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
....i miss having no responsibilites.
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 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."
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.
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
Neighbor: gets nice computer
Me: is this for me 🥺~👉👈~
I'm guessing the OOP was born early to mid 80s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The internet? At those prices?
We had to go to each others houses to look at CD-ROMs!
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.
My mother would tell us that she especially loved visiting her grandparent's house because they had color tv
Well now you're making me feel old because I was talking to my daughter today about how my mother occasionally went to a friend's house to watch his brand new television back in the early 1950s.
Old enough to remember a world without the internet.
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.
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 and then walk 45 minutes back home. 🥰
Old enough to have had a Commodore 64 and Atari 2600.
You just missed the golden era of the VIC-20, when you had to walk over to the house of the friend that had one and type in the BASIC code for a game before you could play it, since it didn't originally have a hard drive and the friend's mom was too cheap to buy a tape drive or any game cartridges.
Remember when nobody had internet service for the most part and you had only a little window of time to use Freenet?
And holy shit if some one used the phone
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?
I’d say the window of overlap for “look at the computer” and “information superhighway” was actually pretty small for most people.
Maybe 1996-2001?
So then you factor in how old people would have been during that period who would have done this. Being generous, I’d say 9-18. At different ages in that range “going to my friend’s place to look at the computer” would have been a euphemism for different things.
But the range there would be from 1977-1992, which is actually pretty impressive for a cultural moment. Essentially, most millennials.
I remember my friend showing a BBS that his uncle had got him set up on and being blown away. Also, I guess my parents were impressed by Spokesdude Bronson Pinchot (The Bronster), because they got us a US Videotel console for almost a year.
"Information superhighway" 🤣
More like flash games and Runescape private servers.
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