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Yes and no.
Computers and computer systems weren’t so much enshittified back in those days.
But the bulk CRT screens, I don’t miss those…
By the way, at those times almost every screen had one of those stupid placebo ‘glare filters’ . I don’t miss those either.
Yeah and would go back.
I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.
Zip drive AND a CD ROM? What kind of elite school is that?
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?!
It's the only room with air conditioning that we can be in during class time
No
Bah, I'm too old. Had a commodore 64 at home tho.
I totally do.
Hell yeah. I was young with only young people concerns. That room was always a comfortable temperature. The assignments were meant to last a few minutes and I would have them done in under a minute, giving me plenty of time to do whatever I wanted.
Greatly. Rather, I miss the days where it was easy to unplug.
Not really. I still take the time to have in person LAN parties with friends and crack out a CRT or two for old skool Mario Kart on the N64.
You can't miss what you never let go of
Cutting a second notch on a 360KB floppy to make it double sided, doubling the capacity to 720KB
Also, taping over the notches to protect the floppy from being overwritten.
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 mostly miss that our society seemed stable at the time. I was wrong; for minorities it was still a shit show, but I didn't know that yet.
Gaming got way better after around 2007, and Turtle Rock invented co-op multiplayer that wasn't deathmatch.
I'm old enough to remember classrooms without computers! The most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the room was my digital watch!
I can smell this picture
.... you kids need to get off my lawn *shakes fist*
We had Apple IIs and later some early macs because my area experienced a population boom and had some more tax money to play with.
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.
All but the CRTs. Too harsh. No dark themes.
I had a CRT that was like 100 pounds, it was huge!
I had a Sony flat screen crt that was literally 100+ lbs. because of all the extra glass.
I miss the community of it. As with a lot of things having it at home seems easier and better but so much more lonely.
I'm feeling old, because our computer "lab" was a bunch of apple 2s, which predates this scene, which they just sat us infront of when there was free time and fucked off and didnt teach us a goddamn thing.. So all I remember is sitting infront of a green glowing screen randomly hitting buttons on a keyboard doing fuckall nothing.
I can smell that room.
30 years ago?
When the Internet used to be something almost equal to a library, the excitement of and the privilege of going online (about $3 an hour in my country back then) and discovering some more knowledge to be had, and was then constantly growing with new information being put online. Yes, and if you have to make contact, you make the effort of writing an email after reading all you have to do to follow "netiquette". Or introducing oneself at a newsgroup.
BTW, in some places with limited options for which to make computers work, you had to DIY, like making your own Laplink cable so that you could transfer files.
The games... Yes, the games were becoming exciting as we were then enjoy watching the intense competition between the largest console makers, and there was no greater excitement than waiting for the newsstands putting out the latest copy of EGM, can't wait reading where video games are heading to next. And nearly all the devs were then really sincere about their personal idealism about video games.
It was also a time when the fringers were then really in the outer fringes, conspiracy theories also made for entertaining long barroom tales we even laugh at between sips of beer, rather than accepted as, uh, "truth". Way before some techbro rolled out a certain "TheFacebook".
On the other hand... 17" monitors were fucking heavy already, what more with bigger ones made for CAD jobs? Plus, around that same time a lot of those mechanical IBM AT keyboards were being pulled out from offices and stacked on top of another, destined for recyclers... now those same keyboards you have a hard time finding intact, or even still in their boxes.
I'm old enough to recognise an iomega ZIP drive.
My heart lies with FOSS, but my soul lies in a beige box.
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.
bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head
Windows? Fuck no, we had Sun Sparcs and we lik
Segmentation fault.
I was at uni towards the end of rooms full of Sun workstations. The best trick we came up with wasn't even software hacking. It was chain degaussing.
Those enormous Sun monitors could put out enough of an EMP when told to degauss that it could automatically trigger the one next to it to do the same.
I want to say we got it to go all the way around one of the labs, but I don't trust my recollection and it might have only been three in a row once or twice. Still pretty impressive.
I remember this extremely well, because I am indeed old enough to remember these things!
School computer lab memories:
School #1: c. 1989-1991 - Apple IIGSes with ImageWriter printers and a shared 5.25" disk box that the instructor could use to load software onto multiple machines.
The school also had a bunch of Commodore 64s that had recently been replaced by the IIGS machines. There were also a few Apple IIc machines (thought they were neat at the time, and still do!)
My sixth grade teacher was an amateur coder and taught me a bit of Pascal.
School #2:
c.1991-1993 - Apple IIe machines. Had a first experience using a Mac SE and a Mac Classic, which I thought was amazing.
School #3:
c. 1994-1997
Mac Classics in a line in the library, A lab filled with Macintosh LC3s, and another lab with PCs running earlyish versions of Windows and DOS, networked with Netware IPX. I was old enough at this point to be a student network admin.
The school also had some lingering Mac SE/30s, and a store room filled with TRS-80s, which I unsuccessfully tried to get my computer teacher to give me. However, the librarian gave me an original IBM 8086 and a monitor, so I took it home and learnt assembly.
Love the overhead projector in the corner of the lab shown. They were ubiquitous!
Computers were still exciting. And hadn't been enshitified.
during my k12, we went from PET to apple II and gs (apple was wizards at selling their junk to schools), and finally getting out from under apple and adding a few 386s at the end.
Fuck yeah.
We had it way better than we knew.
