That’s crazy. I had no idea everyone said “look at the computer”. Also, I miss being a kid. Growing up in the 90s and 00s was magical time.
Trading floppies at the library
Spamming duckjob in AOL chatrooms.
Ahhh the good old 90s for me… Get together, play games, share information and combos about games. I remember playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and trying to see who can do all the combos or fatalities while playing on the same computer. I recently find a photo from those times. Feeling a bit nostalgic.
One day a coworker announced he had bought a PC with the new 80286 processor running at 10 MHz (an unheard of blistering speed).
That afternoon the entire Engineering Department went to his house to look at it.
That was my first real computer. We had two games: where in the world is carmen Sandiego and kings quest 4 rosella’s peril. There was not enough disk space to have both games (size 2 5.25 floppies each IIRC) installed at the same time. Then we got quest for glory. That was special.
Now we’re all reading Lemmy and trying to save open computing because we’re the only generation who knows what it is.
This comment is real.
Previous generations grew up without Internet at all, and later generations grew up in a world where you get an iPad in your face from age 3 and haven’t known anything other than corporate centralisation.
There’s only so many of us were online in that brief period of time where the Internet felt like something that would unite people, rather than being algorithmically weaponised to divide us.
I teach computer science, and when we talk about networking and the internet, I apologize to the students. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I’m wondering if you have any reference resources on-hand for this. Like if we can identify where exactly it went wrong and how it was supposed to be, to point to in a somewhat scholarly sense.
As a 90’s kid self-taught dabbler in comp-sci / FOSS advocate, my first thoughts for ultimately disasterous elements usually go to corporate disruption, like the iPhone. Maybe if we go further back, Internet Explorer?
I feel like this stuff is intentionally buried to be as if it had never been. General computer knowledge used to be more commonplace, now gen-pops are ignorant slaves to stupid black-box appliances and monolithic rent-seeking cloud services. It sucks.
We are the resistance though. The indie web is growing by the day. Gen-Z has been ditching social media. Open source stuff like Linux or Blender are exploding within niche circles like gaming and indie creator spaces. There’s hope. :)
All unregulated systems consolidate. This is the natural evolution of letting media and data mining run without any guide rails. This is why the ultimate concept for all these companies is to provide access to everything… Your friends, your shopping, your entertainment, all discussions, all money, all search, every service goes through the monolith. Nobody is regulating any of this, because the barrier to entry for software has been so low, they’ll say they aren’t monopolies, and we don’t regulate relatively normally run business.
Reagan. It’s always Reagan. However, in this case I do not know the specific steps that deregulation took between his disaster of a presidency and the present day.
Reagan. It’s always Reagan.
Gosh dammit, isn’t it always‽ I know beforehand, corruption in the late 70’s laid the groundwork that culminated in the finishing move that was Reagan upending everything, but it’s crazy how destructive his reign was, and how we’re still dealing with the consequences, and how there are still people that think anything he did was remotely good for the people.
For our overseas brethren, replace with Thatcher. Total monster.
Yeah, I’m curious about the true effects dereg had on the tech industry as a whole. Like, would we still have gotten PCs in our households like we did? Or would the government have say, cracked down harder on Microsoft and Apple monopolies?
I wonder if there’s any way we can really know. Because if we can see where it went wrong, maybe we can paint a clearer picture of how it could be turned right…
You’re under the impression a single generation is here…?
Yes, the Pepsi generation. Maybe a few of the lesser coke generation
I think my equivalent at that age would have been going to a friend’s house to watch their newly acquired colour TV instead of our B/W one.
Before that, listening to the radio.
Color radio was a big deal, to be fair.
I think I listened to one of those at a party once
And before that, admiring your friends newly acquired onion that you both helped tie to their belt.
After all, it was the fashion of the time.
It was? Oh why didn’t anyone tell me I looked like an idiot
There’s a motel near where my mom lives that only recently updated their sign from “colour TV” to “High Def TV”
I remember the good old days when my friend would come over and we’d turn on my black and white TV, and change it to channel 3 so that we could play a “doubles tennis” version of pong on the little pong console we owned.
Now, this may cause you to exclaim, “How fucking old is this guy?” But what you may not know is that my parents rarely threw old electronics away. That could have happened maybe as late as the mid 90s.
I have a tube TV, a tape recorder and a gramophone literally in my room. Living in grandparents’ old house at the moment. Super cool
How fucking old are you?
Normal amount.
Older than my teeth, younger than my asshole
I had a Panasonic crystal clear b&w tv until 2004… I loved that TV.
I watched most of star trek in black and white with a high pitched whine only I could hear
I’ve got a portable b&w TV that I used until they shut down the analog transmitters. It has a really good tuner that would pick up lots of channels with the built in antenna. The digital transmitters are much weaker. I can’t receive a single one with an indoor antenna.
Going to the neighbour’s house to see Ceefax for the first time.
We had color TV and it picked up 2 channels. One out picked up really well, one decent and one if you turned the antenna just right and the weather was favorable but you’d lose the other two.
Old enough to know what RealPlayer was. And to use Netscape communicator.
RealPlayer still exists and I use it.
I remember when Netscape Navigator came out and it was brilliant, better than mosaic, but slow to load by comparison and we all called it bloatware.
We had internet at work (you could rlogin to different servers and some of them were fast and had internet access), but at home it was pay per minute dial up - check no one is using the phone, dial in, download email via pop3, disconnect.
I wasted hours of my life on irc but nowadays I waste hours of my life on lemmy instead.
I’m so curious, why do you use RealPlayer? I remember only ever using it because some downloadable videos were in their format. They never struck me as good quality or especially good compression. And the player itself seemed to get worse and more bloated with every update.
Uhhh, if there’s a video that you don’t want to be held hostage to intrusive ads or buffering during a bad internet connection, realplayer can help with that.
Interesting. So you can watch arbitrary web videos using it? That’s so different than how it started!
Uhhh, the browser extension offers to download from pretty much any youtube video, but not always all. If there’s one that won’t download, it’s worth trying again after the next realplayer update.
The videos end up in my real player videos folder, from whence I can watch them uninterrupted.
I’m the right age to be in that venn diagram of having had an ICQ account in 1996 and a Snapchat account in 2014.
Where one of my favorite things about the iPhone was that it finally put the nail in the coffin of
MacromediaAdobe Flash.Nice. I loved ICQ. A friend of mine had this really cool online friend he made in Sweden (we’re in the US) and it was such a feeling of connection then. I miss those days. Nowadays it’s like a 50% chance of a snarky/negative interaction with random internet people. The internet used to feel friendlier.
I’m the right age to be in that venn diagram of having had an ICQ account in 1996 and a Snapchat account in 2014.
haha upvote
Where one of my favorite things about the iPhone was that it finally put the nail in the coffin of
MacromediaAdobe Flash.fuck you
I remember when the iPhone was “doomed to fail” because it didn’t support flash
Huh. I never heard that. I remember everyone being super stoked that Flash was going to probably die because of the iPhone, and everyone loving it. (I didn’t at the time, but I get now why it was Flash that was itself doomed to fail eventually)
Really?? Damn. It was a huge thing. Got a resurgence after the iPad came out and still didn’t support flash. Was a big circlejerk about it in every tech forum
I guess I didn’t use those (or many other) forums. I don’t remember anyone saying much negative about the iPhone in fact. With a few exceptions like when people pointed out that it didn’t initially ship with copy/paste or downloadable apps. Most people overlooked those temporary shortcomings though, because: shiny.
Netscape? We didn’t have Internet when I grew up.
I had to learn from magazines how to configure autoexec.bat to load DOS in high memory, and ask me on boot if whatever game I wanted to run needed extended or expanded memory, and which drivers (mouse, joystick, sound card…) not to load in order to leave enough precious kilobytes of memory available for the game to fit in…
Heh, I got a computer at the end of the DOS era. For all of the things like that, a friend of mine guided me through. You might find it hard to believe but I had to wait 3+ years to even get the Internet at home after getting a computer, so my experience with browsers was mostly at school and a job I got in highschool. At home, I did get secret internet access against my parents’ wishes by sharing that same friend’s internet account creds and dialing in late at night. If caught, the excuse was always that I’d dialed into that friend’s machine to download some files. Technically was true like 1% of the time haha. So yeah I didn’t have real Internet access myself either, for a long time.
I remember editing a config/ini file to add the word HIMEM and setting IRQs manually for sound cards and things like that. Not sure I had to do all the steps you mentioned though since our first computer had 24 whole MB of ram. I think most people had 16 (or often 8) at the time!
Back then 640KB was supposed to be enough for anyone.
It wasn’t.
HIMEM. SYS, if I recall correctly, allowed you to tell DOS to load as much as possible of itself (and maybe even some drivers?) into “high memory” (within the first, and probably last, megabyte, I believe) if it existed and the processor was at least a 286, freeing more of those precious 640KB for programs to run in (DOS by default didn’t give them any means of addressing any more memory, even if it existed).
There was also expanded memory (EMS) and, from the 286 on, extended memory (XMS), different, incompatible, methods of addressing memory above that first MB (up to a whopping 8MB with EMS and an absurd 4GB with XMS), and depending on what the program you wanted to run required you had to choose one or the other (which became much easier once the memmaker utility came along).
Then true 32-bit software able to access the whole 4GB address space in 386s and later came along, and all that became ancient history, until we started needing more than 4GB and had to move to 64 bits.
Oh man, I remember downloading Netscape versions that were probably the sand thing with a different version number. But you’re still on dial up so it didn’t matter lol. Don’t forget downloading more RAM lol
Oh yeah – I cannot remember what that program was called that everyone used for a while that “compressed” or “optimized” RAM usage but there was a feeling (placebo effect, maybe?) that it helped. It may have been something like RAM Optimizer Pro.
Do you mean Netscape navigator? Or was there another product called communicator?
Sort of. There was a period where they rebranded navigator to come along with an email client also. I remember it being slower and crappier! But I think they stopped updating the original “Navigator” version, at least for a while.
Ah, I guess that was the time I switched to internet exploder for a few years.
I remember spending a day and a half downloading the Halo 2 trailer to run on RealPlayer. Good times.
We used go to Internet cafes and log onto anonymous chat rooms as a tween group of three. Thought it was HILARIOUS. then eventually got computers in our houses… Dial up… Rotten.com…etc etc… Funniest time of my life hands down. Big up maddox.xmission articles.👐 Would love to find all the random hilarious videos that made me crack up so much.
There was a seedy building in Memphis with a pretty dingy vibe that looked like a bad strip club. You could go in as a sixteen year old, get a giant extra caffeinated oreo milkshake, and play Tribes all night on the LAN
Biggest regret : not convincing my parents to let me but bitcoin at 50c… They thought it was bullshit and I didn’t know how to. Time machine message.
Biggest regret : not
convincing my parents to let me butmining bitcoin before silk road because “it’s probably some 4chan virus”
AlbinoBlackSheep Ytmnd Newgrounds Fark Stumbleupon
Good shit
The Youths (20-somethings) at work have a new 3d printer, and were explaining how they were using the printer to print additional parts for the printer, so I said “oh, like downloading Limewire pro” and the blank looks made me feel so old.
How are those the same?
You download limewire and then you use that to download a pirated copy of limewire pro.
Ahh. I used Kazaa was unaware of limewire pro. Thanks for the clarificatiion
You mean Kazaa Lite K++, right?
You think my buddy had internet? We would go over to his house to play DOS games.
Fuck yeah worms
I spent so much fucking time at my mates dad’s cafe caning the rope training mission that I got fucking a 45 minute time.
We were trying to load up Leisure Suit Larry from 5.25" floppy on my friend’s dad’s IBM PC before he noticed we were in his office downstairs.
I had a hard time getting past that game’s age verification, which consisted of trivia questions an 18-year-old American should know, because I was a 6-year-old German.
But I just systematically tried out all combinations (taking notes) until it launched. And I beat the game, learning the first basics of English that way.
So yeah, some of the first English words I learned were “preservative”, “hooker” and “Spanish Fly”.Oh god, you just reminded me of the time I donated my old PC to my dad, and managed to leave this game in the CD-ROM drive:
I’m pretty sure he had that as well, funny thing is he was a strict Lutheran man, but he had this computer full of lewd games and drove a Corvette, no big shock that it came out later he was unfaithful. Proto-MAGA.
The millennial amount of old haha
Back when 1984 was just a story, not Government policy
They were still just laying the ground work for it instead of enacting it.
Typing in the original Goatse URL at somebody’s house on their computer
Changing their browser homepage.
Making it their desktop wallpaper, screenshotting the desktop, setting the desktop to that screenshot, then “hide icons.”
A classic prank that persisted long after into the workplace lol
