Ask Lemmy

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

I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.

I DO miss the crunchy keyboards of my younger days.

Yeah and would go back.

I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.

Here's a piece of the old knowledge: if you had a CRT monitor and a chair with rubber/insulated feet, you could lift your feet off the floor, spread one hand as wide as you could across the screen, turn the monitor off, and you could zap someone with an electric shock with your other hand.

You could also daisy-chain it across multiple people, so if you could rope 4-5 people into helping you then you could all hold hands and zap someone on the other side of the room if they weren't paying attention.

I can smell that room.

You should have seen our first computer room: three C64 with floppy drives, monitors, and one printer...

we used to sneak CDs to install counter strike, carmageddon, and unreal tournament. good times

I mostly miss the degauss button. And all the free steel balls fron the mice, they were good for milling media.

I had way too many of those old mice balls in my mouth... So no I don't really miss it. They tasted awful anyway but the mouthfeel was very pleasant.

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

As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don't miss those old ball mice.

Swashbuckler!!!

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

Where are the flying toasters?

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?!

No. Not one bit.

Between the 50Hz fluorescent tubes that were common at the time and the cheap shit monitors running at 60Hz, also common at the time, I had migraines 3-4 times a week.

I categorically do not miss those days.

bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head

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

I mean. very small amount of nostalgia for some games and such but things changed a lot with the 486dx2 and next step machines. My heydey nostaligia times was when macs went to osx and the macbook pro was lauded for having a bigger screen, more ports, and being more powerful than pc competitors. Hardware wise when the iphone started influencing laptops it was kinda the decline to me. Since then though linux has become amazing so that is cool. Open source is the only technology I have liked since the teens.

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.

No

Those boxes are newer than the ones I had at the school lab, but still probably similar.

My school just have gotten broadband earlyish.

I remember finding out they had Internet access, but all I knew about it at the time was dialup services, and there were no icons there that seemed to be related to the Internet at all, except for Internet Explorer itself. (version 5.0, new at the time)

I actually had to ask the school librarian how to get online. She said "just open an explorer window", and I thought that was weird because I knew how to use it, but I was asking how to GET online, not how to browse.

But I tried it and it just worked. I must have done an early version of a poggers face.

I was lucky in the early 90s in that my dad had a PC for work. A 14.4 modem and random BBS's to dial up to, and I got an interesting first experience with computers. Our local library had UNIX PCs, so I had to learn random protocols like telnet and gopher to access anything. Once I got to middle school we had labs like this. I definitely miss the LAN café feel of that era.

Yeah. I had A LOT of fun in the 90s in these labs. You could easily bypass the shitty security, I printed ASCii peniss to all the school printers,changed my grades sophmore year.

It wasn't even that I was gifted or anything, they were just incredibly ignorant and had no idea what they were doing to keep people out.

Going to university in the late 90s/early 00s, when not everyone had home computers and especially not laptops. We had the computer lab in the basement where were could go to print out essays, do research, etc.

There was the library as well with a few computers on each floor, but those were always taken, and lab access came with our tuition anyway.

Other than that and a rather simple cellphone, we were device free. We still took notes by hand, copiously highlighted lines in ridiculously overpriced text books, met with friends at the coffee shop to study, and essentially kept technology compartmentalised.

Do I miss it? Oh hell yes.

I totally do.