I saw some post the other day by a teenaged girl, saying something along the lines of “y’all are mixing up the Challenger explosion and 9/11. There’s NO WAY teachers actually turned the classroom TVs on to watch the towers fall. You millennials didn’t watch it happen live.”
Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.
I believe you (I’m 29) but why did everyone’s teacher wheel in the TV cart?
My school, we had a CRT TV up in the corner of each room. How else would we see the student-produced morning announcements?
Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.
then got sent home from school that day and saw it covered everywhere and it was the only thing everyone would talk about and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about. After a while it was just fucking annoying to hear about it.
I’m in Europe. I still remember my dad calling me on the landline after school, telling me to “turn on the TV and have fun”. To this day I don’t understand why he added the “have fun” part…
I was literally in between jobs, at home which at the time was in The Netherlands and by chance was watching CNN International and saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers as it happened.
So, live, a 1/4 of the way around the World.
It was our generation’s Pearl Harbour. You remember the exact moment you heard about it and what you were doing.
For me, I was in the car, getting driven back to school after having gone home for lunch.
enlaserfication
“Buffer underrun.”
They’re burning to see deez nuts! Got 'em!
You ever have a car cd player that plays files? You could put every song you downloaded from LimeWire onto a single disc.
That was an amazing time to be alive. I miss it sometimes. No need for a music streaming service when you have 4 gigs of music on one CD. Then If you get bored you can pull out the other CDs that also have stupid amounts of music. Or maybe you burned all of a language learning program onto one disc. ALL of the language discs onto one.
When I started listening to the harry Potter audiobooks I had the first 4 on tape. They filled a small suitcase.
I got 5 and 6 on CDs, each with ~20-25 CDs.
The 7th book came on mp3 CDs. Just 3 for the whole book. It absolutely blew my mindhow did you 4 gigs of music on a 700m CD??
He probably meant dvd.
They probably mean the mp3 equivalent of what it would be in wav, since most any CD player that could genuinely care about files could play mp3’s. … Although that could easily get past six CDs on one’s worth so… I dunno’!
I had a 6 disc changer in the trunk AND a head unit that could play mp3s … coolest nerd in the parking lot
Could the disc changer play files? If you filled all 6 with files, I think you would have had all of music ever made up until 2004. Which is when I’m assuming you had this car.
It was a mk4 Jetta, I had a stupid wiring harness adapter from an Acura spliced inbetween the Bose system and the aftermarket head unit, but … yes.
We discovered the 6 disc changer in the trunk cuz my mom had been driving the car and hated it because she “needed” to use a portable cd player with a cassette adapter. I put a head unit that could handle mp3s and had a usb port, no cd slot because of the 6 disc changer.
Loved that car.
We had so much music at our disposal whole smoking blunts in it
I was a Napster guy, then a Kazaa guy. I had moved on to torrents by the time Limewire was the big thing.
Though I haven’t actually pirated anything in over 10 years. Was thinking of getting back into it and setting up a Jellyfin to keep some family members from giving money to streaming services that support fascists, but don’t even know where to get files anymore. I’ve already got a VPN for privacy reasons, so I think I’m good there, but I can’t imagine Pirate Bay is still a safe source
Pirate bay is still a great source if you use your brain in terms of the types of files you are downloading etc. I get a lot of TV shows etc from there with no issues at all.
You ever have a car cd player that plays files?
It’s pretty common.
My current car can do that (2019 Toyota) with the factory player.
As could every car I have owned in the previous couple decades.
It was 2002. Was going on a 1 year assignment to Australia.
Spent almost 24 straight hours feeding CD after CD into my fancy 6x reader, ripping and converting to MP3. Brought my whole 5’ high tower of music on the plane in a harddrive.
Almost 25 years later(!), same direcory has been added to and copied to a hosted VPS from which I stream.
It’s slang for using Nero burning ROM
And people still say Germans lack a sense of humor…
Still doing it today. Its not an old thing. I have hundreds of Cds. Best form of physical media for me.
Especially with insanity HDD costs. I did the math, and while ridiculous, buying blank DVDs vs a 12 tb hard drive is only minimally more expensive and discs last longer. HDDs die all the time.
Obviously I still use drives but disks are definitely viable especially as data centers continue to ruin everything.
used to have a bunch of DVDs with my favourite shows. but I kept them on a spindle and didn’t look at them for years, only to find out they had all become unreadable
I keep hearing this but Ive yet to find an unreadable disk. I think they are way more robust than most think. Same with vhs. Never had an issue even after being stores in non climate controlled storages for years.
Meanwhile ive had dozens of HDDs and sdds die.
Just 2 years ago i got 3 DOA Wd red HDDs. The nice ones, not cheapo seagates barracudas. Those are shit.
Funnily enough I have a Seagate constellation which is supposed to be trash and its over 6 years old now. Maybe more.
maybe if you store them better than I did they dont become unreadable son quickly. personally I’ve sadly not much luck with them. Thankfully it did push me to find new encodes of the shows and I got much better quality replacements for most of them
CDz burning nutz!
Might wanna see a doctor.
The Old Magic Will not be Discussed with Children of New
My mother just gave me the walkman I had in high school, which I guess was in a box somewhere in her house. It still works, and in it was a cassette I taped off the radio
Is that even legal??
Call the feds
Yeah, it would be fair use. Selling the tape would be illegal tho.
We all taped the radio. If we ran out of cassettes we’d get sticky tape and put it over the hole at the top to allow recording over recorded stuff we didn’t want
A friend of mine spent weeks creating a single cassette mixtape off pausing recording while songs were being played.
No, it was not legal. Did I give a fuck. Nope.
Had an audiophile buddy who bought tons of Japanese import vinyl records which he would burn(copy) to tape for me. Later on to CD then even later to DVD’s. Many years later bought tons of original CD’s at flea markets at rock bottom prices. Mainly got them for the artwork. Was not ever worried about the illegality of it.
Edit: I also have a boatload of .flac rock songs and oldies I downloaded as well and have stashed away.
It’s totally legal to tape the radio for personal use
Snitches get stitches.
Not only legal, this was an old way of distributing software.
In the early 1980s, engineers over at the Dutch broadcasting organization Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) had this fantastic idea of distributing computer programs over the radio
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/people-once-downloaded-games-from-radio.html?m=1
Yeah but I read it took forever to download them.
Everything about computers was slow then. There was a time when you could read text faster than modems could run text through them.
I wish I was born in 1970 so I could’ve experienced all the old technologies as well as the premium LSD of the 90’s. So many people used to tell me, “You would’ve done great int he 80’s,” I didn’t know what that meant until I was older and they’re right, I would’ve enjoyed myself and I would’ve been one of those nerdy fuckers. Then again, I’ve enjoyed myself throughout my life and I am a nerdy fucker lol.
The first OS I ever used was Windows 95 in 1998 at 6 years old. I didn’t grasp the inconvenience of dial-up until I was a little older but everything after Windows 2000 was fast.
My son who’s 15 now had a word problem when he was about 9. It was something like “Billy burned 9 CDs and April burned 4 CDs, how many CDs did they have in total”. He asked me for help because he didn’t understand how the answer wasn’t 0 CDs. FML.
“How is burning a CD supposed to make a copy, again?”
It softens the plastic so you can press it to the original and copy the grooves
When I was 15 I bought a CD burner for my PC. This was circa 1999 and Napster. It cost about $250 (which is a little over $500 in 2026) and it had to be installed and in a more complex fashion beyond plug USB and let’s drivers auto install. I was selling custom CDs for $5 with case inserts and paid off the burner in about a month. Then someone snitched on me in school and eventually burners started becoming standard on all new machines
Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?
If you didn’t install that you couldn’t actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn’t have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we’re talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).
When I was 10 or 11 I once stole a shitload of blank cds from the church my father was the pastor of so that I could burn pirated audiobooks to listen to at night.
0% chance you didn’t grow up to be a nerd.
If you had said music, it would have been 15-20%. But audiobooks? 0.
