Ask Lemmy

I miss computer time being something special.

They said learn to code. 😂

I'll be honest I don't really miss a lab full of win95 shit boxes further crippled by net nanny. It was just a partial escape from the other abuses of middle and high school.

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 miss having enough friends that we could have a full 5v5 in CS without needing bots or the server open to the internet. Especislly true of high school, where I had CS and a few other games installed on the network (we had a networking class and our teacher was also the IT manager for the district and the 5 people in the class were given admin access for something and it was never revoked) so literally every PC on the network had access to it and you could be playing a game in any class, any period.

I do, especially the couple of years before the internet really took off.

We like to look at this era through rose tinned glasses. You had not a lot of processing power, not a lot of storage space, insecure code (and internet) everywhere, flimsy methods of portable storage and slow network transfer speeds. A lot of software was not mature enough for everyday use. Energy inefficient. Yet, we made it work.
It was in some ways romantic, computers were a cool thing, not a necessity for everyday life (yes, I'm counting phones as computers - fight me). That's what I miss the most. We weren't connected all the time and the software market space was unexplored and unexploited. It felt new and exciting, but it was flawed in so many ways. This counts both for pc's and the internet.

I just want to get a CRT monitor for cheap.

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.

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

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

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

I DO miss the crunchy keyboards of my younger days.

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.

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?!

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

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

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

No

bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head

Where are the flying toasters?

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.

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.

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

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 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.