Ask Lemmy

I miss the flying toaster screen saver.

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?!

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

Yeah but not because of the computers.

I totally do.

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.

I see your nostalgia and raise you this:

Why am I crying?

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

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

I can smell that room.

Zip drive AND a CD ROM? What kind of elite school is that?

No

Yes. Websites were dead easy to make. I could fit all my music onto one floppy disk because I saved them as midis. There were no standards for sound or graphics cards so everything played different on different computers. You could access information without needing to sign up because emails were just emerging. You could get an email address with a name you wanted. Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia yet. Autodesk hadn't bought 3ds max yet. Animated gifs. Flying toaster screensavers. In fact, the screensavers had sound! Would give you a great attack if you left your speakers on.

I remember essentially turning a BASIC prompt into a spinning, geometric rave decoration back in 5th grade, and thinking it was the coolest shit ever, but really… it was all about Math Blaster and The Oregon Trail in the years up to that point, and for several years later.

And yes, I'd go back in a heartbeat.

I'm feeling old, because our computer "lab" was a bunch of apple 2s, which predates this scene, which they just sat us infront of when there was free time and fucked off and didnt teach us a goddamn thing.. So all I remember is sitting infront of a green glowing screen randomly hitting buttons on a keyboard doing fuckall nothing.

I'm old enough to recognise an iomega ZIP drive.

30 years ago?

When the Internet used to be something almost equal to a library, the excitement of and the privilege of going online (about $3 an hour in my country back then) and discovering some more knowledge to be had, and was then constantly growing with new information being put online. Yes, and if you have to make contact, you make the effort of writing an email after reading all you have to do to follow "netiquette". Or introducing oneself at a newsgroup.

BTW, in some places with limited options for which to make computers work, you had to DIY, like making your own Laplink cable so that you could transfer files.

The games... Yes, the games were becoming exciting as we were then enjoy watching the intense competition between the largest console makers, and there was no greater excitement than waiting for the newsstands putting out the latest copy of EGM, can't wait reading where video games are heading to next. And nearly all the devs were then really sincere about their personal idealism about video games.

It was also a time when the fringers were then really in the outer fringes, conspiracy theories also made for entertaining long barroom tales we even laugh at between sips of beer, rather than accepted as, uh, "truth". Way before some techbro rolled out a certain "TheFacebook".

On the other hand... 17" monitors were fucking heavy already, what more with bigger ones made for CAD jobs? Plus, around that same time a lot of those mechanical IBM AT keyboards were being pulled out from offices and stacked on top of another, destined for recyclers... now those same keyboards you have a hard time finding intact, or even still in their boxes.

Despite having a very nostalgic soft spot for my 16-bit and 8-bit home computers, these labs do nothing for me. I worked in so many as an technician at a uni and in various other tech support roles in my 20s that these generic cream boxes leave me kinda cold. Give me an Amiga, an ST or even a ZX Spectrum any day. Probably cos I'm old AF 🤣

bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head

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

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.

Cutting a second notch on a 360KB floppy to make it double sided, doubling the capacity to 720KB

Also, taping over the notches to protect the floppy from being overwritten.

I used to love lifting my feet, putting one hand on the monitor screen, turning it off, and shocking the hell out of whoever was sitting beside me.

I'm old enough to remember classrooms without computers! The most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the room was my digital watch!

Fuck yeah.

We had it way better than we knew.

.... you kids need to get off my lawn *shakes fist*

We had Apple IIs and later some early macs because my area experienced a population boom and had some more tax money to play with.

I mostly miss that our society seemed stable at the time. I was wrong; for minorities it was still a shit show, but I didn't know that yet.

Gaming got way better after around 2007, and Turtle Rock invented co-op multiplayer that wasn't deathmatch.

Yep can confirm. I was a computer technician in a UK university throughout the 1990's, and we had 8 labs with PCs and Macs, and at the very beginning, BBC Micros, Atari STs, and even Sun SparcStations. Not sure I miss it - certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on "older" PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs, or self-combusting mice. I did enjoy it, though - being right there as the World Wide Web was born, and each new year brought faster CPUs, better colour graphics, and progressively worse versions of Windows...