Ask Lemmy

Fuck yeah.

We had it way better than we knew.

Not much, but I do miss the fact that school computers were linux and we used free software to learn basic computer stuff. Nowadays the our school system is held ar gunpoint by google&co

bounces grimy rubber mouse ball off the back of your head

Yes, computers were fun and exciting. Now they just suck.

Unless Linux. But even then it takes an effort to disable all the bloat and spyware bs in the bios.

Computers were still exciting. And hadn't been enshitified.

Yes. Websites were dead easy to make. I could fit all my music onto one floppy disk because I saved them as midis. There were no standards for sound or graphics cards so everything played different on different computers. You could access information without needing to sign up because emails were just emerging. You could get an email address with a name you wanted. Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia yet. Autodesk hadn't bought 3ds max yet. Animated gifs. Flying toaster screensavers. In fact, the screensavers had sound! Would give you a great attack if you left your speakers on.

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 don't miss windows, but I do miss sitting in the same era computer labs with either the university's own flavor of red hat, or SPARCstations.

The internet was a lot more fun 30 years ago. I guess partly because it felt like magic, and after a degree and some decades in the industry the illusion is gone.

Also, it used to be about sharing pictures of your cat or listing your favourite books. Now everyone is trying to either sell you something or source everything about you to be able to sell you something with more accuracy.

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

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

i can still literally smell and remember the atmosphere in those IT classes:

• PCs takes 10 mins to boot sometimes 30 mins. By the time it boots, we are out of time and cant play any games. Yes we are allowed the last 10 mins of class to play games.

• Remember DAVE the game?

• Keyboards are very satisfying to type on. Mouse is a hit n miss because they have those ball thing to control the direction. I.e. sometimes the ball gets stuck and you cannot click or scroll.

• A bunch of geeks try to send message using net send command. We thought we are the gangsters.

• Nothing worse than having an IT class after lunch, you have like 50 kids and 25 pcs and there are NO A.C. The only thing you have is the ceiling fan.

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

By this time i had already gotten kicked out of school for the first time. Lucky for me our family had to have a computer for business so I had access to a computer almost as long as I can remember. I'm thinking around this time I had my own Amega to play with.

I graduated in the early 90s and never had a room like this. But I do remember rooms with electric typewriters laid out like that

Despite having a very nostalgic soft spot for my 16-bit and 8-bit home computers, these labs do nothing for me. I worked in so many as an technician at a uni and in various other tech support roles in my 20s that these generic cream boxes leave me kinda cold. Give me an Amiga, an ST or even a ZX Spectrum any day. Probably cos I'm old AF 🤣

Yeah but not because of the computers.

Computer lab day!

Computer class in high school back then for me was treating them as glorified typewriters. I fooled around with some VBScript as that’s all we had available (I was very fortunate my grade school teacher taught us LOGO) and I managed to script kiddy my way into admin access for the internet filter for my friends so we could play stuff on Newgrounds. My career advisor told me to get a science degree because there was no future in computers, haha.

Yeah, sorta but it was the late 80s and we were on apple 2’s playing Oregon Trail.

The heat in those rooms my goodness

With a little pre-planning and netsend you could scare the crap out of whoever you wanted!

Nope.

Yeah I remember going to the "computer lab" and doing school work searching askjeves for answers.

Rose colored glasses.

In my nearest CCollege in the mid 2000s, they w were still using FLOPPY DISCS and old macs for computer labs. its only until few years later we finally got funding for upgrades, i think the 08 crash really screwed things up.