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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 had to clean a hundred of them every quarter for a couple of years (work study was in the computer lab).
Since the build up was oils from people's hands you needed the right cleaners.
The balls got tossed into hot soapy water. Soak them for 10 minutes and they came out clean.
The rollers inside the mice were the worst. They required a Q-tip with some acetone or rubbing alcohol. For the really stubborn ones, I pulled out the naptha.
Yeah. I had A LOT of fun in the 90s in these labs. You could easily bypass the shitty security, I printed ASCii peniss to all the school printers,changed my grades sophmore year.
It wasn't even that I was gifted or anything, they were just incredibly ignorant and had no idea what they were doing to keep people out.
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 DO miss the crunchy keyboards of my younger days.
I mean. very small amount of nostalgia for some games and such but things changed a lot with the 486dx2 and next step machines. My heydey nostaligia times was when macs went to osx and the macbook pro was lauded for having a bigger screen, more ports, and being more powerful than pc competitors. Hardware wise when the iphone started influencing laptops it was kinda the decline to me. Since then though linux has become amazing so that is cool. Open source is the only technology I have liked since the teens.
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.
Yep. My first email address started with x.400, first BBS was Heartland Freenet, first newsreader was Usenet, 3600 baud modem at home, connecting through OCLC.
Man, I remember being blown away after getting a 14.4 modem after dialing up with my 2400 from the family 286.... Data was instant, those ANSI greetings from the BBS were just there.
I long for the days of random people running a BBS and no centralized social media
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 feel lucky that i didn't had to study like that lol
To each their own I supposed. But I firmly believe you retain more knowledge, the more senses that you use when learning.
If I'm reading the material (sight), highlighting the notes (touch), and listenting to the prof (sound), I'm triggering more synapses and as a result hold more of the information in.
Letting an A.I. summarize it for you, or just recording in on a laptop voice-to-text while zoning out for the hour of that class, is completely useless because you don't actually learn anything except how to ask the computer for the answer.
Letting an A.I. summarize it for you, or just recording in on a laptop voice-to-text while zoning out for the hour of that class, is completely useless because you don't actually learn anything except how to ask the computer for the answer.
That's hella of an assumption of what i do(and other people do) lol;
I just don't want to write every note by hand (Dysgraphia and dysorthography don’t help) and have to use a public device to write my notes, schemes etc etc
I was using "you" in the royal-sense; as in "anyone" or "oneself". Didn't mean to imply that you specificially do that. I apologize if it came across that way.
Ooh i see, my bad, don't worry
No
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.
Swashbuckler!!!
I miss the freedom. We would sneak out of class, play games, smoke weed, fuck. Sneak out of the house at 1am, cause hell, be back in bed for school. No ring cams, no cell phones. I didnt have all the bullshit of the world shoved in my face daily. Just hop on my bike, be back before night. I dont miss my circumstances though, my childhood was ruined by adults and social workers. I still remember the era fondly though. Life was good. I had friends and loves who I cared so deeply about. I didnt feel so strongly about anyone until I had kids. I dont think I ever will again.
I totally do.
Where are the flying toasters?
Those boxes are newer than the ones I had at the school lab, but still probably similar.
My school just have gotten broadband earlyish.
I remember finding out they had Internet access, but all I knew about it at the time was dialup services, and there were no icons there that seemed to be related to the Internet at all, except for Internet Explorer itself. (version 5.0, new at the time)
I actually had to ask the school librarian how to get online. She said "just open an explorer window", and I thought that was weird because I knew how to use it, but I was asking how to GET online, not how to browse.
But I tried it and it just worked. I must have done an early version of a poggers face.
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.
Yeah, my first computer lab was similar, full of old Apple 2s, lot of Oregon Trail and Mavis Beacon teaches typing. Wild that kids don't take or have typing classes any longer. I can't say I miss it perse, but it was great to have access to a computer when we couldn't afford one at home.
Not even learning about dying of dysentery? Or where in the world a certain person was?
I miss who I was in those days. Or more to the point, I miss not worrying about bills, the state of the world, the health and well-being of my family. I miss that my biggest concerns were around school exams and girls.
And yeah, I do miss the culture of the time, and the general attitude of hopefulness that seemed to pervade. But times change, life moves on, and as they say, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
No.
I was a worse person with less stuff.
I certainly enjoyed myself at the time, but I there was a lot I didn't (and probably couldn't) know.
What do you mean, old enough?
Those are fairly modern computers. They don't even have 5.25-inch floppy drives!
Exactly! There is even still defense equipment in use that uses 8inch floppies!
I miss the flying toaster screen saver.
I liked pipes.
Fuck yeah.
We had it way better than we knew.
IDK how old that picture is but it reminds me of my computer class back at school and the computers at the library. Back then Windows XP/2000 was the thing but there were many older NT 4.0 machines and I think even ancient 3.51 machines too lol.
The Internet was a very different thing back then. I used to spend ages on CBBC games and other random sites I've forgotten by now xD
Yes and no, brought this Badboy to our Lan last Saturday and it was Fun to play on it, but it weights over 38kg.
Yeah... playing runescape in computer class then the browser got blocked so I used the old .txt to .bat trick to open it
@echo off was hackerman level stuff to my peers
I'm old enough to recognise an iomega ZIP drive.
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.
Yep can confirm. I was a computer technician in a UK university throughout the 1990's, and we had 8 labs with PCs and Macs, and at the very beginning, BBC Micros, Atari STs, and even Sun SparcStations. Not sure I miss it - certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on "older" PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs, or self-combusting mice. I did enjoy it, though - being right there as the World Wide Web was born, and each new year brought faster CPUs, better colour graphics, and progressively worse versions of Windows...
I miss the 35 cent scribbler and way better gym equipment.
