Y’all remember the computer room? Like that guest bedroom or whatever that wasn’t really used for anything other than housing The Computer?
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
We definitely upped our chair game since then. That’s for sure
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
…i miss having no responsibilites.
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.
We put internet on mobile and things went to shit.
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 agree and hope that continues to get better for more children. I just feel bad for the kids that don’t have as empathetic parents.
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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.
I can still hear the white noise ringing of the hard drives that hit you as soon as you walked in. So good
Yeah, unless you grew up in the Bible belt then it was in the corner of the dining room with no privacy.
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
And it was always cold because someone’s father would always say something like “I’m not paying to heat that room no one is ever in it.”
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.
They were just looking for an excuse to remodel the basement and “the computer” made it seem like something they were doing for the family.
Remember? I still have one.
We call them “home offices” now but ultimately they’re still the same thing lol
I could never find the computer room.
id use it to play backyard baseball all day
Yeah, it’s called an office, I still have one to do work and game in.
That was pretty normal when I was 10. I was born in the 80s. It was novel like TV in the 1950s or radio in the 1920s.
Yep same. AOL chatrooms and shock sites like rotten(dot)com were a staple of middle school sleepovers.
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I’m in my 20s and it wasn’t any different for me
“Get off the computer, I have to make a phone call!” -My childhood
That’s why I waited until 2 am to dial in to the local BBSes. On a Tuesday. During the school year.
*Taps temple*
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Get off the phone, I need to play counter-strike - My childhood
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.
Zork
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.
Everybody wayyyohhhh
Mmmm-zibadaba zibadaba zadap-eee!
My gravy love, potaties love…
https://youtu.be/pEjBlL64SuU for the uninitiated
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.
Neverhood and Sam & Max were great games.
Did you check out the Neverhood sequel from a few years ago? Was via Kickstarter, I think.
I was whatever was exactly one generation later. Also a Compaq but my games were a demo pack of X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Dark Forces, and Yoda Stories.
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.
FUCK YES NEVERHOOD
Day of the tentacle, lol. I remembers that. as well as prince of Persia and commander Keen
Neighbor: gets nice computer
Me: is this for me 🥺👉👈
I’m guessing the OOP was born early to mid 80s.
Could even be late 90s or early 2000s in some places
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.
Hell, friends and I were doing it 2008 in college. 6 or 7 of us all gathered around a single 24" monitor watching the latest episode from Nostalgia Critic or something similar.
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!
Not necessarily, I did that as a kid in the late 2000s. My friend’s parents had an old mac in their basement that we would play flash games and watch stupid youtube videos on.
83 baby here. Perfect timing. Grew up during the early internet, before Facebook and phone cameras. No such thing as online bullying and nobody could film you getting beaten up.
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.
Cardboard box of playboys in the woods, but for the digital age
set to the tune of Treat the Kids Right by The Interrupters
Let the kids wank
Or you’re gonna get a spank
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 used to phone the internet and sometimes it’d be busy and I’d have to phone it back 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 did the same with gaming consoles at Conrad (when they still had physical stores). When you were there early in the afternoon you could play the latest releases on the newest consoles.
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)
Having like 3+ audio players until Winamp came along and rocked that world.
It really whipped the llamas ass
Hm! What was there? Winplay3, mpg123 and…? Was there another before Winamp? Or are you talking about other formats than mp3?
Real Player, I think.
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.
It would not have been able to play mp3s or anything but a .wav file.
You kids and your fancy MP3s. In my day we used Real Audio, uphill both ways.
Yuck… Real player. What about vivo player? Somehow was even worse!
TBF RealAudio typically used a 200:1 compression ratio, which nothing can survive. Tiny files, at least.
Well, yeah, but it was the player software itself that sucked so bad. It could’ve easily been less bloated but for years they added more and more bloat. Even an old slow computer shouldn’t be struggling hard just to open a damned audio player.
My first sound file was a supercut of Keiko O’Brien giving birth on Star Trek: The Next Generation, edited to make it sound like an orgasm 😆
Not much editing was needed lmao!
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There was a time when Windows didn’t have a TCP/IP stack so it couldn’t connect to the Internet at all and you had to use a third party program like Trumpet Winsock.
Nutscrape navigator!
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.
No I can’t relate to that memory because nobody had internet when I was 10 🥲
Oh, me too… When i was 10, i was visiting friends to play Pac-Man together on their brand new Atari.
Or pong
User name checks out :']
Now we’re talking! #TeamAtari
Nobody had personal computers when I was ten.
Not even a RadioShack TRS-80?
Not even an Altair 8800, at least in my country.
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
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.
I’m in that first group and can still hear the squeal of the dial-up modem then, “You’ve got mail!”
That’s just what we did until like… Jeez… 2006?
Not even, I was playing EverQuest in 2000. And WoW in 2004.
okay and?
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 I stopped going to a neighbors to hang out and look at internet shit together around when I got a Facebook account. I was in highschool. It was when we bought a mobile broadband stick from Verizon. Before that us and the next-door neighbors had dial up and it was slow as can be imagined. Like… I feel like we mainly hung out and to use the internet together to show each other the things we’d found on our own and also because you had to do something together while you waited for whatever it was you were looking at to load. I think the thing we did the most was used limewire to download morning radio shows like Johnboy and just laugh at the antics of characters trying to sell boats and whatever.
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.
I had barely functioning dial up Internet, while my friend had cable before YouTube existed. My first ever experience was on January 10, 1997. I was 16 and we borrowed a friend’s AOL login info to use that “browser” for limited number of minutes.
Not even 3 years later was it possible to play games and have a lawsuit with Metallica due to p2p distribution. I’m basing my previous statements off of the popularity of these very things.
??? The fuck are you talking about? We’d go hang out together to play games and torrent shit. That’s literally what I’m saying we would go hang out in front of cathode ray tubes to do. None of those things are mutually exclusive?
Whatever. I’m apparently not explaining well enough, and / or you aren’t understanding. And I’m too tried. So just ignore me from here on out.
I guess you’re too young to get the meme then :)
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.
Not everyone has a good internet connection now. Much of rural America still awaits high-speed internet connectivity
I’m talking about dialup
Yeah, and I was behind the times.
No I mean literally we as in my cohort did that until 2006. A we that I was in. Me and my people
The internet? At those prices?
We had to go to each others houses to look at CD-ROMs!
Load up Encarta.
Or Mavis Beacon!
and where in the fuck is Carmen San Diego
Oregon Trail was my jam.
Funny… I remember “where in the world is Carmen San Diego” but I don’t remember “where the fuck is Carmen San Diego”
Fancy. Who could afford a CD-ROM drive at those prices?
We had boxes of floppy disks and BBS to get us through.
Luxury.
I had to load my games in from tape!
Tape?
Now let me tell you about punched cards…
… that were used long before I was born.
'course I say tape, it was more like a code listing in a magazine, but it were a tape to us!
My dad used punch cards.
He’s dead.
Back in my day we had books, that we had to share, and we LIKED it.
Books? Back in my day we had cuneiform tablets.
I remember looking at the CD Roms before our computer had one.
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.
