I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.
Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer…
Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad’s work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.
I remember
- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)
- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds
- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff
- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.
- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.
I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.
After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.
Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.
I grew up pretty poor. When I was a kid my dad brought home a pentium 2 that didn’t work. He picked it out of the garbage, told me I could have it, but that it didn’t work.
We often rode the bus to school. We would get off at school and my parents would get off at work. And then we would meet them on the bus on the way home.
After getting the computer we started stopping off at the library, so I could check out books about computers. I would take them home and start reading. (I was illiterate until I was 10 years old, and this really kicked off my reading ability, to this day I still read 100-120 books per year)
Over time I was able to figure out enough to diagnose the issue (bad PSU and bad HDD), garbage pick replacements, and then install DOS from floppy I got from school.
From there I started picking up as many parts and computers as I could and filling my corner of our studio apartment with parts. I loved writing text files and documenting what I was doing, like a little knowledgebase of what I was figuring out. Eventually, we got evicted, and due to having to live in our car for a couple of years I had to give up my computer. Left it out in the curb. Ever since, I have been obsessed with terminal based interfaces and to this day almost exclusively use terminal.
Copying code out of a magazine to put into debug.com to run
Flipping 5.25 disks over on Apple II since their drives weren’t dual-sided
If you don’t like vi, you should try edlin
Pressing the “interrupt” button on Mac classics and feeling like a hacker
Hey that sounds like only about 19.2k not 28.8!
X/y/zmodem wars
Lots
Oh MAN those magazine listings!
I remember my mom, bless her, reading them to me so I could type the bloody things in becauase, being partially blind, I couldn’t get the bloody page close enough to my face to properly read the infinite lines of DATA statements :)
And then, years later, they finally came out with checksum programs so you could see a number at the end of each line and compare it with what was in the magazine.
Crazy to think back, innit? :)
I actually love vi to this day. As long as you understand the basic concepts (how to navigate, append/insert, switch between modes, save and exit) it’s great. I’m a touch-typer so I could whiz around vi like nobody’s business.
HATED Emacs though
For me as a kid growing up in the 80s, it’s absolutely walking into Radio Shack (my favorite place in the mall next to the arcade!) and seeing a TRE-80 Model II set up for demo.
Kind of intresting as I think about it that I ended up not going for a Tandy computer and instead bought an Atari ;) No regrets. I still adore my 800XL!
Reading computer magazines and books, and eagerly anticipating getting my hands on such material. Today’s kids born in an online era of infinite content just can’t imagine how difficult it was back them to get technical publications and information, printed or otherwise.
So much this!
I remember having to order tech books from Waldenbooks, and getting blank stares from the clerk, who’d basically tell me they were never going to actually receive it after I’d waited WEEKS.
Then I finally got to visit QuantumBooks, a technical bookstore in Kendall Square Cambridge, and it was like going to heaven :)
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Desqview, swapping between GoldEd and the BBS watching the users playing LoRD and other games. And before that, scrambling to quit my game and get the BBS back up when I was using my 286 for gaming instead of leaving the BBS running.
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Those terrible, terrible CGA games that I played because for a couple years, I only had CGA and no EGA. The high pitched whine of the CGA monitor whenever I stood behind it.
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When I finally got OS/2, and could play Descent or Doom, while the BBS was handling a phone call in the background.
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Even older, printing out yet another Bill the Cat on my dot matrix printer.
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Typing in games from Compute Magazine into my Atari 130xe, but the checksum being wrong because I used abbreviated basic commands due to being a lazy typist.
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Getting killed by that darn Terminator in Zone 2 of LOD again…
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Going to my Uncle’s house to transfer all of Kings Quest 6 from 1.44mb to 1.2mb floppies.
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Sitting there watching with satisfaction as MSDOS 6.22 DEFRAG.EXE did its thing.
I remember using QEMM for the first time and finally being able to load games and applications that would otherwise not work.
I remember having to fiddle with IRQ settings to get sound working.
I remember the C64 emulator and finally being able to play Ultima 4 without having to constantly switch disks.
I remember the experimental OS and hardware explosions: QNX (still alive as an automotive OS), BeOS, MenuetOS, Transmeta Crusoe.
The Voodoo graphics cards!
The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like “ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of”.
Floppies. So many floppies.
All unlabelled, with a bunch of corrupted ones but you never threw them out just in case it was a one off and you really needed that extra megabyte? Or was that just me?
And I still have them. In a box. And any day now I’ll get my double speed Sony USB floppy drive and image them. And clearly I’ll still be able to open the files that are on them.
