this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by Harryd91@lemm.ee to c/retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
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I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.

Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer..

Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad's work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.

I remember

- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)


- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds


- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff


- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.


- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.

I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.

After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.

Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.

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[–] kazriko@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

  • Desqview, swapping between GoldEd and the BBS watching the users playing LoRD and other games. And before that, scrambling to quit my game and get the BBS back up when I was using my 286 for gaming instead of leaving the BBS running.

  • Those terrible, terrible CGA games that I played because for a couple years, I only had CGA and no EGA. The high pitched whine of the CGA monitor whenever I stood behind it.

  • When I finally got OS/2, and could play Descent or Doom, while the BBS was handling a phone call in the background.

  • Even older, printing out yet another Bill the Cat on my dot matrix printer.

  • Typing in games from Compute Magazine into my Atari 130xe, but the checksum being wrong because I used abbreviated basic commands due to being a lazy typist.

  • Getting killed by that darn Terminator in Zone 2 of LOD again...

  • Going to my Uncle's house to transfer all of Kings Quest 6 from 1.44mb to 1.2mb floppies.

[–] richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one 1 points 1 year ago

To add devices for your computer (like a disk drive, a serial or parallel port, or more memory) you needed a huge box with a very rigid cable and a lot of space.

This was for the TI-99/4A.

[–] jmcunx@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A couple:

  1. CRC Errors when restoring 9-track tapes (the large reels) on a mini at work.

  2. A manager not knowing a removable 256meg Disk Pack suffered a heard crash. So he mounted it on 4 or 5 production drives, destroying the hardware. He did this to test if the Disk pack was OK. This caused almost a month of agony while we went looking for hardware to replace the drives. This caused manufacturing to slow down since inventory could not be ordered.

I can almost laugh now :)

[–] Jabbawacky 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Loading games from big floppy disks, hearing the CLINK CLUNK CLUNK WRRRRR noises, on the BBC Micro computers at school in the early 90s. There were boxes of awesome games like Chuckie egg that we had to work out how to load during lunch breaks.

Then getting our first home computer with win 3.11 which was a huge deal then

[–] 91x@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I remember mom setting me up with my own 3.5" floppy for all my files. Later on it was CD-RWs for me and my little brother.

Felt like I had more storage than I'd ever know what to do with at the time.

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