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

    • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
      0·
      22 days ago

      Yeah, I was going to bring up Turbo buttons, but then realised that the Commodore Vic 20 in my bedroom predates that by quite some margin 😇

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Vic 20 -> C=64 -> few 386/486 units -> AMD K6-2 and a ton of stuff after that. And maybe something in between.

        And now I’m writing this in my garage computer which I picked up from a e-waste pile at work few years back and it has more computing power than pretty much all the systems combined I had before being 18 years old. And when we (as a family) got our first “mobile” phone it was hardwired to a car electronics since they took ‘a bit’ more power than the supercomputers we carry in our pockets today (obviously Li-ion batteries were not a thing either, but that old Motorola NMT450 took a crapload of power by todays standards).

        It’s been a wild ride so far. My grandparents were on top of the technology when they got the first landline phone around the neighborhood (I’m living in a rural area so it was not a new invention back then by any stretch) and now I can just yell to a entity in my palm to show me pictures from another planet or a high definition live video from Earth orbit.

        And still I’m somehow trying to teach basic tehcnology concepts to both my parents and my kids. It’s bizarre to try and explain about benefits of touch typing to a 16 year old who thinks it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to type out an essay at school containing 2000 words in an hour (33wpm)…

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    I’m exactly that old.

    Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we’re all thinking of:

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        I had an Optipex from that era too. It was “horizontal” but could also stand vertically. It was the business model.

        This one, but beige:

        The image is the Precision model which was the consumer version of it.

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
          0·
          22 days ago

          We use to flip the light gray flap all shift in computer lab in middle school. When we got bored with that, we figured out how to pop out the Dell logo and flip it upside down

        • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          22 days ago

          You’re real close to the “capacitor of death” models there. GX270s failed like a motherfucker.

            • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              22 days ago

              Between the capacitor plague and the tin whiskers from the phaseout of lead, hardware from that era failed constantly.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      That or the ol’ tan cased dinosaurs.

      The gray Dell helped me through many-a “100 Games!” disc…

    • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
      0·
      22 days ago

      Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise

  • Chozo@fedia.io
    0·
    22 days ago

    I remember feeling like such a badass when I got a CD player that could read MP3 files burned to a disc. I’d have an entire band’s discography burned to a single disc and felt like some sort of musical library with my binder full of MP3 CDs.

  • psx_crab@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    Tell your kids we used to burn cd for entertainment, then proceed to take a torch to the cd.

  • UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca
    0·
    22 days ago

    I remember getting a ton of mp3 with kazaa which was shut down, replaced by limewire.

    Then all my mp3 disappeared from my pentium replaced by a copyright rar file.

    I hope they paid for winrar…

        • MintyFresh@lemmy.world
          0·
          22 days ago

          Lol I forgot all about it till just now! I had an almost out of body trip into memory. Shitty living room, shitty weed, off brand cigarettes, one of those flat screen CRT monstrosities that was top of the line at the time. Downloading what we hoped was family guy 2kb a min. The good ol days.

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    0·
    22 days ago

    I’m old enough to remember when computers didn’t even require a hard drive, they could just boot right into Basic from ROM.

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    I remember the moment I realised my fancy new Walkman could read data CD-Rs and I could fit all my mp3s into one 700mb disc. I felt insane, majestic, limitless.

  • Thyristor@lemm.ee
    0·
    22 days ago

    I started college with a floppy disc in my pocket and graduated with a 1GB USB stick.

    • devfuuu@lemmy.world
      0·
      22 days ago

      I had one of the biggest usb pen drives at the time with a huge 128MB of space. It was very small too, which was nice. At same time for college it was needed to have a floppy disk to save some homework.

    • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
      0·
      22 days ago

      Those were pretty hard for floppies. Mine were 5.35" and cassette tape before that. But I was in high school at the time, so I probably need to respect my elder.

  • Default_Defect@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    Yup, and eventually I got a disk drive with LIGHTSCRIBE and just put the album art on the burned CD. I felt like hot shit.