- cross-posted to:
- microblogmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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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
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.
I can still hear the white noise ringing of the hard drives that hit you as soon as you walked in. So good
When my mom took my computer out of my room, I used to crawl to the computer room after she went to bed to use it. Fun times.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
This is how we did it in the 00s too. Then I remember when I got to college and everyone had a laptop - but we still reflexively did all of our hanging out in the same room, just showing each other youtube/newgrounds videos we liked in between classes.
That was peak internet for me, everything since has been a pale shadow.
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*
Get off the phone, I need to play counter-strike - My childhood
Neighbor: gets nice computer
Me: is this for me 🥺👉👈
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
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 remember printing out pictures that, in hindsight, were Photoshopped, but it was before I knew what Photoshop was. I learned a lot between 2000 and 2005.
Her head wasn’t glued on quite right.
If AI figures out fingers, we will really be in trouble.Or that fire doesn’t belong in a tent I guess .
I think a few months ago I was hearing “GPT 4.0 has finally figured out fingers” and seeing examples of correctly generated fingers.
Still seeing AI images with fucked fingers, though. Guess GPT still isn’t that good at it, or maybe they’re using some budget AI.
set to the tune of Treat the Kids Right by The Interrupters
Let the kids wank
Or you’re gonna get a spank
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.
We got internet when I was around 7, Prodigy, 1994 or 1995. I never used it because there wasn’t shit for a kid to do. We had Prodigy until like 2002. My old man signed a long contract with them, it was a good deal, but wouldn’t you know, right after he signed it, cable internet became available. And you can bet 14 year old me wore him down, it was not a want, but a need.
Prodigy
I’m a firestatah
Twisted firestatahI would love to have experienced that generation of electronic industrial music, but I’m not sure it was anyplace for a 10 year old.
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
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 would go to my friends house to play RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 she bought for 60$, i would spent the day playing with her on a single computer taking turns and discovering the game ans then walk 45 minutes back home. 🥰
The internet? At those prices?
We had to go to each others houses to look at CD-ROMs!
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.
A literal god or the worst ever homeschooled kid walks among us.
That’s how I started too.
Load up Encarta.
That’s just what we did until like… Jeez… 2006?
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.
One of my buddies had a AOL birthday party where we got the internet for “30 days free” and we just spent the time taking turns chatting with people in chatrooms.
I spent so much time in AIM chat rooms in my teens right around the turn of the millennium. Incredibly naive, almost certainly had to have been talking to some creepers at some point. But hey, I had a good time.
Old enough to have had a Commodore 64 and Atari 2600.
Coleco ADAM over here
Old enough to remember a world without the internet.
Browsing atomfilms.com with friends after school on their family computer, housed in a stained wood “computer desk/cabinet” in the living room. Man, that takes me back. Haven’t thought about that in a while… Searching for Atom Films took me to a depressing Wikipedia page detailing its death. Where does the time go?
