This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 years ago

    No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.

    • D_C@lemm.ee
      0·
      2 years ago

      Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!

      • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        2 years ago

        The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.

        When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        And rmvb files were all the rage. Those sweet video files with only 32MB… Peak compression. What the world was before h264 and before youtube existed was amazing.

        • BenLeMan@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer’s amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).

  • Ken Oh@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 years ago

    Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn’t use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓

      🗑️💿🚮💔

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.

      Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can’t specifically recall whether ±R/RW).

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        I remember this being a DVD thing. By the time I got a dvd burner though mine supported both.

        The RW issue with CDs was that a lot of older players couldn’t read them.

        • PlasticExistence@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          I damaged the laser on a PS2 by using a DVD-RW. They’re harder to read than a normal disc apparently, so it wore the laser down pretty quick

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 years ago

            Can you believe my original ps1 is still rocking hard with zero adjustments?

            My ps2 is currently dead, but it was because I used thicker wire than necessary when modding it a thousand years ago and I need to just heat up the solder a bit.

            That console is a nightmare to disassemble/reassemble though and it’s been down for around 15 years. I’ll fix it one day.

              • theangryseal@lemmy.world
                0·
                2 years ago

                And just saying, if it’s the 72 pin connector, you don’t need a new one. Just pop yours out and bend the pins back out. It’s very very easy, honest to God there’s no reason to get a new one. I have new ones in my closet, probably 20 of them, but I’ve never really needed to use any of them.

                If you don’t want to fool with that PM me your address and I’ll send you one.

  • oppy1984@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    2001, Dre’s album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre’s new album five bucks right here.

    He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
      0·
      2 years ago

      There was a kid who was selling the cheat codes for pokemon he printed off gamefaqs at my school. One of my friends found out I had internet access and asked me if I would get them for him. After I did that some other people asked me as well. Eventually the kid who was selling them got wind of it and got a couple of his other friends together to jump me on the playground at recess. I remember laying on the ground looking up at him standing over me threatening me if I didn’t stop doing that and just thinking “this is really stupid…”

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Oh boy. I remember seeing an 8 track system once… I was very curious, and honestly, I still don’t have any of the answers I wanted. They’re just no longer relevant. The tech was old when I was a kid.

        I used dial up, so anything that’s post-Internet, I’m probably older than. I still remember the idiot news anchors going “move over Internet, here comes the world wide Web”… They’re literally the same thing. What the fuck are you talking about?

  • voodooattack@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    Old enough to remember using a 3½” floppy disk to boot my first PC and mess around with GW/Q-BASIC and play DOS games.

    The disks were strongly perfumed (I guess the guy I bought my pirated games from liked to do that for some reason), and I still remember that aroma.

    • ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      My favorite memory of that era was awkwardly asking my mom historical questions to get past the age block.

      ‘Mom! Who was Nixon’s vice president?’ or something like that.

  • madjo@feddit.nl
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’m monochrome cga screen old. Commodore VIC 20, Philips MSX, Video 2000 old.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’m exactly that old.

    Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we’re all thinking of:

  • Emerald (she/her)@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    This isn’t very old lol. That computer could be from 2010 and CD’s and Sharpies were used then. Also, LimeWire was functional until like late 2010.