Old School

[svx]

Hey...

Hey, what do you guys remember about computers and things ages and ages ago?

I remember DOS.  Like, in 1995.  I liked DOS.  I remember using Windows at times, but that I liked DOS so much that I'd do whatever-it-was to boot into it in order to do anything interesting. I think it was something like holding shift while clicking the reboot button in Windows 95...

Ehh.  I played a lot of Quake back then, especially in 1996 when it was created.  I was 11 years old...  I remember loving it every time I had a ping greater than 500 on the server I connected to.  I always wished Warcraft had something similar, but I don't recall it having anything TCP/IP related; though, I did play against my friend (an Arab dude whose name is Yousef) often.

I remember loving my favourite Zip disk, which I proudly encrypted with GPG after downloading it from some hacker site.  And loving every Sierra game that was ever published.  I remember buying FreeBSD from some local software store, and devoting myself to learning how to use Unix, which I ultimately stayed close to as I made the transition to Linux...

I remember the UHS, Universal Hint System, that I'd go to for gamefaqs-style walkthroughs on the games I played. And my brother rattling off the strings to set up my Soundblaster in the autoexec.bat file, which I was always surprised he could do from memory, and that I never, ever understood...  And warezing -- I remember pages of black, elitely long lists of URL's with "virii", prods, warez, and pr0n. Torrents are spoiling.

I remember that Razor 1911 were my heroes, along with Phrozen. I loved the idea of hacking and cracking, but phreaking and phones and the other groups that envied those two agendas were never my thing. I think that learning to program anything at all was inspired by them, though I hadn't written a keygen for anything until I was 24 -- this year, in fact...

Ehh...

The good old times. Ages and ages ago. I wish I could've known about BBS's and such.

What do you guys remember? What about the old times is awesome? svx. drunk on his Dragon Joose, must know!

[Red-Machine]

I was too young to enjoy DOS at the time, but since then I have gotten into a few of the games.  I even have a dedicated DOS PC for it, just like my Legacy PC for WIn 98 stuffs.

I go older, tho.  My oldest computer is the Dragon 32 from around 1983.

[NejinOniwa]

Weeeell...

I remember, vaguely, the old 3.1 computer we used to have. I can't have been much older than 4, maybe 5 years old at that time, because we got our 95 box almost right when it came out. I remember this time when my mother got sent a copy of Internet Explorer for her work - that must've been in Mosaic age - and all the fuss it gave out when she came home with it, saying stuff like "This is the internet, boys!" (Me and my brother were the ones in the family primarily interested in such things, our sister was a tad too young at the time and has never had much of a nerd streak to her anyway) and showing us all the stuff you could do and us being all wide-eyed and awed. Some time later my brother set up his own home-coded homepage, and I was all envious of his MAD HTML SKILLZ (not quite, but I was like 6-7 years old, so yeah). I remember when the 98 box came home, and we moved the 95 box to my brother's room (the kids' computer, for gaming and stuff, as opposed to the SRS BZNS 98 box, lol) and playing Liero for hours, making those RAD AS HELL circles-of-death with the controlled missile weapon. And the time when I broke down the 98 box trying to download an emulator and Pokemon Gold. I was so sad (mostly because I didn't get to play Gold, lulz), man. So sad.

And then, by 2000, we got 10/10 broadband and Kazaa, and I think it's pretty easy to guess what came after that. -w-;

[PizzaDrill]

Jazz Jackrabbit
Wacky Wheels
Commander Keen
Duke Nukem
Duke Nukem 2
Raptor: Call of the Shadows
Myst
Rise of the Triad
Math Blaster
Hocus Pocus
Sim City
Wolfenstein 3D
Doom
Duke Nukem 3D

My first internet experience was at the age of 3 on my father's lap using prodigy on our 386.

[Chocofreak13]

windows 95 <3
it was my uncle's computer, so i could only play on it when i went over his house, but it was AWESOME. i was about 5 or so at the time.
he had a huge gamepack installed, so i would always play things like jezzball and pipe dream and chip's challenge, but jewel thief was my absolute favourite (i have vague memories of that cause it got deleted when i was about 7-8 ). it had a bunch of other games too (whose names i can't remember for the life of me) and there was also tetris, which i sucked royally at. xD

when i was about 8, we got our first computer, a win. 98 first edition (which didn't matter, we had no scanner anyway). it came with a whole slew of games, one or two of which didn't work, but i remember playing oregon trail 3 alot. we got theme hospital soon after and that was just amazing.
jump start first grade never worked and i wanted to play it for some reason so that annoyed the fuk outta me. >___<;;

we got the interwebs when i was around 8 or so as well, and all i remember is th dial up sound <3, random hentai sites, and surfing sailor moon websites untill 10 pm and my mom yelled at me to go to bed. ^^

we lost the net when i was about 9 or 10 (cause no one wanted to pay for it) and i was pretty much the only kid in middle school without the net. we got it back when i was going into high school.

things i miss:
~my childhood innocence
~the dial up noise
~pipe dream for windows 95 (i mangaged to track down and download chip's challenge and jewel thief.)
~when gaia online was good (got my account there when i was turning 14.)

also, i remember my cousins' N64. though TECHNICALLY not my FIRST console (first video game was a copy of pokemon blue my sister borrowed from her friend ^^), it was the first one i had regular access to. my cousins kept it at my grandparents house, so when i was 7 i went over there all the time and played it on their big tv (bigger than the one at my house!). :3 the games i really remember were Donkey Kong 64 (MADE. OF. AWESOME.), 007 Goldeneye (only game my dad ever played) and Mario Kart 64 (wrote my first poem about that :3) all the other games i knew and loved (still do) we rented from the store, untill my cousin sold me that N64 when i was about 12, and i started buying games for it. ^^

games i miss (cause i don't have them yet):
~Bust a Move 99'
~Dr. Mario
~Mario Party 2 (we played that the most even though 3 pwned it)
~Rugrats (i can't remember the rest of the title)

[Dr. Kraus]

I started out with 3.1 because my dad worked at CompUSA making the 3.1 boxes in the back room. I was his assistant almost every day with putting together the computers I could barley understand. Did the same thing for when Windows95 came out and then my dad decided to make his own company. I remember all the old Windows manuals that were bigger than the phone book at the time and reading them with my dad.

My dad got me a custom Windows95 box for our first computer which than got Windows98 on it and was placed in my room.

After a while I lost interest in computers and that stuff for a while but used them from time to time.

Now I'm studying code and all sorts of other stuff with computers!

Times sure change, I wish I still had that old 95 box. My brother spilled a bunch of stuff all over it and ruined it so we had to trash it.

[Chocofreak13]

@kraus: aw. ;__; i know how you feel a bit, the only parts left from the family's first computer is the hard drive (bigfoot 8 GB xD) and the speakers.

how cool that you got to help build them so young. ^^ my mum worked at radio shack at the time so we got ours on discount, but we didn't know too much about the technical stuff. ^^;

[11076ddz]

i remember my 3.1 computer playing a super pixalated Tomb raider.and trying to figure out how to get dos to load my daffy duck game off the floppy.

then i remember 95. that when i started understanding computers i was 6 years old at that time. way later on i took the computer apart and my weird friends attempted to turn the power unit into a bong cause it was kinda shaped like one.

its nice to see im not that old ^.^

[Bella]

way later on i took the computer apart and my weird friends attempted to turn the power unit into a bong cause it was kinda shaped like one.

its nice to see im not that old ^.^

WHAT.
THE.
FSCK.

I usually refrain from setting the trollbait on fire, but that, sir, is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. =___=

[11076ddz]

i thought so also. like i said i wasn't apart of that.

[Chocofreak13]

crack is whack, say nope to dope. ^w^

at any rate, i didn't learn anything super technical about computers until high school. i'm so jealous of you guys cause you actually know how to work DOS. ;___;

[stewartsage]

DOS is boss.  Not the BOS, or BOS/360 for that matter.

[Bella]

I know enough DOS to navigate it. >>

Hm... I've been interested in computers and reading about and researching them since I was like 10... maybe younger...

Old things I remember? Retroactivly? I've telnet'd with a bunch of public machines just to see what computing was like back in the Good Old Days when folks had terminals and connected to institutional computers. RSTS was the first; I remember how exotic it seemed, and how cool it was interacting with a 30-year-old OS. I played text games on it for hours! After that there was Deathrow's VMS cluster, Super Dimensional Fortress' NetBSD and Tenex systems... I once even discovered a public access PR1MOS system (a near-Multics experience), but it was all greek to me so I didn't get very far.

[Aurora Borealis]

The first system I used was Macintosh System 7.5 in 1994. From personal experience, it's the worst Mac OS version I've used (7.5 specifically, the rest of 7.x is okay), but still had fond memories playing games on it.

I also remember using Mac OSX for the first time and remember how weird and otherworldly-yet-somewhat-familiar it all seemed.

For a long time I didn't really give computing much thought, it wasn't until about 6 years ago that I did. Hmm.

BTW, I've used DOS only once and that was to help a friend reinstall Windows ME on an old computer via command-line.

Though System 7.5 was the first OS I've used, and the oldest for a long time, it was System 6 that introduced me to retrocomputing just two years ago!

@Bella: How do you access those systems? I'm curious!

[Red-Machine]

Hm... I've been interested in computers and reading about and researching them since I was like 10... maybe younger...

Same here.