Y’all remember the computer room? Like that guest bedroom or whatever that wasn’t really used for anything other than housing The Computer?
Plus all the accoutrements that invariably went along with The Computer.
A printer and a scanner
A filing cabinet for all the things you liked to print and scan
A rack full of CD-ROM disks like Encarta 95 and Ecco The Dolphin and CorelDRAW 4
A beige container with clear plastic lid for storing floppy disks, that for some reason had a lock on it as if floppy disks were the Crown Jewels
....i miss having no responsibilites.
So many accoutrements! This was also the original home of the box of random cables that lived under the bed. Some day I’ll be buried with those cables.
I can still hear the white noise ringing of the hard drives that hit you as soon as you walked in. So good
When my mom took my computer out of my room, I used to crawl to the computer room after she went to bed to use it. Fun times.
After my dad had locked me out of the computer room, I learned how to pick locks. And I'm not even kidding.
I knew a kid whose mom didn't want him using the internet after she went to bed so she unplugged their cable modem each night and locked it in a goddamn safe lol. I think he eventually found a similar model at CompUSA or Best Buy and just got his own.
Yeah, unless you grew up in the Bible belt then it was in the corner of the dining room with no privacy.
Me and my brother established ourselves as like The computer kids so my extended family just dumped off all there broken and old computers
Now we have a room, not for using them but to store all the random tech we have accumulated
And it was always cold because someone's father would always say something like "I'm not paying to heat that room no one is ever in it."
The dads of two guys I knew remodelled their entire basements to accommodate "the computer." Now writing this down, it sounds like they bought VAXes or something, but it was just plain old Pentiums, plus printers and stuff.
They were just looking for an excuse to remodel the basement and “the computer” made it seem like something they were doing for the family.
Remember? I still have one.
We call them "home offices" now but ultimately they're still the same thing lol
I could never find the computer room.
id use it to play backyard baseball all day
Yeah, it's called an office, I still have one to do work and game in.
That was pretty normal when I was 10. I was born in the 80s. It was novel like TV in the 1950s or radio in the 1920s.
Yep same. AOL chatrooms and shock sites like rotten(dot)com were a staple of middle school sleepovers.
This is how we did it in the 00s too. Then I remember when I got to college and everyone had a laptop - but we still reflexively did all of our hanging out in the same room, just showing each other youtube/newgrounds videos we liked in between classes.
That was peak internet for me, everything since has been a pale shadow.
I'm in my 20s and it wasn't any different for me
"Get off the computer, I have to make a phone call!" -My childhood
That's why I waited until 2 am to dial in to the local BBSes. On a Tuesday. During the school year.
*Taps temple*
Get off the phone, I need to play counter-strike - My childhood
In the mid-90s my dad bought a Compaq Presario and the LucasArts games multi-pack. X-Wing, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Indiana Jones. Amazing. I was like a God.
I also remember playing a game called The Neverhood, which was a claymation liminal space game. Gave me nightmares of being trapped there, but it was still one of my favorites.
LucasArts was goated at that time
Damn this thread is making me feel ancient.
This was my first computer.
I still kick ass at Snake Byte.
(Also, The Neverhood has one of the best game soundtracks of all time. I still listen to it.)
This was my computer lab at school. Vividly remember the double stacked apple floppy drives and the wood box of floppy discs that you could check out at the school library to use the on the computers.
Didn't have a home PC until the Commodore 64. Still have that one in a box somewhere with way too many accessories.
Everybody wayyyohhhh
Mmmm-zibadaba zibadaba zadap-eee!
My gravy love, potaties love...
https://youtu.be/pEjBlL64SuU for the uninitiated
I had the exact same Lucas arts box set. Each of those games was amazing! And I think I actually finished them all. I ran them on my Packard Bell Pentium 75 with 8mb of ram. So much fun then!
Neverhood and Sam & Max were great games.
Neverhood was my fucking childhood, man. The day I beat the game my grandfather and I celebrated. Add to that Myst, RCT1, Zoo Tycoon, and eGames Pack Volume 1 (which had DEMONSTAR on it) and you've encapsulated basically 100% of my gaming experience until I discovered Minecraft in 09-10.
Did you check out the Neverhood sequel from a few years ago? Was via Kickstarter, I think.
I was whatever was exactly one generation later. Also a Compaq but my games were a demo pack of X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Dark Forces, and Yoda Stories.
Tie Fighter and Dark forces were great games, but I always liked Xwing, because I was more accurate when the aiming reticle was locked center screen.
FUCK YES NEVERHOOD
Day of the tentacle, lol. I remembers that. as well as prince of Persia and commander Keen
Neighbor: gets nice computer
Me: is this for me 🥺👉👈
I'm guessing the OOP was born early to mid 80s.
Could even be late 90s or early 2000s in some places
Born in 2000, my parents had a computer (running Windows XP) but it was only for work. Went over to my friends' houses to experience the information superhighway.
I did it being born in 94. It wasn't about who has access to the internet, it's that I wanted to hang out with my friend in person like a normal 10 year old but the Internet was the coolest thing to do at the time.
83 baby here. Perfect timing. Grew up during the early internet, before Facebook and phone cameras. No such thing as online bullying and nobody could film you getting beaten up.
Not necessarily, I did that as a kid in the late 2000s. My friend's parents had an old mac in their basement that we would play flash games and watch stupid youtube videos on.
I remember sharing porn on floppy disks in highschool. I didn't have Internet yet so a few of my friends were gods among men.
Click here if you're over 18?
Not much has changed there. Unless you live in a nanny state of "small government" and "save the children". Bitch you turned out fine! Let em rub one out in peace.
So this guy I knew was trading porn. Mostly pics, a few low-res clips. Some warez here and there, too. Most people did not have fast internet yet, let alone a CD burner. He'd lug around these large wooden crates filled to the brim with home-made porn collection CDs. It was totally out there.
Cardboard box of playboys in the woods, but for the digital age
My friend used to print out pics on plain paper and distribute to us. what a champ
Son: Mom! We need more ink!
Mom: What!? I just bought ink last week!
Mom: What have you been printing!?
Son: IDK!? School Stuff!?
Mom: Okay sweetie. I'll get you some more from the Office Max!
set to the tune of Treat the Kids Right by The Interrupters
Let the kids wank
Or you're gonna get a spank
I used to phone the internet and sometimes it'd be busy and I'd have to phone it back later.
No I can't relate to that memory because nobody had internet when I was 10 🥲
We got internet when I was around 7, Prodigy, 1994 or 1995. I never used it because there wasn't shit for a kid to do. We had Prodigy until like 2002. My old man signed a long contract with them, it was a good deal, but wouldn't you know, right after he signed it, cable internet became available. And you can bet 14 year old me wore him down, it was not a want, but a need.
Living in a university town with a much older, tech-savvy brother meant I first used the internet in 1990 at the age of 13. I used the internet before pretty much anyone I know other than my brother, but I was on MU*s and Usenet like it was home and then I discovered IRC...
I'm not saying I was smart, just lucky. In fact, I was pretty stupid about the internet. I remember seeing an early website in 1993 maybe and saying something like, "it's cool, but it will never replace Gopher."
That's an impressive level of early adopting :-)
Gopher was brought back to life later
We actually went to a local department store (Karstadt), where they had a few computers lined up for people to play around with. It was all really expensive and very very beige, as was the style at the time. So we went there to "try out" the computers until the store clerks would approach us, eyebrow raised, asking if we were intending to buy one. Yes Mister, I am 10, and I would like to buy this computer that is about 5000 times my weekly allowance! I used to visit a neighbour who lived in the same house who actually had a computer that was hooked up to a TV. He was developing a game for it, and I was his alpha tester. It was way cool. It was so long ago that I forgot what the game was really about, but I loved going there and playing it everytime he finished a new part of it. Later, my mother would buy an Atari Mega ST 1 with an SM124 screen and one of those break-your-wrist mouses they had at the time. She had to chase me away from that to get any work done. It wasn't until 1993 that I would get my first own PC that I could use as much and as long as I wanted. Internet I got when I got a 14.4k modem. Dialed in to a BBS first, which only gave me usenet. Then later, the first internet provider opened in our town, and so I had 'real' internet. But damnit, did that shit cost money. Not the internet access itself, but the fees for the phone line, because we had to pay per minute even for local calls.
I'd say good times, but then I remember things like having to edit your startup files every time you wanted to play a different game, and how slow and horrible and expensive (not to mention beige) everything was.
I did the same with gaming consoles at Conrad (when they still had physical stores). When you were there early in the afternoon you could play the latest releases on the newest consoles.
I remember when digital audio first became available and downloading a supercut (which we didn't have a word for then) of Homer Simpson saying "d'oh". We probably had to wait at least half an hour, and then we didn't have a program on the computer that could play audio files (or at least not one we could find) so we had to search around and wait even longer to download some shareware program (Goldwave)
Assuming Windows, I think Sound Recorder should have worked. I remember wasting many hours just playing with it by reversing, speeding up, or slowing down my voice that I recorded on the old, beige Bob Barker-like standing microphone.
My first sound file was a supercut of Keiko O'Brien giving birth on Star Trek: The Next Generation, edited to make it sound like an orgasm 😆
Not much editing was needed lmao!
I still use Goldwave to this day, so about 20 years. Been using the free version the entire time. I just edit some file every so often to reset my clicks. I need to just buy it, but for some reason I remember intentionally not buying it, maybe was subscription or something.
I was surprised to look it up and see it still kicking. I actually paid for it but haven't used it in probably 15 years
I miss Audiogalaxy. I got so many BBC radio dramas from there and I love radio drama. I've gotten a lot of them I've lost over the years back, and a lot of new ones, thanks to the Internet Archive, but it's a fraction of what I used to have.
But backing up data back then was way too expensive except on CD-Rs and I have no idea where those CD-Rs went. They're long gone now.
Some did this because it was a long time ago and the internet was new and only a few people had it.
Some people did this because the internet wasn't new, and the parents knew what kind of trouble giving a 10 year old unmonitored access to the internet could lead to - which meant that they would have to travel to that one friend's house whose parents didn't give a damn.
Then there are those that grew up after the age of smart phones and can't understand how two people could read from the same phone screen at the same time.
I'm in that first group and can still hear the squeal of the dial-up modem then, "You've got mail!"
Some people did this because the internet wasn't new, and the parents knew what kind of trouble giving a 10 year old unmonitored access to the internet could lead to...
Happy Tree Friends and helicopter dick jumpscares, among other things.
The internet? At those prices?
We had to go to each others houses to look at CD-ROMs!
That's just what we did until like... Jeez... 2006?
Not even, I was playing EverQuest in 2000. And WoW in 2004.
My mother would tell us that she especially loved visiting her grandparent's house because they had color tv
I remember learning about the Internet in school and coming home and asking my parents if we could get it. I was then informed we had the Internet for over a decade (both my parents were in IT and remoted in to work). I was so excited to go to pokemon.com but while lecturing me about URLs and spell checking my mom typed in pokeman.com. Very different site...
Talked to my friends the next day and none of them had internet so I got to brag about the pokemon info I had and about a cool wrestling site I found.
Old enough to have had a Commodore 64 and Atari 2600.
You just missed the golden era of the VIC-20, when you had to walk over to the house of the friend that had one and type in the BASIC code for a game before you could play it, since it didn't originally have a hard drive and the friend's mom was too cheap to buy a tape drive or any game cartridges.
Haha my dad had a vic20 and he has told me a story almost exactly like that
I had a Texas Instruments 99/4A, and my parents were also too cheap to buy a tape drive! Typing in pages and pages of inscrutable BASIC (endless lines of DATA in hex for sounds or graphics) only to find out at the end that you made a mistake somewhere and it's broken or glitchy or just won't run. Pretty sure I have PTSD from those days!
Coleco ADAM over here
One of my buddies had a AOL birthday party where we got the internet for "30 days free" and we just spent the time taking turns chatting with people in chatrooms.
Old enough to remember a world without the internet.
I would go to my friends house to play RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 she bought for 60$, i would spent the day playing with her on a single computer taking turns and discovering the game and then walk 45 minutes back home. 🥰
Remember when nobody had internet service for the most part and you had only a little window of time to use Freenet?
And holy shit if some one used the phone
I remember trying to disable the banner ad on NetZero.
Browsing atomfilms.com with friends after school on their family computer, housed in a stained wood "computer desk/cabinet" in the living room. Man, that takes me back. Haven't thought about that in a while... Searching for Atom Films took me to a depressing Wikipedia page detailing its death. Where does the time go?
I’d say the window of overlap for “look at the computer” and “information superhighway” was actually pretty small for most people.
Maybe 1996-2001?
So then you factor in how old people would have been during that period who would have done this. Being generous, I’d say 9-18. At different ages in that range “going to my friend’s place to look at the computer” would have been a euphemism for different things.
But the range there would be from 1977-1992, which is actually pretty impressive for a cultural moment. Essentially, most millennials.
I remember use of the phrase "information superhighway" only really existing for a short window around the early days of the WWW while it was still novel and exciting and before it started to become mundane. I'd say you're bang on for the window.
Those were the best days of the Internet, and not just because I was a teenager who'd discovered there were pictures of boobs on it.
“information superhighway”
The term was actually coined by Al Gore in 1978 but came into widespread usage in the mid-1990s as the Internet took off.
Sure I memba!! I also memba getting yelled at for tying up the only phone line 😭
Heh, I ended up getting a job to pay for a second phone line.
Back in the day we use to use dield internet after midnight cause one would pay only one phonecall that would last until you hang-up. I used to go to a relatives house that I hated, only to play Doom at their's PCs. I mean, only to watch her playing.
I remember my friend showing a BBS that his uncle had got him set up on and being blown away. Also, I guess my parents were impressed by Spokesdude Bronson Pinchot (The Bronster), because they got us a US Videotel console for almost a year.
Be me, 6 or 7 years old, scrolling through BBS stuff for many hours, blissfully unaware of our ISP being long distance until my mom realized what was happening and totally freaked out
"Information superhighway" 🤣
More like flash games and Runescape private servers.
As a kid, all of us nerds got our own computers eventually after much begging. (Commodore 64s and such.)
And occasionally, we had the magical moments when we got to visit the occasional person who had a big computer. (PC clones)
No information superhighways yet!
The information superhighway? You mean the cassette tape?
And then you or your friend, depending on who had the tape drive, asked what it sounded like in the stereo, and your friend said, "it sounds awful" and you said to put it in anyway and he did and it sounded awful. But cool.
The long and winding road.
I think this was probably still a common thing for people in their 30s now, it wasn't that long ago
I remember going with my friend to his parents flat to play the OG Doom on their computer. Good times.
Same. Firing up Doom and Wolfenstein from the DOS command prompt at your friends house and everyone taking turns was definitely normal
My best friend got cable internet around the same time we had just gotten dial-up at home, you're darn right I was gonna go over there so we could experience the Information Superhighway(r) together
I remember my friends would be cramming around our buddy's computer watching him play Sim Ant. Ran on DOS I think.
Remember that one friend you had who's parents would let them play DOOM so your group of friends would all go over to their house and take turns being exposed to all the blood and violence a kid could ever hope for? That was me. I was that kid with the young cool parents.
I'm a 2000s child and did this
I remember my, well, the house's first computer, a Windows 95 machine (no idea about the actual specs). Shit was magical to my then 5 year old eyes. The internet only came some 3 years later and time online was heavily regulated because of the phone bill, also because someone might be waiting for an important call or whatever, which was usually my older brother waiting for a friend or girl to call him.
I'm certainly normally aged.
I built my first website without access to internet. Just locally for me and my friends.
the House Wide Page
I'll do you one better...we'd use the internet together. Probably the inspiration for that well-known NCIS hacker-fight scene, except one of us would be on the mouse and the other on the keyboard.
I hope I just unlocked a core memory for a few more lemmings.
But only on weekends when dialing in was cheaper.
UK centric view here, but there were a number of key points in the rollout of narrowband internet access here.
Freeserve was probably the biggest turning point - scrapping monthly subscription fees and just charging by the minute for local rate calls. In the era of CompuServe and AOL, that was a big shift.
Next up was probably a mix of BT Free Weekend - paying an extra tenner or so a month so access the internet on 0808 numbers (free at point of calling for non UK telephony nerds), then expanded to evenings and weekends for 2hr stints. That, or Xstream who allowed 1hr stints on a free number, where capacity allowed and so long as you used their dialler and banner software. It used to get royally hammered at 0001hrs on a Monday.
After that, there was nothing special until ADSL services swooped in and killed dial-up and ISDN services for all but hardened/secure line requirements.
It got to a point where calling someone's landline was next to pointless on the weekend unless you liked busy tones, but then this did coincide with the takeoff of 2G mobile telephony services so the next best thing to do was send a text message anyway.
Shit, I remember when our public library got some fancy new computers with an internet connection which was super high tech at the time. Two of my buddies and I rode our bikes down there and we couldn't believe how cool this new thing called a "chatroom" was. Like... there were other people on there just talking to each other, long distance, mind you, and FOR FREE?!?!?!
I'm sure it's a normal distribution with a pretty amazing skew for late 30s to mid 40s and a high peak.
Man I'm early 30's and this tracks
10? I guess if "Compuserve over slow dial-up" counts as "the information superhighway", then sure. Web browsers almost certainly weren't a thing yet. Hypertext had more-or-less just been invented.
I first learned about the Internet reading about it in the encyclopedia. We had CompuServe and I would chat and play Neverwinter Nights (not the Bioware game).
Heh. When i was 10, pcs did not exist. Didnt have one til i was 25
Did you kinda know beforehand that it's something you're interested in? (If it is, but I'm taking a "wild" guess here that you are, seeing as we're on Lemmy).
Didn't have one till I was 15, and that was pretty late compared to most other families we knew (around 2005). I went from zero interest in computers to the geekiest, most knowledgeable computer nerd of anyone we knew within a year of that. It's like I dove into another universe and never came back, which has both had major pros and cons.
The first experience i had witha pc was my sisters 386sx that she got from school. It cam with a netcom.com floppy that neither of us knew anything about but i plugged it into the drive and got to the splash page before learning that it needed an online connection to complete setup. We didnt have one so it was just a fancy beer coaster until aol came along
Amateurs. When I went there all there was was a big screen with green block letters, no highway or whatever magic non sense you're talking about
PAC man , that was the real stuff. great graphics.
I remember there was this claymation loop site where it was people and animals pooping over and over
Did you just incept that memory in my head and all I really remember is a trend (meme as we call it now) of clayimation stuff on the web, or did I also see this site at my friend's house
ratemypoo.com the infromation pooperhighway.
