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.

  •  Paolo Amoroso   ( @amoroso@lemmy.ml ) English
    8•1 year ago

    Reading computer magazines and books, and eagerly anticipating getting my hands on such material. Today’s kids born in an online era of infinite content just can’t imagine how difficult it was back them to get technical publications and information, printed or otherwise.

      •  plugd   ( @plugd@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
        2•1 year ago

        Indeed! Computer Recreations was the absolute best. I remember implementing an algorithm from this that displayed 3d projections of a 4d rotating hypercube; then extending it to support red/blue cellophane 3d glasses (or as best as possible with a 16 colour pallette). So much fun and learnt so much!

    •  feoh   ( @feoh@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      2•1 year ago

      So much this!

      I remember having to order tech books from Waldenbooks, and getting blank stares from the clerk, who’d basically tell me they were never going to actually receive it after I’d waited WEEKS.

      Then I finally got to visit QuantumBooks, a technical bookstore in Kendall Square Cambridge, and it was like going to heaven :)

  •  Frater Mus   ( @fratermus@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
    7•1 year ago

    In 8th (?) grade our larval computing lab was a row of Commodore 64 but there was only one 5.25" floppy drive between them. When you wanted to save or load your proglet you had to

    • walk over to insert your floppy
    • return to your seat to do your load/save
    • walk back over to retrieve your floppy to free up the drive for someone else

    At some point I realized that while the owner was walking back and forth you could load their code to see how they approached the assignment. And doing so did not affect their workflow or anyone else at all. It felt like the earth shifted a bit at that moment.

  •  Harryd91   ( @Harryd91@lemm.ee ) OP
    7•1 year ago

    Another thing - my windows 95 era PC was packed to the gills with bad desktop themes. Usually South Park related with annoying soundclips that played whenever you did something. Obnoxious mouse cursors and wallpapers that hurt the eyes.

    I was upset when everything moved to ATX and computers powered off by themselves because I didn’t get to see the modded ‘It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer’ screens that came with the themes

  •  MXX53   ( @MXX53@programming.dev ) 
    6•1 year ago

    I grew up pretty poor. When I was a kid my dad brought home a pentium 2 that didn’t work. He picked it out of the garbage, told me I could have it, but that it didn’t work.

    We often rode the bus to school. We would get off at school and my parents would get off at work. And then we would meet them on the bus on the way home.

    After getting the computer we started stopping off at the library, so I could check out books about computers. I would take them home and start reading. (I was illiterate until I was 10 years old, and this really kicked off my reading ability, to this day I still read 100-120 books per year)

    Over time I was able to figure out enough to diagnose the issue (bad PSU and bad HDD), garbage pick replacements, and then install DOS from floppy I got from school.

    From there I started picking up as many parts and computers as I could and filling my corner of our studio apartment with parts. I loved writing text files and documenting what I was doing, like a little knowledgebase of what I was figuring out. Eventually, we got evicted, and due to having to live in our car for a couple of years I had to give up my computer. Left it out in the curb. Ever since, I have been obsessed with terminal based interfaces and to this day almost exclusively use terminal.

  •  jadero   ( @jadero@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
    6•1 year ago

    Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

    Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

    Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

  •  duncesplayed   ( @duncesplayed@lemmy.one ) English
    5•1 year ago

    The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like “ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of”.