Ask Lemmy

I’m ~~a little earlier,~~ mid 80s. Can’t recollect exact years so the order will probably be wrong but here are a few things I remember:

I grew up when vinyls were on the way out but we still had some and I was listening to old children’s stories on it. Newer ones on cassette.

I used to record songs on cassette from the radio. Annoying hosts kept talking over it.

I also secretly recorded the movie Halloween over a bought VHS of The Little Mermaid, which my parents were furious about.

I didn’t have my own stationary gaming console until the N64 because we didn’t have a lot of money. So I visited friends to play. But I did have a game boy. With a transparent case, it was awesome. Kids with money had a bunch of attachments for it, like a magnifier, light, better speakers. One friend (who had everything) owned a Sega Game Gear. It was huge and had a color screen but it ate batteries like crazy, so it was always attached to the outlet. Sega was always weird to me.

Console games often didn’t have any way to save progress, so some of them showed you a code after each level, which you would write down so next time you could begin at that point. Some games didn’t have that either so you had to play through it in one sitting. But they were also much shorter. Later we also had memory cards.

My second Gameboy was the Color and I also got the Gameboy Camera attachment. It had such a bad quality but somehow it was fun. It had little games on it as well. I still have both in a drawer somewhere.

Computers were much larger in the beginning and software would come on multiple (!) floppy discs. The installation would take FOREVER and make make loud noises. Later it was on CDs.

People used to buy gaming magazines with CDs included to play the hottest new game demos and sometimes full versions. Games also came bundled with computers.

Games also had huge instruction manuals which were fun to read on their own.

In dial-up internet times we could only either be online OR use the landline phone (which was just „the phone“ because there was no mobile). It was also extremely expensive, billed by the minute. To get the cheapest we used a list of dial up numbers with prices on it which would get updated weekly or so. I think it was in the newspaper or TV guide magazine? So internet time was rare.

Before everyone started to be glued to computers 24/7 we used to roam around town and in the woods a lot.

Personally I was big into Lego. I had a huge box full of it and just emptied it on the floor to build whatever came to my mind. I could get lost in it and I was so much more creative back then. I also had some action figures, mostly He-Man and Ninja Turtles.

I had my own first computer when I was around 18 or so. That was Windows XP time (or was it Vista already?). Before that I always used my parent’s to play games or go online. And I was one of the first to own an LCD screen then. This was not ideal for Counterstrike because refresh rates were low, but it was a good trade off in my opinion. I had less weight to carry around to LAN parties, which was a thing back then. Just us friends in the basement or big events with hundreds of people. We all connected our computers together and it usually took an hour or so to even get it working and then everyone needed special patches and software to be compatible with each other.

Game patches… that was a crazy time. Nowadays games update automatically and frequently. Back then you would get instructions on what files you need to open in a hex editor to fix some bug. The patches would need to be implemented one by one in the right order, or everything was fucked. Or you just got complete new files from somewhere to replace existing ones. Then later patch programs would do that for you but they only worked half the time.

Ok I should stop now, new memories keep popping up.