Plus all the accoutrements that invariably went along with The Computer.
A printer and a scanner
A filing cabinet for all the things you liked to print and scan
A rack full of CD-ROM disks like Encarta 95 and Ecco The Dolphin and CorelDRAW 4
A beige container with clear plastic lid for storing floppy disks, that for some reason had a lock on it as if floppy disks were the Crown Jewels
I still have all this stuff and the room. probably because I am not good at cleaning. also the office chair straight out of 90s. Maybe if enough time passes of not throwing things out I will be able to open a museum and make some extra
I don’t know, I feel like office chairs are made for some aliens. Never found one that is comfortable so I always sit like some fucking crab in a jar, feet on the table, hands desperately trying to maintain stable connection to peripherals.
Truth to be said I gave up on sitting. I do all my work reclined, slightly stoned, half nude with an air fan on max setting in a 25 wet bulb celsius
So many accoutrements! This was also the original home of the box of random cables that lived under the bed. Some day I’ll be buried with those cables.
I had about 4 different boxes of floppies, with different keys for each. Any key worked in any lock. The handle of a spoon worked in any of the locks.
Just don't forget to put the dust cover back on the CRT monitor and keyboard when you were done!
A do miss the degauss button.
Edit: There has to be an app that would simulate the button, right? I did a quick search just now and found one for iphone, another for android, but too old so it's no longer available/working. I'll look some more tomorrow.
Being constantly connected is bad for us because we haven't figured out the right coping mechanisms. I bet the generation Gen Z raises will do a lot better since Gen Z will be familiar with exactly how hooked on simulated connectedness you can get
I doubt that. My mother was addicted to CompuServe back in the day and I was a neglected child because of it. I give my kid all the attention I can, but he wants more than I can possibly muster.
Well. Then maybe the next gen after that will be the cohort that for the most part raises their kids like you are. We all try to protect our kids from the trauma we went through, and raise them to interact with the world in better and healthier ways than we do. Right now the fight is to make sure the next generations get the chance to do better
I doubt that since most of gen z is injecting the feed directly into their arteries. They suffer fucking withdrawals if disconnected for more than a few minutes without something else to occupy them.
Those withdrawal symptoms are what they're gonna want their kids to avoid. They're so addicted because their parents didn't worry as much as they should have about if all that connectivity would be okay.
After my dad had locked me out of the computer room, I learned how to pick locks. And I'm not even kidding.
I knew a kid whose mom didn't want him using the internet after she went to bed so she unplugged their cable modem each night and locked it in a goddamn safe lol. I think he eventually found a similar model at CompUSA or Best Buy and just got his own.
Me and my brother established ourselves as like The computer kids so my extended family just dumped off all there broken and old computers
Now we have a room, not for using them but to store all the random tech we have accumulated
The dads of two guys I knew remodelled their entire basements to accommodate "the computer." Now writing this down, it sounds like they bought VAXes or something, but it was just plain old Pentiums, plus printers and stuff.
I could never find the computer room.
id use it to play backyard baseball all day
I'm in my 20s and it wasn't any different for me
That's why I waited until 2 am to dial in to the local BBSes. On a Tuesday. During the school year.
*Taps temple*
In the mid-90s my dad bought a Compaq Presario and the LucasArts games multi-pack. X-Wing, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Indiana Jones. Amazing. I was like a God.
I also remember playing a game called The Neverhood, which was a claymation liminal space game. Gave me nightmares of being trapped there, but it was still one of my favorites.
LucasArts was goated at that time
Damn this thread is making me feel ancient.
This was my first computer.
I still kick ass at Snake Byte.
(Also, The Neverhood has one of the best game soundtracks of all time. I still listen to it.)
This was my computer lab at school. Vividly remember the double stacked apple floppy drives and the wood box of floppy discs that you could check out at the school library to use the on the computers.
Didn't have a home PC until the Commodore 64. Still have that one in a box somewhere with way too many accessories.
Everybody wayyyohhhh
Mmmm-zibadaba zibadaba zadap-eee!
My gravy love, potaties love...
https://youtu.be/pEjBlL64SuU for the uninitiated
I had every Zork. Even the crappy CD-Rom one with bad video starring the older brother from The Wonder Years.
Zork Zero was my favorite. I still have the Zorkmid coin that came with it.
I had the exact same Lucas arts box set. Each of those games was amazing! And I think I actually finished them all. I ran them on my Packard Bell Pentium 75 with 8mb of ram. So much fun then!
Neverhood was my fucking childhood, man. The day I beat the game my grandfather and I celebrated. Add to that Myst, RCT1, Zoo Tycoon, and eGames Pack Volume 1 (which had DEMONSTAR on it) and you've encapsulated basically 100% of my gaming experience until I discovered Minecraft in 09-10.
Tie Fighter and Dark forces were great games, but I always liked Xwing, because I was more accurate when the aiming reticle was locked center screen.
Did you check out the Neverhood sequel from a few years ago? Was via Kickstarter, I think.
FUCK YES NEVERHOOD
Neighbor: gets nice computer
Me: is this for me 🥺👉👈
Born in 2000, my parents had a computer (running Windows XP) but it was only for work. Went over to my friends' houses to experience the information superhighway.
I did it being born in 94. It wasn't about who has access to the internet, it's that I wanted to hang out with my friend in person like a normal 10 year old but the Internet was the coolest thing to do at the time.
One of things I miss most about my college years was when I lived off campus in a rambling old house with a bunch of friends, and we had an entire room for our PCs - so we weren't crammed around one monitor, but we were physically hanging out together while each using their own rig. Permanent LAN party, for three years!
I remember sharing porn on floppy disks in highschool. I didn't have Internet yet so a few of my friends were gods among men.
Click here if you're over 18?
Not much has changed there. Unless you live in a nanny state of "small government" and "save the children". Bitch you turned out fine! Let em rub one out in peace.
So this guy I knew was trading porn. Mostly pics, a few low-res clips. Some warez here and there, too. Most people did not have fast internet yet, let alone a CD burner. He'd lug around these large wooden crates filled to the brim with home-made porn collection CDs. It was totally out there.
My friend used to print out pics on plain paper and distribute to us. what a champ
Son: Mom! We need more ink!
Mom: What!? I just bought ink last week!
Mom: What have you been printing!?
Son: IDK!? School Stuff!?
Mom: Okay sweetie. I'll get you some more from the Office Max!
I think a few months ago I was hearing "GPT 4.0 has finally figured out fingers" and seeing examples of correctly generated fingers.
Still seeing AI images with fucked fingers, though. Guess GPT still isn't that good at it, or maybe they're using some budget AI.
No I can't relate to that memory because nobody had internet when I was 10 🥲
User name checks out :']
Now we're talking! #TeamAtari
Not even a RadioShack TRS-80?
We got internet when I was around 7, Prodigy, 1994 or 1995. I never used it because there wasn't shit for a kid to do. We had Prodigy until like 2002. My old man signed a long contract with them, it was a good deal, but wouldn't you know, right after he signed it, cable internet became available. And you can bet 14 year old me wore him down, it was not a want, but a need.
Prodigy
I'm a firestatah
Twisted firestatah
Living in a university town with a much older, tech-savvy brother meant I first used the internet in 1990 at the age of 13. I used the internet before pretty much anyone I know other than my brother, but I was on MU*s and Usenet like it was home and then I discovered IRC...
I'm not saying I was smart, just lucky. In fact, I was pretty stupid about the internet. I remember seeing an early website in 1993 maybe and saying something like, "it's cool, but it will never replace Gopher."
That's an impressive level of early adopting :-)
Gopher was brought back to life later
We actually went to a local department store (Karstadt), where they had a few computers lined up for people to play around with. It was all really expensive and very very beige, as was the style at the time. So we went there to "try out" the computers until the store clerks would approach us, eyebrow raised, asking if we were intending to buy one. Yes Mister, I am 10, and I would like to buy this computer that is about 5000 times my weekly allowance! I used to visit a neighbour who lived in the same house who actually had a computer that was hooked up to a TV. He was developing a game for it, and I was his alpha tester. It was way cool. It was so long ago that I forgot what the game was really about, but I loved going there and playing it everytime he finished a new part of it. Later, my mother would buy an Atari Mega ST 1 with an SM124 screen and one of those break-your-wrist mouses they had at the time. She had to chase me away from that to get any work done. It wasn't until 1993 that I would get my first own PC that I could use as much and as long as I wanted. Internet I got when I got a 14.4k modem. Dialed in to a BBS first, which only gave me usenet. Then later, the first internet provider opened in our town, and so I had 'real' internet. But damnit, did that shit cost money. Not the internet access itself, but the fees for the phone line, because we had to pay per minute even for local calls.
I'd say good times, but then I remember things like having to edit your startup files every time you wanted to play a different game, and how slow and horrible and expensive (not to mention beige) everything was.
I remember when digital audio first became available and downloading a supercut (which we didn't have a word for then) of Homer Simpson saying "d'oh". We probably had to wait at least half an hour, and then we didn't have a program on the computer that could play audio files (or at least not one we could find) so we had to search around and wait even longer to download some shareware program (Goldwave)
Hm! What was there? Winplay3, mpg123 and...? Was there another before Winamp? Or are you talking about other formats than mp3?
Assuming Windows, I think Sound Recorder should have worked. I remember wasting many hours just playing with it by reversing, speeding up, or slowing down my voice that I recorded on the old, beige Bob Barker-like standing microphone.
You kids and your fancy MP3s. In my day we used Real Audio, uphill both ways.
Not much editing was needed lmao!
I still use Goldwave to this day, so about 20 years. Been using the free version the entire time. I just edit some file every so often to reset my clicks. I need to just buy it, but for some reason I remember intentionally not buying it, maybe was subscription or something.
I miss Audiogalaxy. I got so many BBC radio dramas from there and I love radio drama. I've gotten a lot of them I've lost over the years back, and a lot of new ones, thanks to the Internet Archive, but it's a fraction of what I used to have.
But backing up data back then was way too expensive except on CD-Rs and I have no idea where those CD-Rs went. They're long gone now.
Fancy. Who could afford a CD-ROM drive at those prices?
We had boxes of floppy disks and BBS to get us through.
Oh, I remember loading lemmings from a floppy as a 7 yearold
My dad used punch cards.
He's dead.
That’s how I started too.
I remember looking at the CD Roms before our computer had one.
Funny... I remember "where in the world is Carmen San Diego" but I don't remember "where the fuck is Carmen San Diego"
Some did this because it was a long time ago and the internet was new and only a few people had it.
Some people did this because the internet wasn't new, and the parents knew what kind of trouble giving a 10 year old unmonitored access to the internet could lead to - which meant that they would have to travel to that one friend's house whose parents didn't give a damn.
Then there are those that grew up after the age of smart phones and can't understand how two people could read from the same phone screen at the same time.
Some people did this because the internet wasn't new, and the parents knew what kind of trouble giving a 10 year old unmonitored access to the internet could lead to...
Happy Tree Friends and helicopter dick jumpscares, among other things.
My mother would tell us that she especially loved visiting her grandparent's house because they had color tv
Well now you're making me feel old because I was talking to my daughter today about how my mother occasionally went to a friend's house to watch his brand new television back in the early 1950s.
Fuck, squids now watch TV too?
I'm as surprised as you are. I mean, I shouldn't be, because he didn't even know coupons existed on the internet until a week or two ago.
People weren't just hanging around looking at what the Internet could do in 2006, they were using it for all manner of shit. The Napster/ Metallica lawsuit was in 2000. Shit, the first YouTube video was uploaded in 2006.
Methinks people don't remember their timelines, and are forgetting how quickly we stopped gawking at the Internet, and actively utilizing it.
i think you might be a bit confused. No, no 17-20 year old sat with their friends before a computer just to gaze at the internet in 2006 in the USA.
But 10 year olds still did. And so did teens in countries where the internet was still new then.
Just because you all have grown up and it stopped being a novelty doesn't mean it was a universal shift.
I remember my entire primary school class in 2010 gathered around the one kid who had a PSP, none of us spoke English so we were navigating it completely blindly through trial and error. I also remember being invited to my friend's home to just, use the computer, now it wasn't as fascinating as it could be for US kids (most of the internet was in English after all) so after playing a coop flash game or two we did other things but it was still a fascinating new device we didn't get to use much.
the phenomenon of "kid goes to a friend to look at computer for a while" was alive and strong in 2006, and well after that as well. youtube beginning most likely gave it a boost
I think you assume your personal experience was everyone's experience. I didn't have an internet connection good enough to watch YouTube until I started college in 2010. The neighborhood I grew up in still doesn't have high speed internet except over 4g.
Not everyone had a good Internet connection or even a computer during those times. We would still go use the library computers and sit next to each other because they had broadband and I only had dialup and my friends didn't have a PC at all.
My people too. Especially after discovering weed, smoking some bowls and watching 1.21 Gigawatts in my buddy's computer room, and him and I absolutely dying of laughter, and his mom just wondering what was happening. Was probably 16 or 17 at this point. Maybe we were holding on, but so many memories of just pulling up some chairs around an old CRT and cruising the highway. Shit, I'm just about to 37 and we still do it. It's just how we learned to share, and I'd rather share a screen than have everyone in their phones.
I remember learning about the Internet in school and coming home and asking my parents if we could get it. I was then informed we had the Internet for over a decade (both my parents were in IT and remoted in to work). I was so excited to go to pokemon.com but while lecturing me about URLs and spell checking my mom typed in pokeman.com. Very different site...
Talked to my friends the next day and none of them had internet so I got to brag about the pokemon info I had and about a cool wrestling site I found.
I spent so much time in AIM chat rooms in my teens right around the turn of the millennium. Incredibly naive, almost certainly had to have been talking to some creepers at some point. But hey, I had a good time.
A/S/L?
When I was a teen my answer was always 69/Ya Mom/Everywhere.
Man, back then I always thought I was so witty with that bs.
You just missed the golden era of the VIC-20, when you had to walk over to the house of the friend that had one and type in the BASIC code for a game before you could play it, since it didn't originally have a hard drive and the friend's mom was too cheap to buy a tape drive or any game cartridges.
Haha my dad had a vic20 and he has told me a story almost exactly like that
I had a Texas Instruments 99/4A, and my parents were also too cheap to buy a tape drive! Typing in pages and pages of inscrutable BASIC (endless lines of DATA in hex for sounds or graphics) only to find out at the end that you made a mistake somewhere and it's broken or glitchy or just won't run. Pretty sure I have PTSD from those days!
I actually did my very first programming with punch cards on a mainframe, thanks to an older neighbor friend who was auditing a comp sci class at the local university (this was the late '70s and they were still teaching intro classes with punch cards). Even worse than typing out BASIC and seeing if it ran correctly was poking holes in a bunch of cards, depositing them in your slot in the basement of the computer science building, and then picking up your inch-thick printout three days later to find out what you'd fucked up. Typing games into that VIC-20 seemed like heaven in comparison.
I would go to my friends house to play RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 she bought for 60$, i would spent the day playing with her on a single computer taking turns and discovering the game and then walk 45 minutes back home. 🥰
Same! Except it was a bootleg version because this was Argentina 🤣
My friend gave me a burnt copy of rt1. I still play it. But I bought it legally on steam
You still have the copy for when we lose Gaben, and his succession plan fails to secure the kingdom from vultures?
Of course. Not sure if that copy is starting to delaminate considering it's like 20 years old CD.
Very good memories! 😊
Remember when nobody had internet service for the most part and you had only a little window of time to use Freenet?
And holy shit if some one used the phone
Browsing atomfilms.com with friends after school on their family computer, housed in a stained wood "computer desk/cabinet" in the living room. Man, that takes me back. Haven't thought about that in a while... Searching for Atom Films took me to a depressing Wikipedia page detailing its death. Where does the time go?
I’d say the window of overlap for “look at the computer” and “information superhighway” was actually pretty small for most people.
Maybe 1996-2001?
So then you factor in how old people would have been during that period who would have done this. Being generous, I’d say 9-18. At different ages in that range “going to my friend’s place to look at the computer” would have been a euphemism for different things.
But the range there would be from 1977-1992, which is actually pretty impressive for a cultural moment. Essentially, most millennials.
I remember use of the phrase "information superhighway" only really existing for a short window around the early days of the WWW while it was still novel and exciting and before it started to become mundane. I'd say you're bang on for the window.
Those were the best days of the Internet, and not just because I was a teenager who'd discovered there were pictures of boobs on it.
“information superhighway”
The term was actually coined by Al Gore in 1978 but came into widespread usage in the mid-1990s as the Internet took off.
Sure I memba!! I also memba getting yelled at for tying up the only phone line 😭
Heh, I ended up getting a job to pay for a second phone line.
Back in the day we use to use dield internet after midnight cause one would pay only one phonecall that would last until you hang-up. I used to go to a relatives house that I hated, only to play Doom at their's PCs. I mean, only to watch her playing.
I don't know why you got downvoted for that comment, more people should be thinking about The Cable Guy
I remember my friend showing a BBS that his uncle had got him set up on and being blown away. Also, I guess my parents were impressed by Spokesdude Bronson Pinchot (The Bronster), because they got us a US Videotel console for almost a year.
Don't be ridiculous
His character on Night Court was also fantastic.
Whose wasn't?
The information superhighway? You mean the cassette tape?
And then you or your friend, depending on who had the tape drive, asked what it sounded like in the stereo, and your friend said, "it sounds awful" and you said to put it in anyway and he did and it sounded awful. But cool.
The long and winding road.
As a kid, all of us nerds got our own computers eventually after much begging. (Commodore 64s and such.)
And occasionally, we had the magical moments when we got to visit the occasional person who had a big computer. (PC clones)
No information superhighways yet!
My best friend got cable internet around the same time we had just gotten dial-up at home, you're darn right I was gonna go over there so we could experience the Information Superhighway(r) together
I remember my, well, the house's first computer, a Windows 95 machine (no idea about the actual specs). Shit was magical to my then 5 year old eyes. The internet only came some 3 years later and time online was heavily regulated because of the phone bill, also because someone might be waiting for an important call or whatever, which was usually my older brother waiting for a friend or girl to call him.
Remember that one friend you had who's parents would let them play DOOM so your group of friends would all go over to their house and take turns being exposed to all the blood and violence a kid could ever hope for? That was me. I was that kid with the young cool parents.
I built my first website without access to internet. Just locally for me and my friends.
the House Wide Page
I'll do you one better...we'd use the internet together. Probably the inspiration for that well-known NCIS hacker-fight scene, except one of us would be on the mouse and the other on the keyboard.
I hope I just unlocked a core memory for a few more lemmings.
Shit, I remember when our public library got some fancy new computers with an internet connection which was super high tech at the time. Two of my buddies and I rode our bikes down there and we couldn't believe how cool this new thing called a "chatroom" was. Like... there were other people on there just talking to each other, long distance, mind you, and FOR FREE?!?!?!
But only on weekends when dialing in was cheaper.
UK centric view here, but there were a number of key points in the rollout of narrowband internet access here.
Freeserve was probably the biggest turning point - scrapping monthly subscription fees and just charging by the minute for local rate calls. In the era of CompuServe and AOL, that was a big shift.
Next up was probably a mix of BT Free Weekend - paying an extra tenner or so a month so access the internet on 0808 numbers (free at point of calling for non UK telephony nerds), then expanded to evenings and weekends for 2hr stints. That, or Xstream who allowed 1hr stints on a free number, where capacity allowed and so long as you used their dialler and banner software. It used to get royally hammered at 0001hrs on a Monday.
After that, there was nothing special until ADSL services swooped in and killed dial-up and ISDN services for all but hardened/secure line requirements.
It got to a point where calling someone's landline was next to pointless on the weekend unless you liked busy tones, but then this did coincide with the takeoff of 2G mobile telephony services so the next best thing to do was send a text message anyway.
10? I guess if "Compuserve over slow dial-up" counts as "the information superhighway", then sure. Web browsers almost certainly weren't a thing yet. Hypertext had more-or-less just been invented.
I'm sure it's a normal distribution with a pretty amazing skew for late 30s to mid 40s and a high peak.
Did you kinda know beforehand that it's something you're interested in? (If it is, but I'm taking a "wild" guess here that you are, seeing as we're on Lemmy).
Didn't have one till I was 15, and that was pretty late compared to most other families we knew (around 2005). I went from zero interest in computers to the geekiest, most knowledgeable computer nerd of anyone we knew within a year of that. It's like I dove into another universe and never came back, which has both had major pros and cons.
The first experience i had witha pc was my sisters 386sx that she got from school. It cam with a netcom.com floppy that neither of us knew anything about but i plugged it into the drive and got to the splash page before learning that it needed an online connection to complete setup. We didnt have one so it was just a fancy beer coaster until aol came along
I remember there was this claymation loop site where it was people and animals pooping over and over
Amateurs. When I went there all there was was a big screen with green block letters, no highway or whatever magic non sense you're talking about
PAC man , that was the real stuff. great graphics.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
Y’all remember the computer room? Like that guest bedroom or whatever that wasn’t really used for anything other than housing The Computer?
save