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.
Sitting there watching with satisfaction as MSDOS 6.22 DEFRAG.EXE did its thing.
The most fun you could possibly have short of watching paint dry!
Modem noises.
TeeeiiiDoooŠššTrrrrŠššKrrrr ŠššPeeePrrrrrŠššPeeee
deeedahdeeeee!
So accurate.
ATM0 so you don"t wake your parents while youre dialing in somewhere
Back when custom ringtones were a thing and people still called each other frequently I used to have that as my ringtone.
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.
Transcribing basic programs from those magazines into a TRS-80.
Remember Compute! magazine? :) I Lived for that thing :)
To play with fractals or cellular automata in the 80s, you read a description in Scientific American, and then wrote your own version at home. Good times.
Indeed! Computer Recreations was the absolute best. I remember implementing an algorithm from this that displayed 3d projections of a 4d rotating hypercube; then extending it to support red/blue cellophane 3d glasses (or as best as possible with a 16 colour pallette). So much fun and learnt so much!
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 :)
You are in a twisty maze of passages all alike.
I don’t know if it’s just me but did anyone ever actually complete those games? I might have just about finished Zork one time years later but for all the games I started that was about it. Good times though. Scott Adams will always be a hero of mine
Of course. I’ve played a number of them, although Zork quickly showed its age (in terms of game design) compared to later text games.
To be fair I would expect someone with a user name such as your to have played your fair share of them. I would usually get frustrated when my graph paper maps stopped making sense… Likely a ‘me’ problem I think
Some of them didn’t make it easy. Not all games were laid out on a strict grid (in fact, the very first one had numerous curving connections), and more than a few of the early games included a maze to intentionally make graphing difficult. Back then it was a lot easier to plug away for a couple months on a game like that, since there were so many fewer games and they were such a novelty.
The dungeon crawler games like Wizardry made the same assumption about the player (“Of course they want a big challenge! How else will they get their money’s worth?”), and look how many people play that series today. Very, very few people have the patience in a saturated game market.
I think later text games corrected those initial assumptions and the parsers became very good, and many even added graphics, but by then most people had moved on.
In 8th (?) grade our larval computing lab was a row of Commodore 64 but there was only one 5.25" floppy drive between them. When you wanted to save or load your proglet you had to
- walk over to insert your floppy
- return to your seat to do your load/save
- walk back over to retrieve your floppy to free up the drive for someone else
At some point I realized that while the owner was walking back and forth you could load their code to see how they approached the assignment. And doing so did not affect their workflow or anyone else at all. It felt like the earth shifted a bit at that moment.
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.
Booting from tape to do a clean install.
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.
Dung Beetles, Karateka, Night Driver and Transylvania on the Apple 2. Moon Patrol and Aztec Challenge on the C64. Flood, Night Hunter, Monkey Island, Technocop on Amiga. Being blown away with how much of an upgrade the Amiga Mortal Kombat was over the Master System version.
First DOS PC with dial-up. FastTracker2, using a terminal ftp finding MOD files from old Amiga favourites, FAQs, and Doom patches. BBSes, Legend of the Red Dragon and Planets: The Exploration Of Space. Writing Web 1.0 HTML pages and hacky QBasic programs for anything and everything. Fossil drivers and WinSock.
I didn’t even realise Mortal Kombat was available on those 2 platforms! My friend’s dad sold me 2 A500s, an A500+ and a crate of cracked floppies for £20 back in the early 2000s when they were out of favour. I hunted down a null-modem cable so I could copy ADFs over from the PC,. Played a lot of Premier Manager on those, and reading old disk magazines. But mostly my memories are of guru meditation errors, cleaning the dust from the mouseball and contending with dodgy floppy disks / drives.
Don’t even breathe near it until the hard drive is parked!!
Another thing - my windows 95 era PC was packed to the gills with bad desktop themes. Usually South Park related with annoying soundclips that played whenever you did something. Obnoxious mouse cursors and wallpapers that hurt the eyes.
I was upset when everything moved to ATX and computers powered off by themselves because I didn’t get to see the modded ‘It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer’ screens that came with the themes
Trying to fly in Chuck Yeager’s Flight Simulator and not experience vertigo 🫠.
“it’s a great day for flying!”
Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.
Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.
Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.
Sitting the lab as an undergraduate plunking away on an 8086 on a token ring network. Mostly telnetting into OLGA. Blew my mind.
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”.
