Yes, comprehensible systems? Just enough to be very exciting? Positive energy? My youth? The music?
Uh, yes?
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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I miss most of all when the internet was the domain of nerds only. Us nerds are nicer than other people on average.
No
My thirties? meh
Playing Unreal Tournament and Duke Nuken 3D with everyone else in the lab.
Yes. Although, more than the technology or the culture, I probably miss being a kid with a bright future ahead of him...
Hell no
Exactly.
I miss computer time being something special.
It is special again - when you switch from your phone to the computer :D
Greatly. Rather, I miss the days where it was easy to unplug.
Not really, but I do remember those things used to keep a room warm.
Nah, I miss the 8 and 16 bit eras
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 not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media
That's on you. Social media is not a necessity, it's actually pretty simple to avoid.
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.
Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, and Bill Clinton predate social media.
Bill Clinton predate social media
Still alive.
So? He was elected in 1992. Social media had nothing to do with it.
I too miss the day when the internet was for geeks and nerds, (and anyone who wasn't never left MySpace). Now everyone is online, and the novelty has been ruined. Not to mention how much more centralized the internet is now, compared to 20-30 years ago. Everyone visits the same five websites/apps now.
The barrier to entry was real, I had to figure out how to write a dialup script for my first PC to connect to the internet I purchased from the local high school. I didn't go there, that was just the only place in town with enough internet to resell.
It's good that everyone has access to information now. The impact it's had on visual arts and music really can't be overstated, it allows artists to reach their fans directly which is incredible. But it was a different place when everyones grandma wasn't reading Breitbart and repeating it on social media.
I agree the centralization of everyone on a handful of sites is an issue, it makes it too easy to manipulate and rig. I feel like social media was an incredible mistake but I don't know if we'll ever be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
They lined the walls of the special computer room at my school, but we used them more as a kind of nerds recess than for actually teaching anything
Oh, this was the case at my school too! The lab became a nerd lounge during lunch and recess.
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.
They said learn to code. 😂
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.
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.
There was a time where you could just turn it all off and no one would ever question you about it.
Nobody even carried "smart phones" until like 2005, it's crazy how fast they've evolved in 20 years.
Yeah and would go back.
I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.
I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.
I am also over 35
I do, especially the couple of years before the internet really took off.
Fuck no. Fragile floppies, DOS start file tuning, and no internet service in the entire city unless you went to university.
When I was at the age where computer class was being taught, I was already typing at a higher level. My parents had the entire Encyclopedia Britannica set and there were games on those discs that taught typing. I learned a lot at home because I wanted to long before the school started teaching it.
So me, grade 4 or 5, already typing at an accelerated level with my own middle-finger led typing technique I taught myself that worked perfectly for my (not yet disagnosed) ADHD-ass brain was literally forced, or I'd fail, to "home key learn" typing. So there's me, my index fingers on F and J, typing out "sad lad sad lass dad lad" when I could already type complete paragraphs on a keyboard.
No, I don't miss that shit. It was so degrading.
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.
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As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don't miss those old ball mice.
oh man optical mice and lcds was the best thing ever for IT. I got everyone in my family optical mice one xmass when they got pretty cheap and when people just did not realize how much a quality of life improvement they were. I think I included a mouse pad that was a good surface in case they had a desk with little contrast. Then at work I was pushing conversion to lcd and sunsetting crts so hard.
The place I worked for had the contract for all school computers in our part of the state. After two years or so of buying huge numbers of mice because the teachers couldn't be bothered to keep the kids from stealing or throwing the balls from the mice we started using epoxy to glue in the balls. The teachers immediately started complaining about the kids complaining about it. I was out of that part of IT when Optical mice became more common but I'm sure it was a great relief to those that were still maintaining that pile.
You would've liked me then. I would scrape that stuff off just as a weird stim toy type activity.
That third wheel was a bit more annoying since it was on a spring and therefore harder to scrape.
Just have to press down and scrape sideways. Optical mice rule.
I can smell that room.
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.
Same. Computer stuff now is better in almost every aspect. The internet (1997-2010) was more enjoyable though.
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