked plastic.
Also, yes and no. There were many positives and negatives. I just really fucking hate the fascist politics and the absolute horseshit that has enabled to proper and grow. In many ways, it's like we all died in 2016 and this is a parallel nightmare dimension leading to really bad shit.
Do I miss those days, like in that picture? In some ways, yes, but in many ways, no.
If that doesn't truly make sense to you, you aren't old enough to understand and I'm not about to explain it.
Sweet summer child. We learned FORTRAN on punch cards that we would send off to the regional office for them to run. Our punch cards would get returned to us with a fanfold printout of errors/output. I'm not sure I ever saw a program work correctly. Mostly because the bad kids would slip fucked up cards into other people's programs, and comment cards remarking on the teacher and her physical unattractiveness. It was a major relief when they put in a micro-lab stocked with these.
We learned FORTRAN on punch cards that we would send off to the regional office for them to run.
Hah, I must have just caught the tail end of that course in HS. Except, maybe midway through the term, they installed a modem that a telephone handset could be placed in to, such that we could run programs remotely on a mainframe.
Actually I remember earlier screensavers those were based on; I believe add-ons like "Flying Toasters" for Mac & PC. Trust Bill Gates' ripoff crew to make a less-robust version, as always.
I still have the CD for the Deluxe 4.0 version and managed over the years to grab all the Star Trek and the Simpsons screensavers as well. I will occasionally boot up MacOS 8.6 and faff around with them.
Rock, Paper, Scissors was one I always thought would be great to put on a TV in a bar, and let it run and let people make bets on it.
Rock, Paper, Scissors was one I always thought would be great to put on a TV in a bar, and let it run and let people make bets on it.
My friends and I get drunk and do this with SaltyBet. It’s based on the freeware Mugen game engine, and uses community-made characters and levels. So you can be hanging out with friends, and suddenly Shaggy is fighting Optimus Prime. If I’m at a friend’s house and nobody else is using the TV for anything (usually sports), I’ll sometimes log into my Plex burner account, and load up MXC (the English dub of Takeshi’s Castle) for people to zone out with. It has absolutely zero plot, so people can tune in and out of it without missing anything.
Yes I do. I was too poor to have my own "modern" computer. Yet I was way ahead of anyone else in the class. So they would just let me fuck off and do whatever I wanted to avoid disruptions.
Yeah. I had A LOT of fun in the 90s in these labs. You could easily bypass the shitty security, I printed ASCii peniss to all the school printers,changed my grades sophmore year.
It wasn't even that I was gifted or anything, they were just incredibly ignorant and had no idea what they were doing to keep people out.
When the Internet used to be something almost equal to a library, the excitement of and the privilege of going online (about $3 an hour in my country back then) and discovering some more knowledge to be had, and was then constantly growing with new information being put online. Yes, and if you have to make contact, you make the effort of writing an email after reading all you have to do to follow "netiquette". Or introducing oneself at a newsgroup.
BTW, in some places with limited options for which to make computers work, you had to DIY, like making your own Laplink cable so that you could transfer files.
The games... Yes, the games were becoming exciting as we were then enjoy watching the intense competition between the largest console makers, and there was no greater excitement than waiting for the newsstands putting out the latest copy of EGM, can't wait reading where video games are heading to next. And nearly all the devs were then really sincere about their personal idealism about video games.
It was also a time when the fringers were then really in the outer fringes, conspiracy theories also made for entertaining long barroom tales we even laugh at between sips of beer, rather than accepted as, uh, "truth". Way before some techbro rolled out a certain "TheFacebook".
On the other hand... 17" monitors were fucking heavy already, what more with bigger ones made for CAD jobs? Plus, around that same time a lot of those mechanical IBM AT keyboards were being pulled out from offices and stacked on top of another, destined for recyclers... now those same keyboards you have a hard time finding intact, or even still in their boxes.
Because life seemed simpler back then. You were probably being looked after and sheltered by someone else, and the world seemed like a much nicer place.
Now you're older with responsibilities and might have taken on the looking after and sheltering, almost certainly for yourself, but maybe a few other humans too. And the world's on f--king fire.
I don't miss it, but I am glad that I was there to experience it in full effect.
I still have my old computers and software from back then so I can easily go back refresh my memory of those computers.
Yep can confirm. I was a computer technician in a UK university throughout the 1990's, and we had 8 labs with PCs and Macs, and at the very beginning, BBC Micros, Atari STs, and even Sun SparcStations. Not sure I miss it - certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on "older" PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs, or self-combusting mice. I did enjoy it, though - being right there as the World Wide Web was born, and each new year brought faster CPUs, better colour graphics, and progressively worse versions of Windows...
certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on "older" PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs
Jeez I really forgot about all that shite. ISA cards sound cards being a total whinge. Doing clean installs every once in a while because your bloated registry meant your computer had gone to shit. Burned CD's with your favourite apps on them so you didn't have to download them again on dial up.
I mean. very small amount of nostalgia for some games and such but things changed a lot with the 486dx2 and next step machines. My heydey nostaligia times was when macs went to osx and the macbook pro was lauded for having a bigger screen, more ports, and being more powerful than pc competitors. Hardware wise when the iphone started influencing laptops it was kinda the decline to me. Since then though linux has become amazing so that is cool. Open source is the only technology I have liked since the teens.
IDK how old that picture is but it reminds me of my computer class back at school and the computers at the library. Back then Windows XP/2000 was the thing but there were many older NT 4.0 machines and I think even ancient 3.51 machines too lol.
The Internet was a very different thing back then. I used to spend ages on CBBC games and other random sites I've forgotten by now xD
Yeah, but I'm glad we're not burning electricity on those anymore. Screensavers were fun at the time, but putting the displays to sleep is the better practice.
i can still literally smell and remember the atmosphere in those IT classes:
PCs takes 10 mins to boot sometimes 30 mins. By the time it boots, we are out of time and cant play any games. Yes we are allowed the last 10 mins of class to play games.
Remember DAVE the game?
Keyboards are very satisfying to type on. Mouse is a hit n miss because they have those ball thing to control the direction. I.e. sometimes the ball gets stuck and you cannot click or scroll.
A bunch of geeks try to send message using net send command. We thought we are the gangsters.
Nothing worse than having an IT class after lunch, you have like 50 kids and 25 pcs and there are NO A.C. The only thing you have is the ceiling fan.
I was at uni towards the end of rooms full of Sun workstations. The best trick we came up with wasn't even software hacking. It was chain degaussing.
Those enormous Sun monitors could put out enough of an EMP when told to degauss that it could automatically trigger the one next to it to do the same.
I want to say we got it to go all the way around one of the labs, but I don't trust my recollection and it might have only been three in a row once or twice. Still pretty impressive.
Not much, but I do miss the fact that school computers were linux and we used free software to learn basic computer stuff. Nowadays the our school system is held ar gunpoint by google&co
The most bonkers court ruling ever was when they allowed Microsoft to pay their huge antitrust fine in Windows licenses for schools and other govt organisations.
They argued that they didn’t really have a monopoly because Linux and Mac existed, and their punishment for illegally abusing what monopoly they did have was… getting their monopoly solidified in all parts of education and government.
Hell yeah. I was young with only young people concerns. That room was always a comfortable temperature. The assignments were meant to last a few minutes and I would have them done in under a minute, giving me plenty of time to do whatever I wanted.
Those boxes are newer than the ones I had at the school lab, but still probably similar.
My school just have gotten broadband earlyish.
I remember finding out they had Internet access, but all I knew about it at the time was dialup services, and there were no icons there that seemed to be related to the Internet at all, except for Internet Explorer itself. (version 5.0, new at the time)
I actually had to ask the school librarian how to get online. She said "just open an explorer window", and I thought that was weird because I knew how to use it, but I was asking how to GET online, not how to browse.
But I tried it and it just worked. I must have done an early version of a poggers face.
I don't miss windows, but I do miss sitting in the same era computer labs with either the university's own flavor of red hat, or SPARCstations.
The internet was a lot more fun 30 years ago. I guess partly because it felt like magic, and after a degree and some decades in the industry the illusion is gone.
Also, it used to be about sharing pictures of your cat or listing your favourite books. Now everyone is trying to either sell you something or source everything about you to be able to sell you something with more accuracy.
I remember this extremely well, because I am indeed old enough to remember these things!
School computer lab memories:
School #1:
c. 1989-1991 - Apple IIGSes with ImageWriter printers and a shared 5.25" disk box that the instructor could use to load software onto multiple machines.
The school also had a bunch of Commodore 64s that had recently been replaced by the IIGS machines. There were also a few Apple IIc machines (thought they were neat at the time, and still do!)
My sixth grade teacher was an amateur coder and taught me a bit of Pascal.
School #2:
c.1991-1993 - Apple IIe machines. Had a first experience using a Mac SE and a Mac Classic, which I thought was amazing.
School #3:
c. 1994-1997
Mac Classics in a line in the library, A lab filled with Macintosh LC3s, and another lab with PCs running earlyish versions of Windows and DOS, networked with Netware IPX. I was old enough at this point to be a student network admin.
The school also had some lingering Mac SE/30s, and a store room filled with TRS-80s, which I unsuccessfully tried to get my computer teacher to give me. However, the librarian gave me an original IBM 8086 and a monitor, so I took it home and learnt assembly.
Love the overhead projector in the corner of the lab shown. They were ubiquitous!
We had 2 apple II (e)? In our math/science 4th grade class. If we had free time we got to play Oregon Trail. There was a game with a turtle that you could draw lines with. I think it was to help with introductory geometry x,y graphing.
during my k12, we went from PET to apple II and gs (apple was wizards at selling their junk to schools), and finally getting out from under apple and adding a few 386s at the end.
Except from the school aspect, yes, a little. While 33.6 baud was a PITA, websites were built to accommodate it. And I made a lot of extra cash sailing the high seas.
Yep. There weren't devices everywhere so we all learned about them together, hunted for Easter eggs, and trolled each other by inverting mice and flipping screens and all of that. It felt cleaner because there wasn't an ad on every screen. I remember getting a book with exercises in it and just working through it for keyboarding, and going to the lab in a class to do research for a report (or just goof around on the Internet). I also remember in later high school when the IT director informed us very proudly the school had almost a TB of storage across our several computer labs like this.
Good times. I do also remember having THE computer for the school and it rolled in on a heavy cart.
Is this referring to computer labs in schools in general? This is at least Win 95 (and the school system didn't bother to update things in 98), so I would have been in high school with these, and thinking back we had very similar machines. I do kind of miss it because my friends and I had setup a hidden series of IRC servers on a few PCs. So, while we were supposed to be learning to type, we'd just chat. In retrospect, it was a good idea that was poorly implemented (people will eventually get around anything that they have physical access to) but the modern idea of kids in schools just having a ChromeBook, tablet, phone, or w/e is kind of fucked up. We had access to the computer lab for 1 period a day vs. the modern 24/7.
I think that in the end my real opinion is that I don't miss this, I miss my friends and I testing the limits of the security for both network and individual PC. We did some wild stuff with our TI-83s. One of my friends from that time was a certified Machine God and wrote an assembly program for his TI that would allow him (and by extension us) to surreptitiously plug in our calculators to those PCs via serial and effectively "dial out" bypassing the restrictions. It was a wild time.
By this time i had already gotten kicked out of school for the first time. Lucky for me our family had to have a computer for business so I had access to a computer almost as long as I can remember. I'm thinking around this time I had my own Amega to play with.
In my nearest CCollege in the mid 2000s, they w were still using FLOPPY DISCS and old macs for computer labs. its only until few years later we finally got funding for upgrades, i think the 08 crash really screwed things up.
And the capability of those computer labs was purely educational (at least on paper, little shits like me were breaking the networks regularly, but that happens now as well).
If you were unaware, this is a baseline for a micro generation sometimes called the Oregan Trail generation (or Xennials). I'm in that cohort myself. My district was well-funded though and by the time I was in late high school, the computer lab looked like this.
Windows 95 was fun back then. Mostly because the security in those networks was, let say, non-existing. You had full access to every computers drives. And if you'd find the image that was used as the desktop background and changed it, windows would refresh the image automatically. Ofcourse we were very creative with the messages we left. And smart enough to keep the original to put back when our victim tried to get the teacher involved.
We could have errased the document on the diskettes too, but we weren't that horrible.
Nothing quite like that ... there was a room with RM Nimbus', which were 80186 based PC compatibles running proprietary software. And in the business studies room they had 8086 PCs with text-mode WordPerfect on them.
Science classrooms had BBC Acorns, which you could program in basic, but were of little other use for fun.
Then when I was 13 or so there were some diskless 386s with Windows 3, that booted off the network, and I was quite fascinated with them. Someone found out how to break into the network they were on, using a macro in MS Word 2.0.
I taught myself how to sneak around, and ended up putting a copy of Wolfenstein from a machine with a disk drive in a directory named like system flles ... and then drove teachers nuts by sneaking into classrooms to kill Nazis during break times.
That got me some detentions after school, lol. I didn't hear of anyone else pushing the limits as far.
In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.
I remember middle school computer class, using Mavis Beacon to learn to type. We had a list of game sites on the board that we were encouraged to check out if we finished our work early. Since we had to be quiet, my friends and I would go on Neopets and message each other from across the room.
I also remember, after having completed the class, the school deciding to update their security and they banned all the sites that were on that board. Such a stupid decision, it's not like kids were on the computers at all unless they had their teachers' permission. There's no way it was interfering with anyone's class time.
I have no idea what subsequent computer classes were to do in their downtime, but I imagine it became a lot harder to keep a class of 12 year olds sitting quietly.
I am not old enough but my school still used to run Windows 7 at least and god those screensavers are nostalgic, so many good memories, of course I miss those days they were the best days, only gets downhill from there, I was always the computer nerd burning shit down and getting kicked out :(
I see your nostalgia and raise you this:
I see your nostalgia and raise you this: this
I actually had to learn to use a slide rule in high school, in the late 1970s.
thhhick
Computer class in high school back then for me was treating them as glorified typewriters. I fooled around with some VBScript as that’s all we had available (I was very fortunate my grade school teacher taught us LOGO) and I managed to script kiddy my way into admin access for the internet filter for my friends so we could play stuff on Newgrounds. My career advisor told me to get a science degree because there was no future in computers, haha.
Computer lab day!
Yes and no.
Computers and computer systems weren’t so much enshittified back in those days.
But the bulk CRT screens, I don’t miss those…
By the way, at those times almost every screen had one of those stupid placebo ‘glare filters’ . I don’t miss those either.
Oddly, I want the CRT's, but those optiplexes are horrible.
I just want one crt per system for retro gaming.
Computers were still exciting. And hadn't been enshitified.
I remember essentially turning a BASIC prompt into a spinning, geometric rave decoration back in 5th grade, and thinking it was the coolest shit ever, but really… it was all about Math Blaster and The Oregon Trail in the years up to that point, and for several years later.
And yes, I'd go back in a heartbeat.
Yes, computers were fun and exciting. Now they just suck.
Unless Linux. But even then it takes an effort to disable all the bloat and spyware bs in the bios.
what do you mean by bloat and spyware on linux? (asking because it's the first time i hear this take)
In the bios: it’s the booting software that’s separate from the OS. Most newer computers have ridiculously long menu’s and you have to be careful what you disable because of bit locker nonsense and whatnot.
The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.
This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.
Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn't feel near-useless without an Internet connection.
It's been said before but bears repeating: "The Internet was a place." It didn't follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren't supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.
People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.
People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.
I think that's what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.
Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide...
I miss youth and the sort of reckless abandon and constant sense of wonder. The easy friendships and stuff. The discovery of learning tech. The tech was cool and new and dramatic but our tech is def cooler now.
Things are pretty cool now too if you look for it. Sure there are problems but there have always been problems. I look for things to trigger my sense of wonder and it still feels amazing. Just harder to find cus I'm more experienced and well traveled or whatever.
I dunno I was a goofball kid working at tech then and I'm a goofball kid in a old body oggling tech now too :D
Don't they still use computers in schools?
What? Computers are all in schools, and libraries are still a thing too. This is about the old times.
I don't understand the picture not being a shared experience.
I learnt to type on a piece of paper that had a picture of a keyboard on it.
You must be young and never experienced floppy drives.
If I was I wouldn't be asking if kids don't go through this now.
Simpler times? Hell no they don't.
Throwback to hand writing assignments then everyone is lined up to the only computer in the school to type it out.
Yeah but not because of the computers.
In sixth grade we could rent the laptop brick for the weekend; it's where I played Police Quest 1.
In the early 90s I went to computer camp at Aldersgate in Rhode Island and we had a whole room in the retreat center for the TRS-80 Model 4's.
In university in 2000, nothing beat the networked computers with the cables running the ceiling in the metal trays.
Windows 95 in high school was peak though.
I used to love lifting my feet, putting one hand on the monitor screen, turning it off, and shocking the hell out of whoever was sitting beside me.
I miss most of all when the internet was the domain of nerds only. Us nerds are nicer than other people on average.
I don’t miss the misogyny. It’s still around but not as acceptable generally, and easier to find other women now.
I used to think so too. Turns out a lot of nerds were just one culture-war grievance away from going full Nazi.
Yeah :(
The Internet was for anybody. I think it was a mistake to foist it on everybody.
Or when "bad", a hell of a lot more entertaining, like Archimedes Plutonium for example.
I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.
I too miss the day when the internet was for geeks and nerds, (and anyone who wasn't never left MySpace). Now everyone is online, and the novelty has been ruined. Not to mention how much more centralized the internet is now, compared to 20-30 years ago. Everyone visits the same five websites/apps now.
The barrier to entry was real, I had to figure out how to write a dialup script for my first PC to connect to the internet I purchased from the local high school. I didn't go there, that was just the only place in town with enough internet to resell.
It's good that everyone has access to information now. The impact it's had on visual arts and music really can't be overstated, it allows artists to reach their fans directly which is incredible. But it was a different place when everyones grandma wasn't reading Breitbart and repeating it on social media.
I agree the centralization of everyone on a handful of sites is an issue, it makes it too easy to manipulate and rig. I feel like social media was an incredible mistake but I don't know if we'll ever be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
That's on you. Social media is not a necessity, it's actually pretty simple to avoid.
Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, and Bill Clinton predate social media.
Still alive.
So? He was elected in 1992. Social media had nothing to do with it.
So?
So words matter, buddy.
Predate doesn't only mean that someone lived and died before something else. I predate combined Taco Bell/KFC/Pizza Huts Kentaco Huts, but I'm also still living. Like Bill.
So do points, you should find one
You cheer up, pal. You're bad for the climate.
I miss computer time being something special.
It is special again - when you switch from your phone to the computer :D
And you install Linux
Yes, comprehensible systems? Just enough to be very exciting? Positive energy? My youth? The music?
Uh, yes?
all of those things were beautiful. all long gone now.
Playing Unreal Tournament and Duke Nuken 3D with everyone else in the lab.
All nighter Doom sessions for me. IT would delete it each day, and we would just copy it back via ftp from our Unix accounts.
Ah, the good old automatic information processing class lol.
Yes, but because it was completely pre-enshitification internet, with so much hope and promise to be something good for everyone.
It was kinda shit but it was shit because it was shit. It was improving every day and the sky was the limit.
Thats what I miss most about the past. The feeling of hope. Things would get better. Tomorrow was a bright place.
The continuous improvement is what I remember the most! At least how I remember the internet of old, it was like a constant stream of something new, from random funny links of random sites, to big new major projects surfacing. It was cool
Anyone, could throw up a website and get hits, and feel like the world gave a damn. Remember when your site visit counter was THE coolest part of your little site??
Yeah, it was a pretty fun time, before the feeling that everything had to be owned by a mega corporation that would wring every drop off cash out of it.
I distinctly remember the 90s internet. It was a paradise.
Yeah, man, I was so full of hope and so excited about the possibilities.
I was going to say something similar. Stuff ran slow because of slow processing not because of a shit load of overhead like now bad webui and stuff.
Internet? You are a baby! In my days we had to bring our floppies and the day we were able to run that banner making software my life changed.
I was responding to the days of the picture. I started with computers in high school the late 70s, and got my CS degree in 85. I spent a lot of time on the Internet before there was a worldwide web.
Pre Internet
Well, pre-WWW. There was internet, but you had to use telnet and remote into computers. Lots of bulletin board systems.
Yep BBS. So much of Halt and Catch Fire hit home.
Yes. Although, more than the technology or the culture, I probably miss being a kid with a bright future ahead of him...
I only miss running down the row and pressing the degauss button on every monitor.
I can smell this picture
I miss the community of it. As with a lot of things having it at home seems easier and better but so much more lonely.
As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don't miss those old ball mice.
You would've liked me then. I would scrape that stuff off just as a weird stim toy type activity.
That third wheel was a bit more annoying since it was on a spring and therefore harder to scrape.
Just have to press down and scrape sideways. Optical mice rule.
Yeah, just a much lengthier process.
The worst are the spots that didn't build up as much, the large clumps would pop off as a whole. But even a small dot of gunk could make the ball slip or wobble.
oh man optical mice and lcds was the best thing ever for IT. I got everyone in my family optical mice one xmass when they got pretty cheap and when people just did not realize how much a quality of life improvement they were. I think I included a mouse pad that was a good surface in case they had a desk with little contrast. Then at work I was pushing conversion to lcd and sunsetting crts so hard.
The place I worked for had the contract for all school computers in our part of the state. After two years or so of buying huge numbers of mice because the teachers couldn't be bothered to keep the kids from stealing or throwing the balls from the mice we started using epoxy to glue in the balls. The teachers immediately started complaining about the kids complaining about it. I was out of that part of IT when Optical mice became more common but I'm sure it was a great relief to those that were still maintaining that pile.
I assume your talking you glued the plastic that held the ball in the mouse because at first read it sounds like you glued the ball and im like. Yeah I bet there would be complaints :)
No we did not glue the ball. Why would anyone consider that a solution?
yeah it just sounded like it initially while reading your comment. It was sorta funny to visualize.
We just glued the cover in place. It made cleaning them difficult but the guy that ran the company came up with a way to do it quickly in bulk. On the next contract they put provisions in on peripherals and the problem became the schools problem. They quickly determined they could do something about their students behavior.
Despite having a very nostalgic soft spot for my 16-bit and 8-bit home computers, these labs do nothing for me. I worked in so many as an technician at a uni and in various other tech support roles in my 20s that these generic cream boxes leave me kinda cold. Give me an Amiga, an ST or even a ZX Spectrum any day. Probably cos I'm old AF 🤣
I'll be honest I don't really miss a lab full of win95 shit boxes further crippled by net nanny. It was just a partial escape from the other abuses of middle and high school.
I was more in team starfield and pipes and later flying toasters.
I used to write the software to refresh and update student labs like that. There's nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the entire lab reboot simultaneously .. and nothing quite as frustrating as seeing all of them fail at the same point in the boot process .. thanks to Microsoft.
Proof: https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/zen
I administered windows w/netware and zen …. The frustration it could cause but when it all worked it was a sight to behold
Yeah, NetWare and Zen with NAL in full flight was a thing to behold. Instead we got Active Directory.
I got to use my Netware 4.x admin certification a little while ago. A new customer was having a tangential problem that I overheard, they were still running Netware and couldn't figure out how to make it work. So I showed them some things and quickly admonished them to get anything newer.
never had those days when i was in school. we only had good old fashioned books and a teacher to steer.
Hell no
Exactly.
I don't know if I miss this or if I miss being young but yes.
Maybe I just miss using a computer without ads all over the place.
Remember the porn pop-ups?
Oh, I have so many adblockers on now, lol.
You and me both. Back in the days of that photo I only ever saw this many ads when I downloaded something particularly sketchy.
I've been meaning to explore Gopher and Gemini. Maybe this meme is the spark I needed.
I miss who I was in those days. Or more to the point, I miss not worrying about bills, the state of the world, the health and well-being of my family. I miss that my biggest concerns were around school exams and girls.
And yeah, I do miss the culture of the time, and the general attitude of hopefulness that seemed to pervade. But times change, life moves on, and as they say, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
lel
I figured this was some funny attempt at anonymization, even though everyone has their backs turned to the camera.
One to the left too. Cheap edit.
All of them, CRTs can't do black this deep in a room as bright as this
Yes. Websites were dead easy to make. I could fit all my music onto one floppy disk because I saved them as midis. There were no standards for sound or graphics cards so everything played different on different computers. You could access information without needing to sign up because emails were just emerging. You could get an email address with a name you wanted. Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia yet. Autodesk hadn't bought 3ds max yet. Animated gifs. Flying toaster screensavers. In fact, the screensavers had sound! Would give you a great attack if you left your speakers on.
I miss having enough friends that we could have a full 5v5 in CS without needing bots or the server open to the internet. Especislly true of high school, where I had CS and a few other games installed on the network (we had a networking class and our teacher was also the IT manager for the district and the 5 people in the class were given admin access for something and it was never revoked) so literally every PC on the network had access to it and you could be playing a game in any class, any period.
The computers were always slow. SSDs are a wonderful thing as are multicore processors.
But I miss when I had a positive view of tech.
I still have a positive view of the technology, it's the people who demand that they control every aspect of it that I'm weary of.
I'll never forget booting into an SSD for the first time on my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was absolutely mind-blowing how much faster it was. A few weeks later I upped the RAM to 16gb and it was like I was carrying a supercomputer.
Yeah, SSDs are one of the biggest innovations in computer speed in my memory. That, and actual good internet. I was raised with dial-up and HDDs, though I remember my dad coding (and playing things) with MS-DOS before I was old enough to understand it. I fully remember going to a game site and loading up a 2MB Adobe Flash game. I had time to go make a sandwich while it downloaded.
I had lots of games individually bookmarked, because it saved a lot of time compared to waiting like 30 seconds for each page to load. If I only bookmarked the site’s landing page, I would have to wait for the welcome page to load, then the Games section to load, then the first page of the Action Games genre to load, then the second page of the Action Games section to load, before I could finally get to my game. Even skipping those four or five pages and going directly to the game page could easily save a solid 2-3 minutes of waiting.
No. Not one bit.
Between the 50Hz fluorescent tubes that were common at the time and the cheap shit monitors running at 60Hz, also common at the time, I had migraines 3-4 times a week.
I categorically do not miss those days.
Same. Computer stuff now is better in almost every aspect. The internet (1997-2010) was more enjoyable though.
Greatly. Rather, I miss the days where it was easy to unplug.
Going to university in the late 90s/early 00s, when not everyone had home computers and especially not laptops. We had the computer lab in the basement where were could go to print out essays, do research, etc.
There was the library as well with a few computers on each floor, but those were always taken, and lab access came with our tuition anyway.
Other than that and a rather simple cellphone, we were device free. We still took notes by hand, copiously highlighted lines in ridiculously overpriced text books, met with friends at the coffee shop to study, and essentially kept technology compartmentalised.
Do I miss it? Oh hell yes.
I feel lucky that i didn't had to study like that lol
To each their own I supposed. But I firmly believe you retain more knowledge, the more senses that you use when learning.
If I'm reading the material (sight), highlighting the notes (touch), and listenting to the prof (sound), I'm triggering more synapses and as a result hold more of the information in.
Letting an A.I. summarize it for you, or just recording in on a laptop voice-to-text while zoning out for the hour of that class, is completely useless because you don't actually learn anything except how to ask the computer for the answer.
That's hella of an assumption of what i do(and other people do) lol;
I just don't want to write every note by hand (Dysgraphia and dysorthography don’t help) and have to use a public device to write my notes, schemes etc etc
I was using "you" in the royal-sense; as in "anyone" or "oneself". Didn't mean to imply that you specificially do that. I apologize if it came across that way.
Ooh i see, my bad, don't worry
We're the same age or thereabouts. I have very similar memories. I was lucky enough to get a PowerBook 1400c as a graduation gift from high school. Laptops were still something of a rarity with students, though.
Perhaps because of its relative heft, I don't remember carrying it around much, and certainly not to class. I lived in an older dorm that didn't have Ethernet, so we dialed up to the campus modem bank and either used school shell accounts or PPP for internet connectivity. I ran some PhoneNet and LocalTalk around the dorm to connect with a few other Mac users
I had a Nokia 5190 phone which got a lot of use playing Snake, but it wasn't a constant presence in my life.
What do you mean, old enough?
Those are fairly modern computers. They don't even have 5.25-inch floppy drives!
Exactly! There is even still defense equipment in use that uses 8inch floppies!
Yeah and would go back.
I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.
I am also over 35
Rick Rosner had this to say about high school:
I would go for a redo if I could. I would know better not to trust the guidance councilors or school therapists. No compromises on the classes I really should have been in.
What I miss a lot more than the hardware was the straightforwardness of coding. In those days we largely just translated process logic into code, we didn't have to cobble together frameworks, packages, libraries and containers. The code itself took more work but we could do it without knowing as much as devs have to know now.
I miss the freedom. We would sneak out of class, play games, smoke weed, fuck. Sneak out of the house at 1am, cause hell, be back in bed for school. No ring cams, no cell phones. I didnt have all the bullshit of the world shoved in my face daily. Just hop on my bike, be back before night. I dont miss my circumstances though, my childhood was ruined by adults and social workers. I still remember the era fondly though. Life was good. I had friends and loves who I cared so deeply about. I didnt feel so strongly about anyone until I had kids. I dont think I ever will again.
Yes, yes, a million times yes!
We like to look at this era through rose tinned glasses. You had not a lot of processing power, not a lot of storage space, insecure code (and internet) everywhere, flimsy methods of portable storage and slow network transfer speeds. A lot of software was not mature enough for everyday use. Energy inefficient. Yet, we made it work.
It was in some ways romantic, computers were a cool thing, not a necessity for everyday life (yes, I'm counting phones as computers - fight me). That's what I miss the most. We weren't connected all the time and the software market space was unexplored and unexploited. It felt new and exciting, but it was flawed in so many ways. This counts both for pc's and the internet.
There was a time where you could just turn it all off and no one would ever question you about it.
Nobody even carried "smart phones" until like 2005, it's crazy how fast they've evolved in 20 years.
You better believe I was degaussing as many CRTs as I could.
They are actually highly collectable now and can fetch a pretty penny.
The mouse was the rolly ball kind, and you hoped that you were assigned a computer where it still worked properly, or you could arrive in time to grab one where the mouse still worked. Or, if your lunch period coincided with the lab class lunch period, you came in to swap mouses with the bully in the senior class.
Yeah, you could do the thing where you remove the ball and try to clean it, but that only works so much, and for so many times
I had to clean a hundred of them every quarter for a couple of years (work study was in the computer lab).
Since the build up was oils from people's hands you needed the right cleaners.
The balls got tossed into hot soapy water. Soak them for 10 minutes and they came out clean.
The rollers inside the mice were the worst. They required a Q-tip with some acetone or rubbing alcohol. For the really stubborn ones, I pulled out the naptha.
Fuck no. Fragile floppies, DOS start file tuning, and no internet service in the entire city unless you went to university.
When I was at the age where computer class was being taught, I was already typing at a higher level. My parents had the entire Encyclopedia Britannica set and there were games on those discs that taught typing. I learned a lot at home because I wanted to long before the school started teaching it.
So me, grade 4 or 5, already typing at an accelerated level with my own middle-finger led typing technique I taught myself that worked perfectly for my (not yet disagnosed) ADHD-ass brain was literally forced, or I'd fail, to "home key learn" typing. So there's me, my index fingers on F and J, typing out "sad lad sad lass dad lad" when I could already type complete paragraphs on a keyboard.
No, I don't miss that shit. It was so degrading.
I was lucky in the early 90s in that my dad had a PC for work. A 14.4 modem and random BBS's to dial up to, and I got an interesting first experience with computers. Our local library had UNIX PCs, so I had to learn random protocols like telnet and gopher to access anything. Once I got to middle school we had labs like this. I definitely miss the LAN café feel of that era.
Man, I remember being blown away after getting a 14.4 modem after dialing up with my 2400 from the family 286.... Data was instant, those ANSI greetings from the BBS were just there.
I long for the days of random people running a BBS and no centralized social media
Yep. My first email address started with x.400, first BBS was Heartland Freenet, first newsreader was Usenet, 3600 baud modem at home, connecting through OCLC.
Here's a piece of the old knowledge: if you had a CRT monitor and a chair with rubber/insulated feet, you could lift your feet off the floor, spread one hand as wide as you could across the screen, turn the monitor off, and you could zap someone with an electric shock with your other hand.
You could also daisy-chain it across multiple people, so if you could rope 4-5 people into helping you then you could all hold hands and zap someone on the other side of the room if they weren't paying attention.
Ohh, did that as a kid with the CRT TV at home. I seriously charged up on it, and stealthily approached my older sisters husband, who was sleeping on the sofa. There was a visible arc and a crack! when I approached his ear.
I ran away, but he got me halfway down the driveway and tanned my ass...
My heart lies with FOSS, but my soul lies in a beige box.
I can hear the humming from here.
I thought I was developing tinnitus until I noticed it was gone after we replaced everything.
They can have fabulous picture quality but not with the cheapo units we had. But 800x600 is all anyone needs right?!
At one time, 800x600 very much was.
Heck, the first monitor I had which could do that resolution I turned back down to 640x480 because the higher resolution made everything far too small!
Nowadays even 1920x1080 is feeling cramped at times because there's so much padding and chrome and bloat on every application there's hardly room left for content
I do not miss the high pitched background screech of CRTs. Monitors or TVs. The TVs from the late 90s that would show blank screen instead of static were the loudest.
I can smell that room.
My thirties? meh
No
I totally do.
Yes and no, brought this Badboy to our Lan last Saturday and it was Fun to play on it, but it weights over 38kg.
She's a little thick lol.
No.
I miss the flying toaster screen saver.
I liked pipes.
Yeah, I want my toasters back
Unauthorized Bread
They lined the walls of the special computer room at my school, but we used them more as a kind of nerds recess than for actually teaching anything
Oh, this was the case at my school too! The lab became a nerd lounge during lunch and recess.
We all took typing, though
Certainly did, though IRC was the best typing class of all.
I think that's how we learned though. Just learning to do things with a computer was basically Montessori for geeks haha.
When knowledgeable people were present to ask questions to, especially. I find computing itself really isn't properly conveyed in a "lesson 1,2,3" format.
bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head
I remember the feeling of the warmth on my face as I went into the computer lab
Mid 90s. Our school built its first computer lab. The guy they hired to teach students how to use computers was probably in his mid-20s. He installed Doom on a few PCs, and the few of us who figured out there were games hung around near the end of the school day to see if he would allow us to play. He eventually let us when he was convinced we won't tell anyone.
And now you're out here telling the whole world smh
I don't remember how I got involved, but I somehow convinced the school that I knew what I was doing and they let me (starting as a 16 year old student in 1997) create my own elective class where I spent one period every day working with that same 20 something computer lab guy. We built the lab together, just me and this dude who just barely graduated, alone for an hour a day. We put together Frankenstein machines with parts from old busted 286s and rarely a coveted 386. I learned to set up a Novell NetWare network and throw expansion slot cover plates like shuriken.
I still remember working in that lab when the Phantom Menace trailer released online and we downloaded the .mov file (and required QuickTime 3.0 player) to view it in stunning 480x216. That's sub 240p. It looked fucking amazing.
I'm feeling old, because our computer "lab" was a bunch of apple 2s, which predates this scene, which they just sat us infront of when there was free time and fucked off and didnt teach us a goddamn thing.. So all I remember is sitting infront of a green glowing screen randomly hitting buttons on a keyboard doing fuckall nothing.
Yeah, my first computer lab was similar, full of old Apple 2s, lot of Oregon Trail and Mavis Beacon teaches typing. Wild that kids don't take or have typing classes any longer. I can't say I miss it perse, but it was great to have access to a computer when we couldn't afford one at home.
Not even learning about dying of dysentery? Or where in the world a certain person was?
I learned the horrors of dysentery much later in life. on a deeply personal level.
So much laundry..
I miss the computer being at work and not at my house. When you left work for the day, you left work. Now we all have laptops and are expected to be able to work anytime, anywhere.
Anybody else remember the 30lb “portable” Compaqs?
I should clarify that we had a few computers, but only in college. (Am old.) That picture up there reminds me of when my first firm finally got PC's. No mice, all keyboard. Before that they were IBM word processors with the 10 inch dual floppy drives that looked like toasters.
I can SMELL this room. Like ink toner, burnt dust, ozone, and slightly cooked plastic.
Also, yes and no. There were many positives and negatives. I just really fucking hate the fascist politics and the absolute horseshit that has enabled to proper and grow. In many ways, it's like we all died in 2016 and this is a parallel nightmare dimension leading to really bad shit.
Do I miss those days, like in that picture? In some ways, yes, but in many ways, no.
If that doesn't truly make sense to you, you aren't old enough to understand and I'm not about to explain it.
They said learn to code. 😂
Sweet summer child. We learned FORTRAN on punch cards that we would send off to the regional office for them to run. Our punch cards would get returned to us with a fanfold printout of errors/output. I'm not sure I ever saw a program work correctly. Mostly because the bad kids would slip fucked up cards into other people's programs, and comment cards remarking on the teacher and her physical unattractiveness. It was a major relief when they put in a micro-lab stocked with these.
Hah, I must have just caught the tail end of that course in HS. Except, maybe midway through the term, they installed a modem that a telephone handset could be placed in to, such that we could run programs remotely on a mainframe.
@[email protected],
Actually I remember earlier screensavers those were based on; I believe add-ons like "Flying Toasters" for Mac & PC. Trust Bill Gates' ripoff crew to make a less-robust version, as always.
Oh yeah.. After Dark..
I still have the CD for the Deluxe 4.0 version and managed over the years to grab all the Star Trek and the Simpsons screensavers as well. I will occasionally boot up MacOS 8.6 and faff around with them.
Rock, Paper, Scissors was one I always thought would be great to put on a TV in a bar, and let it run and let people make bets on it.
My friends and I get drunk and do this with SaltyBet. It’s based on the freeware Mugen game engine, and uses community-made characters and levels. So you can be hanging out with friends, and suddenly Shaggy is fighting Optimus Prime. If I’m at a friend’s house and nobody else is using the TV for anything (usually sports), I’ll sometimes log into my Plex burner account, and load up MXC (the English dub of Takeshi’s Castle) for people to zone out with. It has absolutely zero plot, so people can tune in and out of it without missing anything.
Hah! Watching a vid now, that's pretty funny. Guess I missed that one...
we used to sneak CDs to install counter strike, carmageddon, and unreal tournament. good times
I mostly miss the degauss button. And all the free steel balls fron the mice, they were good for milling media.
Being optimistic about technology and humanity
Yes I do. I was too poor to have my own "modern" computer. Yet I was way ahead of anyone else in the class. So they would just let me fuck off and do whatever I wanted to avoid disruptions.
I'm old enough to recognise an iomega ZIP drive.
Yeah. I had A LOT of fun in the 90s in these labs. You could easily bypass the shitty security, I printed ASCii peniss to all the school printers,changed my grades sophmore year.
It wasn't even that I was gifted or anything, they were just incredibly ignorant and had no idea what they were doing to keep people out.
30 years ago?
When the Internet used to be something almost equal to a library, the excitement of and the privilege of going online (about $3 an hour in my country back then) and discovering some more knowledge to be had, and was then constantly growing with new information being put online. Yes, and if you have to make contact, you make the effort of writing an email after reading all you have to do to follow "netiquette". Or introducing oneself at a newsgroup.
BTW, in some places with limited options for which to make computers work, you had to DIY, like making your own Laplink cable so that you could transfer files.
The games... Yes, the games were becoming exciting as we were then enjoy watching the intense competition between the largest console makers, and there was no greater excitement than waiting for the newsstands putting out the latest copy of EGM, can't wait reading where video games are heading to next. And nearly all the devs were then really sincere about their personal idealism about video games.
It was also a time when the fringers were then really in the outer fringes, conspiracy theories also made for entertaining long barroom tales we even laugh at between sips of beer, rather than accepted as, uh, "truth". Way before some techbro rolled out a certain "TheFacebook".
On the other hand... 17" monitors were fucking heavy already, what more with bigger ones made for CAD jobs? Plus, around that same time a lot of those mechanical IBM AT keyboards were being pulled out from offices and stacked on top of another, destined for recyclers... now those same keyboards you have a hard time finding intact, or even still in their boxes.
Zip drive AND a CD ROM? What kind of elite school is that?
I do, especially the couple of years before the internet really took off.
Why am I crying?
Because life seemed simpler back then. You were probably being looked after and sheltered by someone else, and the world seemed like a much nicer place.
Now you're older with responsibilities and might have taken on the looking after and sheltering, almost certainly for yourself, but maybe a few other humans too. And the world's on f--king fire.
That's why we cry.
Fuck yeah.
We had it way better than we knew.
No
I don't miss it, but I am glad that I was there to experience it in full effect.
I still have my old computers and software from back then so I can easily go back refresh my memory of those computers.
Not really, but I do remember those things used to keep a room warm.
Nah, I miss the 8 and 16 bit eras
Yep can confirm. I was a computer technician in a UK university throughout the 1990's, and we had 8 labs with PCs and Macs, and at the very beginning, BBC Micros, Atari STs, and even Sun SparcStations. Not sure I miss it - certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on "older" PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs, or self-combusting mice. I did enjoy it, though - being right there as the World Wide Web was born, and each new year brought faster CPUs, better colour graphics, and progressively worse versions of Windows...
Jeez I really forgot about all that shite. ISA cards sound cards being a total whinge. Doing clean installs every once in a while because your bloated registry meant your computer had gone to shit. Burned CD's with your favourite apps on them so you didn't have to download them again on dial up.
Cutting a second notch on a 360KB floppy to make it double sided, doubling the capacity to 720KB
Also, taping over the notches to protect the floppy from being overwritten.
Bah, I'm too old. Had a commodore 64 at home tho.
I mean. very small amount of nostalgia for some games and such but things changed a lot with the 486dx2 and next step machines. My heydey nostaligia times was when macs went to osx and the macbook pro was lauded for having a bigger screen, more ports, and being more powerful than pc competitors. Hardware wise when the iphone started influencing laptops it was kinda the decline to me. Since then though linux has become amazing so that is cool. Open source is the only technology I have liked since the teens.
IDK how old that picture is but it reminds me of my computer class back at school and the computers at the library. Back then Windows XP/2000 was the thing but there were many older NT 4.0 machines and I think even ancient 3.51 machines too lol.
The Internet was a very different thing back then. I used to spend ages on CBBC games and other random sites I've forgotten by now xD
Yeah... playing runescape in computer class then the browser got blocked so I used the old .txt to .bat trick to open it
@echo off was hackerman level stuff to my peers
Well no, I hated computer class, but I fucking hate modern computers, the modern Internet and AI more.
I'm old enough to remember classrooms without computers! The most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the room was my digital watch!
No
Flying toasters.
Yeah, but I'm glad we're not burning electricity on those anymore. Screensavers were fun at the time, but putting the displays to sleep is the better practice.
.... you kids need to get off my lawn *shakes fist*
We had Apple IIs and later some early macs because my area experienced a population boom and had some more tax money to play with.
I mostly miss that our society seemed stable at the time. I was wrong; for minorities it was still a shit show, but I didn't know that yet.
Gaming got way better after around 2007, and Turtle Rock invented co-op multiplayer that wasn't deathmatch.
i can still literally smell and remember the atmosphere in those IT classes:
PCs takes 10 mins to boot sometimes 30 mins. By the time it boots, we are out of time and cant play any games. Yes we are allowed the last 10 mins of class to play games.
Remember DAVE the game?
Keyboards are very satisfying to type on. Mouse is a hit n miss because they have those ball thing to control the direction. I.e. sometimes the ball gets stuck and you cannot click or scroll.
A bunch of geeks try to send message using net send command. We thought we are the gangsters.
Nothing worse than having an IT class after lunch, you have like 50 kids and 25 pcs and there are NO A.C. The only thing you have is the ceiling fan.
I was such a nerd that I had a second mouse ball that soaked in a cup of rubbing alcohol and I'd swap them out before Quake matches.
Oh and the BO smell from lan parties, worse than a locker room.
No
Windows? Fuck no, we had Sun Sparcs and we lik
Segmentation fault.
I was at uni towards the end of rooms full of Sun workstations. The best trick we came up with wasn't even software hacking. It was chain degaussing.
Those enormous Sun monitors could put out enough of an EMP when told to degauss that it could automatically trigger the one next to it to do the same.
I want to say we got it to go all the way around one of the labs, but I don't trust my recollection and it might have only been three in a row once or twice. Still pretty impressive.
It's the only room with air conditioning that we can be in during class time
Not much, but I do miss the fact that school computers were linux and we used free software to learn basic computer stuff. Nowadays the our school system is held ar gunpoint by google&co
The most bonkers court ruling ever was when they allowed Microsoft to pay their huge antitrust fine in Windows licenses for schools and other govt organisations.
They argued that they didn’t really have a monopoly because Linux and Mac existed, and their punishment for illegally abusing what monopoly they did have was… getting their monopoly solidified in all parts of education and government.
Hell yeah. I was young with only young people concerns. That room was always a comfortable temperature. The assignments were meant to last a few minutes and I would have them done in under a minute, giving me plenty of time to do whatever I wanted.
You should have seen our first computer room: three C64 with floppy drives, monitors, and one printer...
I had way too many of those old mice balls in my mouth... So no I don't really miss it. They tasted awful anyway but the mouthfeel was very pleasant.
That seems like a really good way to get sick lol
Swashbuckler!!!
Not really. I still take the time to have in person LAN parties with friends and crack out a CRT or two for old skool Mario Kart on the N64.
You can't miss what you never let go of
Also me lol.
Where are the flying toasters?
All but the CRTs. Too harsh. No dark themes.
I had a CRT that was like 100 pounds, it was huge!
I had a Sony flat screen crt that was literally 100+ lbs. because of all the extra glass.
Those things can kill you!
Those boxes are newer than the ones I had at the school lab, but still probably similar.
My school just have gotten broadband earlyish.
I remember finding out they had Internet access, but all I knew about it at the time was dialup services, and there were no icons there that seemed to be related to the Internet at all, except for Internet Explorer itself. (version 5.0, new at the time)
I actually had to ask the school librarian how to get online. She said "just open an explorer window", and I thought that was weird because I knew how to use it, but I was asking how to GET online, not how to browse.
But I tried it and it just worked. I must have done an early version of a poggers face.
Not really. I don't like nosy people and I don't like having to hear them loudly clacking keys.
No.
I was a worse person with less stuff.
I certainly enjoyed myself at the time, but I there was a lot I didn't (and probably couldn't) know.
My brother told me what it was like. Sounded much more fun than what we have today.
THAT was a service worth paying for (internet cafes). They sound really fun.
I never got to experience it...
I don't miss windows, but I do miss sitting in the same era computer labs with either the university's own flavor of red hat, or SPARCstations.
The internet was a lot more fun 30 years ago. I guess partly because it felt like magic, and after a degree and some decades in the industry the illusion is gone.
Also, it used to be about sharing pictures of your cat or listing your favourite books. Now everyone is trying to either sell you something or source everything about you to be able to sell you something with more accuracy.
I remember this extremely well, because I am indeed old enough to remember these things!
School computer lab memories:
School #1: c. 1989-1991 - Apple IIGSes with ImageWriter printers and a shared 5.25" disk box that the instructor could use to load software onto multiple machines.
The school also had a bunch of Commodore 64s that had recently been replaced by the IIGS machines. There were also a few Apple IIc machines (thought they were neat at the time, and still do!)
My sixth grade teacher was an amateur coder and taught me a bit of Pascal.
School #2:
c.1991-1993 - Apple IIe machines. Had a first experience using a Mac SE and a Mac Classic, which I thought was amazing.
School #3:
c. 1994-1997
Mac Classics in a line in the library, A lab filled with Macintosh LC3s, and another lab with PCs running earlyish versions of Windows and DOS, networked with Netware IPX. I was old enough at this point to be a student network admin.
The school also had some lingering Mac SE/30s, and a store room filled with TRS-80s, which I unsuccessfully tried to get my computer teacher to give me. However, the librarian gave me an original IBM 8086 and a monitor, so I took it home and learnt assembly.
Love the overhead projector in the corner of the lab shown. They were ubiquitous!
We had 2 apple II (e)? In our math/science 4th grade class. If we had free time we got to play Oregon Trail. There was a game with a turtle that you could draw lines with. I think it was to help with introductory geometry x,y graphing.
during my k12, we went from PET to apple II and gs (apple was wizards at selling their junk to schools), and finally getting out from under apple and adding a few 386s at the end.
Not sure what that Apple hostility is about. Those 2-series machines were a blast, with loads of great software & hardware available for them.
From what I've seen, IBM's took some time to match all that, and IIRC were pricey as hell, to boot.
Except from the school aspect, yes, a little. While 33.6 baud was a PITA, websites were built to accommodate it. And I made a lot of extra cash sailing the high seas.
I miss the 35 cent scribbler and way better gym equipment.
Not much, but I miss the years back then.
Yep. There weren't devices everywhere so we all learned about them together, hunted for Easter eggs, and trolled each other by inverting mice and flipping screens and all of that. It felt cleaner because there wasn't an ad on every screen. I remember getting a book with exercises in it and just working through it for keyboarding, and going to the lab in a class to do research for a report (or just goof around on the Internet). I also remember in later high school when the IT director informed us very proudly the school had almost a TB of storage across our several computer labs like this.
Good times. I do also remember having THE computer for the school and it rolled in on a heavy cart.
Is this referring to computer labs in schools in general? This is at least Win 95 (and the school system didn't bother to update things in 98), so I would have been in high school with these, and thinking back we had very similar machines. I do kind of miss it because my friends and I had setup a hidden series of IRC servers on a few PCs. So, while we were supposed to be learning to type, we'd just chat. In retrospect, it was a good idea that was poorly implemented (people will eventually get around anything that they have physical access to) but the modern idea of kids in schools just having a ChromeBook, tablet, phone, or w/e is kind of fucked up. We had access to the computer lab for 1 period a day vs. the modern 24/7.
I think that in the end my real opinion is that I don't miss this, I miss my friends and I testing the limits of the security for both network and individual PC. We did some wild stuff with our TI-83s. One of my friends from that time was a certified Machine God and wrote an assembly program for his TI that would allow him (and by extension us) to surreptitiously plug in our calculators to those PCs via serial and effectively "dial out" bypassing the restrictions. It was a wild time.
I just want to get a CRT monitor for cheap.
Until 15 years ago there were insane lots of them to be had even in thrift shops.
I don't miss them. Felt like handling a bomb whenever I try carrying them around.
I graduated in the early 90s and never had a room like this. But I do remember rooms with electric typewriters laid out like that
One room full of typewriters, and a lab full of TRS-80s.
I work in a special place and we have a museum, with a TRS80 monitor, still in it's original packaging
By this time i had already gotten kicked out of school for the first time. Lucky for me our family had to have a computer for business so I had access to a computer almost as long as I can remember. I'm thinking around this time I had my own Amega to play with.
Computers were like magic to me back then.
They still are for me. Tending my OS is like trimming a bonsai. Playing with code is like playing an ever changing puzzle game.
Always something to learn.
In my nearest CCollege in the mid 2000s, they w were still using FLOPPY DISCS and old macs for computer labs. its only until few years later we finally got funding for upgrades, i think the 08 crash really screwed things up.
I actually liked those old eMacs, the speakers were great.
No.
Simple answer : no
I DO miss the crunchy keyboards of my younger days.
Yeah I remember going to the "computer lab" and doing school work searching askjeves for answers.
Ask shut down recently. End of an era :(
Nope.
Rose colored glasses.
No. Things weren't great but what's going on right now are wayyyy worse. The world wasn't run by science deniers for a start.
And the capability of those computer labs was purely educational (at least on paper, little shits like me were breaking the networks regularly, but that happens now as well).
The heat in those rooms my goodness
Yeah, sorta but it was the late 80s and we were on apple 2’s playing Oregon Trail.
If you were unaware, this is a baseline for a micro generation sometimes called the Oregan Trail generation (or Xennials). I'm in that cohort myself. My district was well-funded though and by the time I was in late high school, the computer lab looked like this.
With a little pre-planning and netsend you could scare the crap out of whoever you wanted!
Windows 95 was fun back then. Mostly because the security in those networks was, let say, non-existing. You had full access to every computers drives. And if you'd find the image that was used as the desktop background and changed it, windows would refresh the image automatically. Ofcourse we were very creative with the messages we left. And smart enough to keep the original to put back when our victim tried to get the teacher involved. We could have errased the document on the diskettes too, but we weren't that horrible.
I'm not sure. The novelty was awesome, but we do so much more now with a lot less waiting.
In some ways yes very much in others no not at all. I wouldn’t go back if I could, I’ve been through too much shit I wouldn’t be willing to do twice
So nostalgic
Ah yes, my first exposure to Hamster Dance was in that room...
I mean yeah. The past is a perfect snapshot in time where I can imagine without also imagining the woes that happened. Great place to pretend live!
Nothing quite like that ... there was a room with RM Nimbus', which were 80186 based PC compatibles running proprietary software. And in the business studies room they had 8086 PCs with text-mode WordPerfect on them.
Science classrooms had BBC Acorns, which you could program in basic, but were of little other use for fun.
Then when I was 13 or so there were some diskless 386s with Windows 3, that booted off the network, and I was quite fascinated with them. Someone found out how to break into the network they were on, using a macro in MS Word 2.0.
I taught myself how to sneak around, and ended up putting a copy of Wolfenstein from a machine with a disk drive in a directory named like system flles ... and then drove teachers nuts by sneaking into classrooms to kill Nazis during break times.
That got me some detentions after school, lol. I didn't hear of anyone else pushing the limits as far.
In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.
He didn’t know how they worked, or? Like might as well take them away.
I remember middle school computer class, using Mavis Beacon to learn to type. We had a list of game sites on the board that we were encouraged to check out if we finished our work early. Since we had to be quiet, my friends and I would go on Neopets and message each other from across the room.
I also remember, after having completed the class, the school deciding to update their security and they banned all the sites that were on that board. Such a stupid decision, it's not like kids were on the computers at all unless they had their teachers' permission. There's no way it was interfering with anyone's class time.
I have no idea what subsequent computer classes were to do in their downtime, but I imagine it became a lot harder to keep a class of 12 year olds sitting quietly.
I am older so no :)
I am not old enough but my school still used to run Windows 7 at least and god those screensavers are nostalgic, so many good memories, of course I miss those days they were the best days, only gets downhill from there, I was always the computer nerd burning shit down and getting kicked out :(