Ask Lemmy

I miss having enough friends that we could have a full 5v5 in CS without needing bots or the server open to the internet. Especislly true of high school, where I had CS and a few other games installed on the network (we had a networking class and our teacher was also the IT manager for the district and the 5 people in the class were given admin access for something and it was never revoked) so literally every PC on the network had access to it and you could be playing a game in any class, any period.

I'll be honest I don't really miss a lab full of win95 shit boxes further crippled by net nanny. It was just a partial escape from the other abuses of middle and high school.

I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.

I just want to get a CRT monitor for cheap.

I do, especially the couple of years before the internet really took off.

We like to look at this era through rose tinned glasses. You had not a lot of processing power, not a lot of storage space, insecure code (and internet) everywhere, flimsy methods of portable storage and slow network transfer speeds. A lot of software was not mature enough for everyday use. Energy inefficient. Yet, we made it work.
It was in some ways romantic, computers were a cool thing, not a necessity for everyday life (yes, I'm counting phones as computers - fight me). That's what I miss the most. We weren't connected all the time and the software market space was unexplored and unexploited. It felt new and exciting, but it was flawed in so many ways. This counts both for pc's and the internet.

Fuck no. Fragile floppies, DOS start file tuning, and no internet service in the entire city unless you went to university.

Yeah and would go back.

I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.

I DO miss the crunchy keyboards of my younger days.

I can smell that room.

we used to sneak CDs to install counter strike, carmageddon, and unreal tournament. good times

As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don't miss those old ball mice.

You should have seen our first computer room: three C64 with floppy drives, monitors, and one printer...

I mostly miss the degauss button. And all the free steel balls fron the mice, they were good for milling media.

I can hear the humming from here.

I thought I was developing tinnitus until I noticed it was gone after we replaced everything.

They can have fabulous picture quality but not with the cheapo units we had. But 800x600 is all anyone needs right?!

I remember the feeling of the warmth on my face as I went into the computer lab

I had way too many of those old mice balls in my mouth... So no I don't really miss it. They tasted awful anyway but the mouthfeel was very pleasant.

No. Not one bit.

Between the 50Hz fluorescent tubes that were common at the time and the cheap shit monitors running at 60Hz, also common at the time, I had migraines 3-4 times a week.

I categorically do not miss those days.

My heart lies with FOSS, but my soul lies in a beige box.

The mouse was the rolly ball kind, and you hoped that you were assigned a computer where it still worked properly, or you could arrive in time to grab one where the mouse still worked. Or, if your lunch period coincided with the lab class lunch period, you came in to swap mouses with the bully in the senior class.

Yeah, you could do the thing where you remove the ball and try to clean it, but that only works so much, and for so many times

Where are the flying toasters?

bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head

I miss the computer being at work and not at my house. When you left work for the day, you left work. Now we all have laptops and are expected to be able to work anytime, anywhere.

Anybody else remember the 30lb “portable” Compaqs?

I should clarify that we had a few computers, but only in college. (Am old.) That picture up there reminds me of when my first firm finally got PC's. No mice, all keyboard. Before that they were IBM word processors with the 10 inch dual floppy drives that looked like toasters.

No

I was lucky in the early 90s in that my dad had a PC for work. A 14.4 modem and random BBS's to dial up to, and I got an interesting first experience with computers. Our local library had UNIX PCs, so I had to learn random protocols like telnet and gopher to access anything. Once I got to middle school we had labs like this. I definitely miss the LAN café feel of that era.

I mean. very small amount of nostalgia for some games and such but things changed a lot with the 486dx2 and next step machines. My heydey nostaligia times was when macs went to osx and the macbook pro was lauded for having a bigger screen, more ports, and being more powerful than pc competitors. Hardware wise when the iphone started influencing laptops it was kinda the decline to me. Since then though linux has become amazing so that is cool. Open source is the only technology I have liked since the teens.

Going to university in the late 90s/early 00s, when not everyone had home computers and especially not laptops. We had the computer lab in the basement where were could go to print out essays, do research, etc.

There was the library as well with a few computers on each floor, but those were always taken, and lab access came with our tuition anyway.

Other than that and a rather simple cellphone, we were device free. We still took notes by hand, copiously highlighted lines in ridiculously overpriced text books, met with friends at the coffee shop to study, and essentially kept technology compartmentalised.

Do I miss it? Oh hell yes.

Those boxes are newer than the ones I had at the school lab, but still probably similar.

My school just have gotten broadband earlyish.

I remember finding out they had Internet access, but all I knew about it at the time was dialup services, and there were no icons there that seemed to be related to the Internet at all, except for Internet Explorer itself. (version 5.0, new at the time)

I actually had to ask the school librarian how to get online. She said "just open an explorer window", and I thought that was weird because I knew how to use it, but I was asking how to GET online, not how to browse.

But I tried it and it just worked. I must have done an early version of a poggers face.