Ask Lemmy

Not much, but I miss the years back then.

Is this referring to computer labs in schools in general? This is at least Win 95 (and the school system didn't bother to update things in 98), so I would have been in high school with these, and thinking back we had very similar machines. I do kind of miss it because my friends and I had setup a hidden series of IRC servers on a few PCs. So, while we were supposed to be learning to type, we'd just chat. In retrospect, it was a good idea that was poorly implemented (people will eventually get around anything that they have physical access to) but the modern idea of kids in schools just having a ChromeBook, tablet, phone, or w/e is kind of fucked up. We had access to the computer lab for 1 period a day vs. the modern 24/7.

I think that in the end my real opinion is that I don't miss this, I miss my friends and I testing the limits of the security for both network and individual PC. We did some wild stuff with our TI-83s. One of my friends from that time was a certified Machine God and wrote an assembly program for his TI that would allow him (and by extension us) to surreptitiously plug in our calculators to those PCs via serial and effectively "dial out" bypassing the restrictions. It was a wild time.

Not really. I don't like nosy people and I don't like having to hear them loudly clacking keys.

My brother told me what it was like. Sounded much more fun than what we have today.

THAT was a service worth paying for (internet cafes). They sound really fun.

I never got to experience it...

Yep. There weren't devices everywhere so we all learned about them together, hunted for Easter eggs, and trolled each other by inverting mice and flipping screens and all of that. It felt cleaner because there wasn't an ad on every screen. I remember getting a book with exercises in it and just working through it for keyboarding, and going to the lab in a class to do research for a report (or just goof around on the Internet). I also remember in later high school when the IT director informed us very proudly the school had almost a TB of storage across our several computer labs like this.

Good times. I do also remember having THE computer for the school and it rolled in on a heavy cart.

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

They said learn to code. 😂

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

My thirties? meh

What I miss a lot more than the hardware was the straightforwardness of coding. In those days we largely just translated process logic into code, we didn't have to cobble together frameworks, packages, libraries and containers. The code itself took more work but we could do it without knowing as much as devs have to know now.

Rick Rosner had this to say about high school:

High school's attractive to me, not necessarily because you have a good time, but because it's clear why you are miserable.

I would go for a redo if I could. I would know better not to trust the guidance councilors or school therapists. No compromises on the classes I really should have been in.

Not really, but I do remember those things used to keep a room warm.

Yes, yes, a million times yes!

Ah yes, my first exposure to Hamster Dance was in that room...

Where are the flying toasters?

Windows 95 was fun back then. Mostly because the security in those networks was, let say, non-existing. You had full access to every computers drives. And if you'd find the image that was used as the desktop background and changed it, windows would refresh the image automatically. Ofcourse we were very creative with the messages we left. And smart enough to keep the original to put back when our victim tried to get the teacher involved. We could have errased the document on the diskettes too, but we weren't that horrible.

In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.

So nostalgic

You better believe I was degaussing as many CRTs as I could.

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

I see your nostalgia and raise you this:

No.