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
Dubbing tapes with my ghetto blaster.
Spamming duckjob in AOL chatrooms.
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.
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.
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.
what? foss computing was always and always will be incredibly niche.
computing has always been dominated by large corporations and non-techincal users have always considers computers to be magical and mysterious and confusing.
web
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 didn’t get a color TV till about 1977. My mom didn’t like the colors on the earlier TVs, but dad finally convinced her when she saw a Sony TV.
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.
Im 20 and I did this as well because cheap broadband internet didn’t arrive everywhere at the same time
What about dial up? OP is clearly talking about the dial up era.
People are still on dialup today
And ota tv baby!
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
Did anyone seriously believe that though? Killing Flash is approximately the only good thing the existence of the iPhone brought to the world.
The only people at the time who thought it was a good idea were people that liked apple products. Everyone else just complained that the web was 90% flash, so iPads/iPhones are useless.
There was more outrage at lack of flash support than there was from removing optical drives, and people put up quite a stink with that as well.
the web was 90% flash
I remember 2007 well enough that I can definitely say that that was not true in 2007. Flash was widespread, but nowhere near 90%.
Well, youtube and video streaming sites (including porn) were flash
Yes, those things definitely were.
no, just the fun parts were flash 😭
itch.io doesn’t hit the same as newgrounds
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.
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.
Wow, that seems to be the predecessor of SeaMonkey.
It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7.
Ah, I guess that was the time I switched to internet exploder for a few years.
Netscape Communicator was the successor to Netscape Navigator.
I miss netscape.
I know firefox is basically its codebase successor… but its not the same.
I just want to go back in time and re-live the magic of the early internet. before search engines. before advertising. before capitalist exploitation.
before search engines
You must be the one guy pining for webrings.
Hey, there’s dozens of guys pining for webrings.
I dunno, can’t really trust the engines we got now
You could use SeaMonkey if you want a modern Netscape.
“Before search engines” is very early and the problem with that is just that if all you have is links, it’s difficult to find anything at all…
I think the Internet of the mid 2000s to early 2010s was the best era. There were amazing new things to discover on it almost every year, people were still using actual communication platforms rather than advertising platforms, it was easy to find out all kinds of interesting facts about the world.
Man, websites still spread like wildfire even before search engines.
Word of mouth is a powerful thing.
I remember so many times trading slips of paper with website addresses written on them with others.
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.
I remember spending a day and a half downloading the Halo 2 trailer to run on RealPlayer. Good times.
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?
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.
I had a handful from the late 2000s that I deleted the wallet file to because I thought it was a dumb waste of time
Biggest regret : not
convincing my parents to let me butmining bitcoin before silk road because “it’s probably some 4chan virus”
Diablo 2 required OVER 1GB of hard drive space to install and 3 CDs. Computer game install sizes are getting out of control.
N64 with 4 controllers and Forsaken while getting a sweet sweet 15 frames per second of motion sickness-inducing awesomeness.
LAN party just to play the Unreal Tournament demo.
Discovering you could use 3333333333333333333 as the CD key for Starcraft.
Heroes of Might and Magic hotseat multiplayer games taking all weekend.
xvid movies that would fit on a CD-R
“Have you guys heard of this broadband thing?”
Monthly nerd conclave to install Linux from the latest Linux Magazine CD. Mandrake has this new KDE 1.0 thing, looks neat.
Magic: The Gathering - Coat of Arms is dumb why does he have 2 of them AND Slivers??!
WAAAY before that: MUDs via BBS (and later Telnet/zMUD 5.55)
We ran a 2-node bbs out of our house.
For those too young to know what that means:
We had 2 computers networked to each other running the bulletin board - each with a separate dedicated phone line. Each line had call forwarding set up to the other, so users could dial either number, and if one of the nodes was available they could log in. And the real magic was that 2 users could actually live chat instead of just leaving messages. You haven’t lived until you’ve played multiplayer TradeWars or LORD.
I was restricted from dial-up use at home until after 9PM. We did eventually get a 2nd line and, way later, a 1Mb ADSL connection.
So we, as TAs in the computer lab, ‘broke’ a PC and put it in the wiring closet. It was actually just running Linux (the teacher new but looked the other way) so we could SSH in get on IRC and queue on FTP downloads (10Mb, so fast!) of pirated music/movies to later burn/sell on CDs. The computer lab sold blanks for $1/ea, but we figured out really quick that a spool of 100 was about $40 at Circuit City.
You haven’t lived until you’ve played multiplayer TradeWars or LORD.
Funny enough with how ridiculously busy everybody is anymore, I’ve been really interested in researching asynchronous multiplayer game concepts.
Like stuff that’s engaging enough to leave you thinking about it between turns, but doesn’t require your constant attention. Stuff to play at work, basically. Lol
lichess has that, as does Yomi 2
xvid movies that would fit on a CD-R
Dvd-decrypter
GordianKnot
WAAAY before that: MUDs via BBS (and later Telnet/zMUD 5.55)
That pirates game on early Facebook gave strong BBS/MUD vibes, back before FB became obvious cancer.
I remember when the AACS encryption key leaked and they started to DMCA everyone so people were printing merch with:
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Printed on it.
A dvd with crouching tiger hidden dragon and gossip girl on the cover, but it’s actually 8 Indian movies
Bootleg karaoke machine with Eason Chan’s greatest hits and Frank Sinatra’s I Did It My Way featuring a music video of two people holding hands on Causeway Bay.
vcd’s from the place around the corner, the one with the fat black cd case that had every title in alphabetical order
A dragon ball vhs tape dubbed in cantonese that includes the first half of a random episode of Journey to the West
Guess where I grew up
crouching tiger hidden dragon and gossip girl
Certainly an… Interesting pairing
The MUD I used to play is still a better game than almost everything else I’ve ever played. That being said all MUDs MUSHES and MOOs were not the same lol.
Ahh MUDconnector.com
Ahh MUDconnector.com
RIP
I used it (and its Java telnet client) to play MUDs at school in the computer lab. I could use regular telnet.exe but it, at least, rendered the colors.
I cannot for the life of me remember what our MUDD was, but I still remember our local BBS because it was called the Forbidden Playground. It was not some weird sex thing, just your normal early 90s BBS but that didn’t stop my mother from losing her mind when she saw the ASCII title banner though.
The first picture I downloaded was a monochrome Batman logo bmp. A few years later someone found a 16 color one of Jenny McCarthy topless from Playboy and spent all night downloading it. We all had to stop by his house on the walk to school to check it out.
Edit It was MajorMud. I found a relatively recent article where a guy researched the BBS some.
Edit It was MajorMud. I found a relatively recent article where a guy researched the BBS some.
That was my first one too! They only allowed so many commands per day (100?) unless you paid $15/mo
Later I found the PvP MUDs and ended up playing a custom Godwars variant (Chaosium/Static Chaos) for years. I still know some of the people that I met in that game.
AlbinoBlackSheep Ytmnd Newgrounds Fark Stumbleupon
Good shit
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.
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.
