This was cutting edge tech... I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs...
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Older actually. My first portable music format was 8track
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No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.
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Record off the radio to cassette and an active market for pirated live shows because we lived past nowhere and it was all we had access to.
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This isn't very old lol. That computer could be from 2010 and CD's and Sharpies were used then. Also, LimeWire was functional until like late 2010.
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I can still sorta remember as a kid, sitting down at a chunky old Dell PC running Windows XP, while my dad inserted a CD for some Go Diago go computer game.
We still have that old computer. We tried to throw Linux on it to see if we could use it for something but I think it's truly beyond saving.
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I'm this old.
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the computer isn't beige enough.
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Better? This was the one I remember running Windows 95. I'm actually shocked at how white this one is. Was everything tinted more back in the 90s? Like going to Mexico in a movie. I feel like it adds a filter.
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Packard Bell with the ole pressing F5 on boot beep to run Doom 2.
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EMachine has entered the chat
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Back in my day we would chemically castrate people that used computers! They were modern day witches!
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Pre-home internet I remember running a line-in to my soundblaster card from a clock radio and recording Tool's Sober to my HDD.
The wav file took up a good chunk of the HDD. After a good amount of funking around with encoding it was barely comprehensible and still took up too much room. Was exciting and felt like a glimpse of the future.
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Don’t hurt me like this.
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My first pirated copy of windows was 3.1.
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I am not old enough that I was doing this myself but I am old enough that I remember my dad doing it both for himself as well as for me so I could load music onto my mp3 player. My dad had a huge shelf of CDs. Some bought and some burnt
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Im Not even 40. Leave me alone.
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Naw. I'm this fucking old:
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Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!
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The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.
When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.
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I'm old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn't coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.
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I wonder how many will realize it's not just a cassette tape to listen to music...
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The TI/99 also had cassettes
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You used a screwdriver to store 73 kB?
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It's a sonic screwdriver.
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I'm this old:
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A question for people who have never used a cassette. What do you think the pencil is for?
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To mark the spot on the tape where your favorite song starts.
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The pencil fits in the hole. You can use that to move the tape. If it’s too loose, the tape player can draw it out and you have a mess to fix. To clean that mess up you also need the pencil to wind the tape from outside the cassette back into it.
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I had those at home when I was a kid.
I was born around the 2000s
It's not really that old lol
Granted, I was in a developing country, so the timeline of technological development is not quite the same (People's Republic of China).
Do people in the west still have Cassettes in the 2000s?
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A lot of people did: home, portable, car. But a lot of people had also left them behind for ordinary CDs, CDs full of MP3s and dedicated MP3 players like Rios and iPods.
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Those of us who can remember used those to save programs. It could take an hour or more if you had a large enough tape save a single file.
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I recorded songs off the radio to cassette
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Me as well Some of the things I first downloaded went onto cassette tape.
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I'm exactly that old.
Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we're all thinking of:
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Wasn't that called the optiplex, or something similar? Pretty sure I had one myself.
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Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise
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That or the ol' tan cased dinosaurs.
The gray Dell helped me through many-a "100 Games!" disc...
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This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes
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I maintain dozens of the black & silver Optiplexes, they're used in Raw Thrills arcade games like The Fast and the Furious, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Guitar Hero Arcade... They are workhorses; usually clean it and recap the power supply (which are kind of a bitch to disassemble) and they're good for another few years.
I still run into the blue/grey ones like your picture, but not in use. Usually stored in the basement of a bar.
My personal collection includes a couple of first-generation Optiplexes, the beige GX1. Dell is a bigger part of my life than I ever imagined or hoped. 😅
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I think we had that one.
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Everytime I see limewire I feel left out.
Where are my Kaaza hommies at??
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Napster!
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What's crazy is that none of the other P2P apps that came after ever had as nice of an interface as Napster. I guess that's cause Napster compiled Mac and Windows native apps while most other P2P apps were Java jars.
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Here!
Kazaa, Kazaa light, WinMX, DC++. I used them all.
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My user name stands for KaZaA Lite User 9.
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Slsk (Soulseek) was far superior. It was the best for getting full albums and leaked stuff. If you found someone with a fast connection and thick library it was like gold.
Shoutout to everyone that got Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead album with “Mike Jones” randomly played in the background.
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Slsk is still around today and people swear by it.
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Don't talk about age... My back hurts and I remember booting dos to run win.com if you wanted windows. Most of the stuff ran fine directly from dos without the added shell.
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2001, Dre's album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre's new album five bucks right here.
He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.
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There was a kid who was selling the cheat codes for pokemon he printed off gamefaqs at my school. One of my friends found out I had internet access and asked me if I would get them for him. After I did that some other people asked me as well. Eventually the kid who was selling them got wind of it and got a couple of his other friends together to jump me on the playground at recess. I remember laying on the ground looking up at him standing over me threatening me if I didn't stop doing that and just thinking "this is really stupid..."
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We're as far away from the 90s as the 90s were from the 60s.
Ugh..
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If they produced an equivalent of That 70s Show today the "very special episode of" would be the one where 9/11 happens.
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I passed the day that was farther away from my birthday than my birthday was to the start of WW2 years ago.
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It was great to go to college at a time when Napster and IRC rooms were in prime time, combined with a T1 fiber connection and University IT was too primitive to do anything to monitor or stop the behavior.
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Older, I used to rip CDs onto tapes using a cassette deck
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Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn't use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?
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I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can't specifically recall whether ±R/RW).
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Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓
🗑️💿🚮💔
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I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.
Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.
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Old enough to have a 286 as a first PC. But more on topic, I remember a time before Limewire and Bearshare. A time before Napster. MP3s were downloaded from IRC or from websites found with AltaVista or WebCrawler.
To play those MP3s? Winamp wasn't out yet. Fraunhofer Winplay3 was your only option. It had to be cracked and pirated as well. Want to multitask while playing an MP3? How about your music cutting out instead?
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I’m monochrome cga screen old. Commodore VIC 20, Philips MSX, Video 2000 old.
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Ah, a fellow ancient one from the time before color. Cheers.
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Back in my day we had green text on black and we were happy.
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VIC-20, my first real girlfriend.
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i witnessed the creation of the mp3 format!
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RealAudio
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oh yeah that piece of crap i haven't missed ^^
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.ra files taught me why proprietary is a bad word.
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And rmvb files were all the rage. Those sweet video files with only 32MB... Peak compression. What the world was before h264 and before youtube existed was amazing.
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My computer’s mobo was so shitty, it played .midi files badly. I was shocked when I went to a mate’s and the same midis sounded like the song they’re actually supposed to be.
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Mod files
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YES! I loved XM Tracker back in the days
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Can you tell us anything about the professors?
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Damn kids acting like 5-10 years before they were born was the dark ages. Damn.
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I'm not even 30 yet and I ripped CDs in my youth. I didn't use limewire though, we would use torrents already at that point.
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Shiiit I had to block people at work from running bearshare and limewire
We didn't really have the right equipment for it. It was early enough in Windows that I couldn't adequately secure the developers from running crap on their workstations.
I eventually managed to get our antivirus to flag the DLLs for the applications as viruses, that caused a little bit of an uproar.
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So, shortly after checking aboard the first fast-attack submarine I served on, in April 1991, the boat was locked down one evening, when the engineer couldn't find his Zenith SuperSport 286e computer. Suspecting someone stole it, the boat was locked down and searched - for 3 hours. Everyone was really angry... It's 2025 and I remember it well.
Anyway, after 3 hours or so, at the Captains insistence, the ENG, doing paperwork in his stateroom, let someone else in, to look for his computer. There it was, sitting plain as day, on his bunk, where his pillow should have been. The ENG said he didn't notice it, as he thought it was his pillow...gross, considering everyone else's pillowcase was white.
The Captain immediately lifted the lockdown, and all the off-duty people went home. The anger lingered though, and the Engineer seemed to have a dark cloud over his head. He was fired a few months later, and I've always wondered if it had something to do with that computer - I was just too new to know anything about the guy, and I didn't work in engineering.
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I used to pirate games and store them here when I was a kid to play on my commodore 128
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damn your childhood was lit
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That one time I got an executable online that made girls strip on my desktop was great. Of course, the spyware and virus crap that was secretly behind it was not. I think that was the first time I did a full reinstall of Windows for the first time. Good times.
Burning CD's, ripping CD's with programs to remove the protection and save songs as MP3...
Anyone remembers cracks? You would replace a couple of files in the game folder and you could run a game without the CD, or a pirated version. These days with the online crap that is much more difficult. Or the serial number generators for some games or software because some genius found out how the software checked the number?
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Anyone remembers cracks?
They're still going strong, even circumventing the online shit for some games. Denuvo and every company that uses it can die in a fire, tho.
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People need to relax. This isn't even old. What's wrong with getting older anyway?
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How did the Sharpie get dragged into this? I still need to use one of those for work.
Anyway, i fit the description. Win.com, Soundblaster IRQ, Audiogalaxy, BBS, etc. It seemed like it was more fun back then. Marketing ruined everything. 🤷♂️
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Zip drive!🙋♂️
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SparQ! (1Gb cartridges, I was never going to fill those suckers.)
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Turbo!
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Dusty old bones. Frog Bog, Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack, Truckin and B-17 Bomber
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These people are like 25-30, that’s not old yet I hope
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As one of the current generation of adults who grew up with afternoon cartoons, G.I. Joes, transformers and all the greatest movies that are so incredibly nostalgic now, I feel internally like I pretty much stopped developing mentally around age 25 and am still "with it" about much of society, but younger people now seem to think I was around during the civil war.
Reading discussions on even Lemmy between people 20 - 30, referencing how anyone over 40 is in like, an entirely different "category" for literally any topic. Makes me feel like a shriveled mummy sometimes.
It was all pretty funny and silly and I didn't think much of it until I tried getting a new job in my same field recently and it became abruptly clear that I was the oldest person applying for those positions even though I had been doing that work and had that experience for years and years, hiring managers always prioritize younger candidates who are more naive, seem more energetic, and are more desperate to succeed so are more willing to compromise on things like pay and benefits.
It took a year and a half to get a new job and that was only because I knew someone who knew someone. Middle-aged people are basically treated like elderly in many fields and hiring managers will always have a bias towards people younger than themselves or people who look or act more like themselves. This isn't malicious, this is just basic human behavior. This is why we had initiatives to remind people of their biases and reconsider candidates who might not seem to fit the "Standard" you might be unconsciously leaning towards.
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These days, old is considered 25 and above.
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Yep, got my Zimmer frame to help me in my 30s
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The people who did this are in their 40s
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Not quite yet, not all of us.
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Not sure if joke or if you're bad at math.
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People that age will see this and say "hell yeah"
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EVEN OLDER!
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I'm quite a bit older than this...
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Yeah, I was going to bring up Turbo buttons, but then realised that the Commodore Vic 20 in my bedroom predates that by quite some margin 😇
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I’m plastic Kawasaki keyboard on top of the C64 keyboard old.
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Vic 20 -> C=64 -> few 386/486 units -> AMD K6-2 and a ton of stuff after that. And maybe something in between.
And now I'm writing this in my garage computer which I picked up from a e-waste pile at work few years back and it has more computing power than pretty much all the systems combined I had before being 18 years old. And when we (as a family) got our first "mobile" phone it was hardwired to a car electronics since they took 'a bit' more power than the supercomputers we carry in our pockets today (obviously Li-ion batteries were not a thing either, but that old Motorola NMT450 took a crapload of power by todays standards).
It's been a wild ride so far. My grandparents were on top of the technology when they got the first landline phone around the neighborhood (I'm living in a rural area so it was not a new invention back then by any stretch) and now I can just yell to a entity in my palm to show me pictures from another planet or a high definition live video from Earth orbit.
And still I'm somehow trying to teach basic tehcnology concepts to both my parents and my kids. It's bizarre to try and explain about benefits of touch typing to a 16 year old who thinks it's pretty much impossible for anyone to type out an essay at school containing 2000 words in an hour (33wpm)...
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8088 era is in da house.