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

    • D_C@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!

      • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.

        When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.

  • Ken Oh@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn’t use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.

      Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can’t specifically recall whether ±R/RW).

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I remember this being a DVD thing. By the time I got a dvd burner though mine supported both.

        The RW issue with CDs was that a lot of older players couldn’t read them.

        • PlasticExistence@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I damaged the laser on a PS2 by using a DVD-RW. They’re harder to read than a normal disc apparently, so it wore the laser down pretty quick

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Can you believe my original ps1 is still rocking hard with zero adjustments?

            My ps2 is currently dead, but it was because I used thicker wire than necessary when modding it a thousand years ago and I need to just heat up the solder a bit.

            That console is a nightmare to disassemble/reassemble though and it’s been down for around 15 years. I’ll fix it one day.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓

      🗑️💿🚮💔

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        And rmvb files 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
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          2 months 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).

  • oppy1984@lemm.ee
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    2 months 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
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      2 months 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…”