This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…

  • UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca
    0·
    28 days ago

    I remember getting a ton of mp3 with kazaa which was shut down, replaced by limewire.

    Then all my mp3 disappeared from my pentium replaced by a copyright rar file.

    I hope they paid for winrar…

        • ummthatguy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          28 days ago

          Oh, aye. Bounced through all those programs.

          Learned about computer viruses and protection the hard way.

        • MintyFresh@lemmy.world
          0·
          28 days ago

          Lol I forgot all about it till just now! I had an almost out of body trip into memory. Shitty living room, shitty weed, off brand cigarettes, one of those flat screen CRT monstrosities that was top of the line at the time. Downloading what we hoped was family guy 2kb a min. The good ol days.

    • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
      0·
      28 days ago

      Yeah, I was going to bring up Turbo buttons, but then realised that the Commodore Vic 20 in my bedroom predates that by quite some margin 😇

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        28 days ago

        Vic 20 -> C=64 -> few 386/486 units -> AMD K6-2 and a ton of stuff after that. And maybe something in between.

        And now I’m writing this in my garage computer which I picked up from a e-waste pile at work few years back and it has more computing power than pretty much all the systems combined I had before being 18 years old. And when we (as a family) got our first “mobile” phone it was hardwired to a car electronics since they took ‘a bit’ more power than the supercomputers we carry in our pockets today (obviously Li-ion batteries were not a thing either, but that old Motorola NMT450 took a crapload of power by todays standards).

        It’s been a wild ride so far. My grandparents were on top of the technology when they got the first landline phone around the neighborhood (I’m living in a rural area so it was not a new invention back then by any stretch) and now I can just yell to a entity in my palm to show me pictures from another planet or a high definition live video from Earth orbit.

        And still I’m somehow trying to teach basic tehcnology concepts to both my parents and my kids. It’s bizarre to try and explain about benefits of touch typing to a 16 year old who thinks it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to type out an essay at school containing 2000 words in an hour (33wpm)…

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        28 days ago

        My computer’s mobo was so shitty, it played .midi files badly. I was shocked when I went to a mate’s and the same midis sounded like the song they’re actually supposed to be.

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        0·
        28 days ago

        And rmvb diles were all the rage. Those sweet video files with only 32MB… Peak compression. What the world was before h264 and before youtube existed was amazing.

        • BenLeMan@lemmy.world
          0·
          26 days ago

          Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer’s amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).

          • devfuuu@lemmy.world
            0·
            28 days ago

            Ohhh yeah, the golden age, xvid, divx, mp3, wmv, rmvb, quicktime videos, installing codec packs in windows…

            I have a cd somewhere with the second matrix movie in 2 parts with a shitty resolution full of pixels and barely able to see with a magnifying glass, but watched it like that.

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
            0·
            28 days ago

            I put mine in a .zip file and renamed the file extension to .dll and stuck it in the system32 folder haha. Hide file extensions when done and make the file hidden. Blammo!

  • SSNs4evr@leminal.space
    0·
    27 days ago

    So, shortly after checking aboard the first fast-attack submarine I served on, in April 1991, the boat was locked down one evening, when the engineer couldn’t find his Zenith SuperSport 286e computer. Suspecting someone stole it, the boat was locked down and searched - for 3 hours. Everyone was really angry… It’s 2025 and I remember it well.

    Anyway, after 3 hours or so, at the Captains insistence, the ENG, doing paperwork in his stateroom, let someone else in, to look for his computer. There it was, sitting plain as day, on his bunk, where his pillow should have been. The ENG said he didn’t notice it, as he thought it was his pillow…gross, considering everyone else’s pillowcase was white.

    The Captain immediately lifted the lockdown, and all the off-duty people went home. The anger lingered though, and the Engineer seemed to have a dark cloud over his head. He was fired a few months later, and I’ve always wondered if it had something to do with that computer - I was just too new to know anything about the guy, and I didn’t work in engineering.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    28 days ago

    Shiiit I had to block people at work from running bearshare and limewire

    We didn’t really have the right equipment for it. It was early enough in Windows that I couldn’t adequately secure the developers from running crap on their workstations.

    I eventually managed to get our antivirus to flag the DLLs for the applications as viruses, that caused a little bit of an uproar.

  • epicstove@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    27 days ago

    I can still sorta remember as a kid, sitting down at a chunky old Dell PC running Windows XP, while my dad inserted a CD for some Go Diago go computer game.

    We still have that old computer. We tried to throw Linux on it to see if we could use it for something but I think it’s truly beyond saving.

  • oppy1984@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    28 days ago

    2001, Dre’s album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre’s new album five bucks right here.

    He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
      0·
      28 days ago

      There was a kid who was selling the cheat codes for pokemon he printed off gamefaqs at my school. One of my friends found out I had internet access and asked me if I would get them for him. After I did that some other people asked me as well. Eventually the kid who was selling them got wind of it and got a couple of his other friends together to jump me on the playground at recess. I remember laying on the ground looking up at him standing over me threatening me if I didn’t stop doing that and just thinking “this is really stupid…”

  • maz1@lemmy.world
    0·
    28 days ago

    The only thing this meme is missing are the Wendy’s napkins in the glovebox of my 1991 Pontiac Sunbird that I give my ex-girlfriend to blot her eyes after this latest mix cd is finally the one to blow her fucking mind

  • spookex@lemmy.world
    0·
    28 days ago

    I remember doing that…

    last year (besides limewire, I needed some CDs to copy to minidiscs)