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 still have all this stuff and the room. probably because I am not good at cleaning. also the office chair straight out of 90s. Maybe if enough time passes of not throwing things out I will be able to open a museum and make some extra
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 miss having no responsibilites.
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.
We put internet on mobile and things went to shit.
Being constantly connected is bad for us because we haven’t figured out the right coping mechanisms. I bet the generation Gen Z raises will do a lot better since Gen Z will be familiar with exactly how hooked on simulated connectedness you can get
I doubt that. My mother was addicted to CompuServe back in the day and I was a neglected child because of it. I give my kid all the attention I can, but he wants more than I can possibly muster.
“Get off the computer, I have to make a phone call!” -My childhood
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.
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.
Yep same. AOL chatrooms and shock sites like rotten(dot)com were a staple of middle school sleepovers.
I’m guessing the OOP was born early to mid 80s.
My mother would tell us that she especially loved visiting her grandparent’s house because they had color tv
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.)
I’m certainly normally aged.
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.
No I can’t relate to that memory because nobody had internet when I was 10 🥲
Oh, me too… When i was 10, i was visiting friends to play Pac-Man together on their brand new Atari.
Or pong
Nobody had personal computers when I was ten.
Not even a RadioShack TRS-80?
Old enough to remember a world without the internet.
Neighbor: gets nice computer
Me: is this for me 🥺👉👈
Old enough to have had a Commodore 64 and Atari 2600.
Coleco ADAM over here
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.
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!
I actually did my very first programming with punch cards on a mainframe, thanks to an older neighbor friend who was auditing a comp sci class at the local university (this was the late '70s and they were still teaching intro classes with punch cards). Even worse than typing out BASIC and seeing if it ran correctly was poking holes in a bunch of cards, depositing them in your slot in the basement of the computer science building, and then picking up your inch-thick printout three days later to find out what you’d fucked up. Typing games into that VIC-20 seemed like heaven in comparison.
I built my first website without access to internet. Just locally for me and my friends.
the House Wide Page
